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Contradicting Vermonts

My experience at the Mountain View Café was one small instance of an uncertainty and contradiction in my identity as a Vermonter. The café's existence was idyllic: a homey establishment settled into the bones of a historic building, in the quiet, sleepy downtown of a village nestled in the hills. And yet it was, for the most part, a fantasy. The locals didn't come by often enough to sustain it. Once they figured out the food all came from the general store, they didn't bother coming much at all. The café was ultimately for tourists. It was a visitor's opportunity to feel like a local, even though the act of eating there practically declared you to be a flatlander.

And I worked there. So did that make me a true Vermonter, or did it make me more like a woman churning butter at the Plymouth Plantation living history exhibit? Was I being a local or playing one?

I feel this contradiction of identities all around me. It bothers me much less than it did when I was an adolescent, when the quest for identity was paramount, but it's still a part of Vermont for me. Because Vermont has many identities. Historian Peter Searls argues that Vermont derives from two versions of itself: uphill and downhill. I like this idea, both because it explains so much of the evolution of our state and because conflicts almost always come down to "us" and "them." The thing that changes is who "we" are and who "they" are.

Today I believe there are numerous sets of conflicting Vermont identities, and each version feels a strong sense of state ownership. I've been finding new Vermonts my whole life, from Danby to Putney to Burlington to Danville. Each corner of the state uses the term "Vermonter" as a sort of mythical communal identity. In Danville, my students might express the idea that "I don't have to be politically correct. I'm a Vermonter". In Burlington, my friends post messages on social media along the lines of, "Great day of hayride and craft beer followed by kombucha and yoga at the park. #suchavermonter". I recently heard a joke: The best part about living in Burlington is that it's so close to Vermont. I'm guessing this witticism came from someone living outside the city. And that's another difficulty- everyone that I've come across thinks that their Vermont is The Real Vermont. For my friends living in Peru and Ludlow, Vermont is a state of skiing and snow. There's a mindset of adventure and excitement, and a camaraderie that connects all winter sportsters. For many people in Danby, Vermont is a state of proud agricultural tradition, and an insular community resistant to flatlanders. Or at least this is what I've seen. I grew up in yet another Vermont, one that I always understood to be The Real Vermont until my encounters with other Real Vermonts made me realize it wasn't that simple.

The Vermont I come from is, I think, a byproduct of the back-to-the-land migration of the 1970's (my parents transplanted from the urban Midwest to a farm in Vermont in the late 80's, and I grew up in a world of organic produce, berkinstocks, health food stores and contra dancing). Urbanites in the mid-twentieth century, spurred on by back-to-the-landers Helen and Scott Nearing, abandoned their cookie-cutter suburban lives and surged into the country to reestablish their souls on farms and communes. Vermont was a perfect destination for people who craved the simplicity of the pastoral past. There are two possible reasons I've found for this phenomenon: one geologic and one economic. If you've read the rest of this project then you'll know that these are two areas I'm not particularly versed in, but I'll do my best.

Goddard College students. Photo from the Goddard College Archives.

Geologic Catalyst for the Hippie Invasion

As I wrote in the "Geology" section of the "Pre-European Landscape" chapter, the shifting and erosion of rocks resulted in an agricultural (and eventually political) separation of New Hampshire and Vermont. The soil is a bit better for growing in Vermont, meaning that this state retained farmers more than New Hampshire did. In the twentieth century, Vermont still looked more or less like the rose-tinted pastoral paradise of yesteryear, while Massachusetts and New Hampshire didn't. So, when dramatic social and political shifts took place after WWII and many Americans grew tired of the pessimism and press of urban life, Vermont seemed like the perfect escape. And so idealistic, socially liberal people began to flock to the state to farm or join communes.

Between 1856 and 1962, Vermont had fifty Republican governors in a row and zero Democratic governors. Between 1963 and 2019, it has elected five Republicans and five Democrats to the office. The hippie invasion brought an influx of liberals who have changed the direction of our state government.

Economic Catalyst for the Hippie Invasion

Unbeknownst to these back-to-the-lander moths drawn to the flame of Vermont, the natural landscape that they craved had been cultivated by shrewd calculation. The match was struck by Vermonters (downhill Vermonters, as defined by Searls) who saw the economic decline of their farms and quarries and knew they had to turn to something new in order to survive. Looking around, they saw the rolling hills and patchwork fields in a new light. The land was beautiful, and if marketed correctly it could be profitable, too. Tourism was the way to the future.

