My Neighbors' Place in History

Vermont is full of it. No less prestigious bodies than UVM and Shelburne Farms are sponsoring "an innovative program in place-based education for towns in Vermont" and our town is one of them.

I was drawn into it when our group asked me to build them a small, growable website. The group's purpose was a mystery until I attended one Saturday field trip on geology and one evening talk on historic remnants. Now I'm hooked.

Suddenly my favorite farm has taken on a much bigger context. A glimpse at an old map shows it as a spread twice as large, belonging to another family. One of that family's descendants still carries on the dairy tradition. To survive, it seems, the larger farm was split and the half with the original brick farmhouse, barns and family cemetery was sold in 1914 to a family from another town. Their descendants are the people I know, the ones who "Farm On" by turning their beautiful historic remnants to more modern uses, like tourism.

OK, I admit to being a foreigner from out West. My view of history growing up went only as far back as the Gold Rush in 1849. I could see and touch old mining camps and ghost towns preserved by a dry climate. I didn't understand or care much about 1776 and Philadelphia. When I went to live in Europe at the tender age of 28, I was shocked to see 500-year-old churches still standing. Good thing I didn't get to Athens or Rome, because I would never have believed buildings could be thousands of years old.