The concept was an awkward one to produce and sell. Vermonters who had their roots in the traditions of dairy and logging and hard work with the land didn't particularly care for the idea of attracting tourists to the state. But the economic developers who did want to bring in tourists knew that the appeal of Vermont's idyllic, unspoiled image depended on those old-time Vermonters. A sort of mythology was born around the "good old times" of Vermont, a nostalgia for an age of simplicity and decency. For that, the simple farmers had to be a part of the landscape. Vermont marketed this image, and it worked well. I can see the early stirrings of the nostalgia already in H.P. Smith and W.H. Rann's History of Rutland County, written in 1886:

The old folks almost universally say: 'When I was young, people were more friendly than now; neighbors were more intimate, more ready to help each other; visited each other more from house to house;' and they all end with a sigh for 'the good old times.'

Along with this nostalgia, Vermont's pristine wilderness, beautiful foliage, and skiing were marketed as part of the package. In the mid-twentieth century, Vermont Life magazine released its first issue, promoting a Vermont of old-timey charm, natural wonders and exciting vacation spots. In 1968, Vermont banned billboards from the state. Though this move might seem like it would deter business, in this case it protected the state's biggest economic asset: its beauty.

It was this carefully curated vision of an untouched natural haven that drew people out of the cities and suburbs to Vermont. And I'm glad it happened, because it eventually brought me here, too. But with the influx of new people and new ideas, Vermont became less homogeneous and more Vermont identities arose. To some extent, there is a conflict between these identities. For Frank Dillingham, an expat Vermonter, the charm of the state was that "It has a comparatively small foreign population and so it avoids to a very large degree the disorders too frequent where an in assimilative element is in excess." The term "Vermonter" is used as a unifying term; the only problem is that it unifies particular groups, excluding other versions of the same name.

Crash and Bounce

I don't know how much Danby experienced this tension in the 20th century, but I know that it experienced other kinds of difficulties in response to modernization in Vermont. For example, the railroad brought easier access to the outside world, but this innovation was a double-edged sword for the community. According to Two Centuries,

The service made traveling easier, quicker, and more economical. People no longer found it necessary to depend upon Danby solely for their needs and Danby's self-sufficiency was to fade. The railroad, rather than increasing the number of people living in Danby, tended to draw people out. Census statistics show Danby's population decreasing steadily in the years following 1851.

The passenger service eventually became obsolete, as it had effectively carried the majority of passengers away for good. It was dissolved in 1953. Just a few years later, in 1962, Route 7 was rerouted around Danby. Main Street, once a thoroughfare for travelers, was relegated to about a block west of the main traffic flow. Some businesses, such as The Danby Cash Market, moved to the new Route 7, but not many. I can only imagine what the Mountain View Café's business would have been like if it had been on Route 7 instead of tucked out of view on Main Street.

There were also several tragedies and setbacks that struck Danby in the first half of the 20th century. The Great Depression hit everyone, but Vermont also experienced a catastrophic flood in 1927. Around the same time there were several terrible fires in Danby. In 1934 a fire destroyed a whole block in the Danby Borough, including a well-known inn and a cold storage house that held harvested ferns. Farming continued to decline, though dairy farming remained significant to the economy of the town. There used to be several creameries in Danby, which processed milk from all the farms into butter and cream. There aren't any in the town anymore.

According to Two Centuries, there were still twenty-three dairies in Danby in 1976. I'm not sure how many there are today, but I can only think of three off the top of my head. A fourth was the Bruce Farm, which operated throughout my childhood on Smokey House property. The Bruce family began their dairy farm about five years after the tragic death of the Curriers, who owned Smokey House Farm. As far as I can tell, the Bruce family had been living at Smokey House before the Curriers died, and continued producing dairy on the land until I was around 12 or so. At that point, Smokey House evicted them from the property because they could no longer pay rent. I yelled at my dad when he told me what was happening, considering the act of eviction to be cruel and unusual punishment. I wanted Smokey House (at this point a nonprofit educational farm owned by the Taconic Foundation and run, in part, by my dad), to let the Bruce farm stay on the land free of charge. They had spent generations there. I still feel uncomfortable at the thought of that farm, whose central barn has since caved in and been demolished. But I understood the pinch of money a little better now that Smokey House's Youthwork Program has folded, leaving my dad and many others out of a job.

There were a lot of wonderful things happening in Danby in the 20th century, too. A weird industry cropped up around the turn of the century: the harvesting and selling of decorative ferns for bouquets. Danby and Mount Tabor both have many attractive ferns, and for most of the twentieth century they were exported from the towns and sold to fancy flower vendors. My grandma, who lives in Indiana, loves the ferns in Danby. I remember one summer when we went into the woods to find as many varieties of ferns as possible. We found maidenhair fern, Christmas fern, sensitive fern, and lady fern, and my parents dug each plant up carefully, wrapped the roots in damp paper towels and actually drove them out to Indiana to add to my grandma's garden.

Carrying on a Danby tradition. Pictured here, a teenage me being oblivious about Danby's traditions.

Farmers and families and anyone looking for extra cash harvested ferns for the Ackert Company, which built a cold storage facility in Danby Borough. As I mentioned above, a fire destroyed the storage building in 1934, but the Ackert family continued the business and built a new storage facility. Their business continued into the 70's.

Silas Griffith, though prominent in the 1800's, left his mark upon the town in the 20th century. I remember him for the presents I got every Christmas when I was little. Griffith set up a fund to buy a present for every child in the town every Christmas, to be distributed one at a time at the Town Hall. I remember ogling the huge pile of presents with all the other kids, waiting for my name to be called and wondering which doll or stuffed animal or trinket would be mine. I also got an orange and a bit of candy every time, part of the old tradition from the nineteenth century. In those days, oranges and candy were rare treats. In my day, I considered the orange to be another disappointing manifestation of adults' desire to make me eat healthy food.

The 20th century equivalent of Silas Griffith was Pearl S. Buck, the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author who spent a lot of time in China but lived in downtown Danby in her later life. Buck helped revitalize the downtown area, buying some of the businesses and supporting community development. There's a plaque on Main Street that tells passersby about her life. Up a little ways on Brook Road, the house that she lived in is slowly decaying, in spite of a few attempted facelifts throughout the course of my life.

Throughout the Depression, one of the main solutions developed by the federal government was to create programs to employ young men. One of the programs was the Civilian Conservation Corps. In Mt. Tabor, young men from Boston and New York trained in forestry with the CCC, maintaining that portion of Green Mountain National Forest. There were people stationed there from 1933 to 1941, but apparently many men stayed in the area and continued on as foresters.

The CCC rings familiar to me because I stayed in their Mt. Tabor barracks while volunteering on a Long Trail conservation crew, and because the mission of the CCC seems similar to that of Smokey House Center, where I grew up. Smokey House was a farm (and then group of farms) purchased in 1958 by an idealistic, philanthropic, and very wealthy couple called the Curriers. They came to Danby after they saw-you guessed it-an appealing picture of Vermont's countryside in Vermont Life. In 1967, they died in a plane crash in the Caribbean, in one of a series of tragic events to strike that family. Their land was left to the Taconic Foundation, and in 1974 the Foundation launched YouthBuild, a program that employed at-risk youth from rural Vermont. The land I grew up on was Smokey House property, as was most of the area I could see from the top of the road. My dad walked to work or rode his bike, and I could see him coming home from across the valley at the end of the day.

My family, as I've said, was drawn to Vermont on the heels of the back-to-the-land movement. It happened like this: In the late 1980's, my dad's friend Ray started working at Smokey House. In 1989, he sent a letter to my dad letting him know there was a job opening. He enclosed a photograph of his home, a quaint red farmhouse tucked beside the stream that runs through the cup-shaped nook of Danby. My parents packed their car, left their tiny Indiana apartment and moved to Vermont. Two years later, I was born in a hospital twenty miles away.

Leaving and Coming Back

When the time came for me to go to college, I had a choice to pick a school in Vermont or Not In Vermont. University of Vermont would have made more sense financially, but I opted for a school in Massachusetts. I was desperate to get out of the state, and to get away from my town. I hated how Danby was so isolated from my friends and from anything fun. I hated how there weren't any stores or restaurants in Danby, how its population was old, and how at Smokey House I felt like too much of a kid to hang out with the grown ups but too much of an adult to be friends with the kids.

I liked my college in Massachusetts. I encountered people and ideas from all over the world and realized fully how small my hometown and the view from Vermont really are. I liked France, too. But while I was living there I found my mind filled with Vermont. I wrote poems about it, I talked incessantly about it, I even spent hours on Street View in Google Maps, inching along the roads of Danby in my little computer screen. In retrospect, I'm glad I left. If I hadn't, I might never have appreciated just how much Vermont, and Danby, mean to me. I've learned about the world in ever-expanding circles, but the center has never changed.

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