Green Mountain Chronicles

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/railroads-1989

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/school-consolidation-farewell-to-the-one-room-schoolhouse-1986

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/first-vermonters-the-abenakis-1976

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/act-250-1970

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Vermont acquired a reputation for being a haven for hippies and a hotbed of counter-cultural communal living.  There was some truth to that. But the communes and alternative life-styles of that generation had a deeper history than most outsiders—and most of the commune residents themselves—knew.  And, like their predecessors in the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the often colorful, sometimes controversial, and much-discussed communal experiments of the late twentieth century ended up having a profound impact on the next generation of Vermonters. For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/back-to-the-land-communes-in-vt-1968

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/vt-ny-youth-project-1968

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/aiken-formula-myth-and-reality-1966

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/dowsing-in-danville-1961

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/democrats-rising-1958

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/hi-tech-comes-to-vermont-1957

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/consuela-northrop-bailey-1954

The most noteworthy expression of McCarthyism in Vermont involved the University of Vermont's 1953 firing of Professor Alex B. Novikoff for the “crime” of invoking the Fifth Amendment before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/case-of-alex-b-novikoff-1953

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/maple-sugaring-1947

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/town-bands-1946

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/senator-ralph-flanders-1946

For more information on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/turning-on-the-lights-1943

Even though the United States did not officially enter World War II until December 8, 1941, Vermonters had been involved—mostly indirectly—in the war effort for over a year.  On September 1940, the Secretary of War ordered units of the Vermont National Guard into active duty; and in October—following the enactment by Congress of the Selective Service Act, creating the first peace-time draft in U.S. history—young Vermont men began receiving draft notices.  Over the winter of 1940-1941, facilities at Fort Ethan Allen were expanded to house the 1,700 men of the Guard and their equipment.  Meanwhile, efforts were underway to gain support for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Lend-Lease plan to assist those nations resisting Germany's army by providing arms and defense materials, and some Vermont industries began shifting over to war-related production.   For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/world-war-ii-at-home-1942

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/fighting-silicosis-dust-control-in-granite-industry-1937

The Vermont Women's Legislative Caucus began its political life as the Vermont Chapter of the Order of Women Legislators, the OWLs. In  June 1936, the women then in the Vermont legislature met at the Fletcher Farm in Proctor for a two day organizational meeting. Following the lead of Julia Emery of Connecticut, founder of the first OWLs group in the nation in 1927, the Vermont legislators joined together to form an organization, which, according to the Rutland Herald reported at the time, "is something else again, a legislative no­man's land, as it were, social, informative, discursive, and instructive in its scope." Twelve years later, Vermont participated in forming the National OWLs, receiving the support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.   For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/the-owls-vermonts-women-legislators-1936

For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/legislative-reappointment-1965

For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/wpa-1935

Telling the story of the development of the sport of skiing in Vermont often begins in 1934, when the first rope tow, a contraption powered by a Model-T Ford truck, was set up on a slope at Clint Gilbert's farm in Woodstock.  This mechanized apparatus did, indeed, launch a new era as well as a new technology in the history of skiing.  But the story begins with the coming of skis to the north country that involved two Vermonters not often enough mentioned in today's skiing memoirs: Fred Garey of Thetford and Fred H. Harris of Brattleboro.   For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/early-days-of-skiing-1934

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/symphony-vso-1934

In 1933, the midst of the Great Depression, Col William J. Wilgus, former chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad, propose the construction of a scenic highway with a 1,000-foot right of way through the Green Mountains. Modeled after Virginia's Skyline Drive in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the road was viewed, in historian Richard Judd's words, “as an imaginative solution to the state's apparent need for a big project which would employ many people, stimulate the Vermont economy, and confer lasting benefits on everyone concerned.”   For more information on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/green-mountain-parkway-1933

Included in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's monumental Emergency Work Act in March 1933 was an authorization to create a Civilian Conservation Corps, or C.C.C. as it came to be known, to recruit thousands of young men in a peace-time army to work in forests and parks and to pursue a broad array of conservation activities.   Vermont was originally allocated four C.C.C. camps, but thanks to the dynamic presence of Perry H. Merrill, State Forester, received considerably more assistance.   For more information on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/fighting-depression-ccc-1933

In 1930, the Committee on Traditions and Ideals of the Vermont Commission on Country Life appointed Helen Hartness Flanders (1890-1972), of Springfield, Vermont, to spearhead a project to document the traditional music of Vermont. Mrs. Flanders, daughter of former Governor of Vermont James Hartness, and wife of Ralph Flanders, a leader in the Vermont machine-tool industry and later Republican Senator from Vermont from 1946-1959, was a trained musician, writer, and arts patron. With the assistance of George Brown of Boston, a member of the Springfield Symphony, Mrs. Flanders traveled throughout the state, sought out singers of old ballads, wrote down and, as technology developed from wax cylinder, to disk, to reel-to-reel magnetic tape, recorded traditional New England folksongs and ballads as sung by native Vermonters and other New Englanders. For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/collecting-old-songs-helen-hartness-flanders-1930

Until recently, little has been written about Vermont during the Great Depression. Two major and now classic scholarly works addressed some aspects of the era. Richard M. Judd's New Deal in Vermont covers a broad expanse of time and focuses on the major political events and the players who shaped New Deal legislation in Vermont. Elin Anderson's We Americans offers a remarkably insightful look at patterns of social interaction between Burlingtonians of varying social and ethnic identities ca. 1930, but does little to convey the overall reality of Depression-era life throughout the state. What was the nature of suffering, misery, despair—in sum, what was it like to have lived through this devastating event and the subsequent years? For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/vermont-in-great-depression-1929

Vermont has had a long history of flooding. Of its approximately twenty major floods in the last two hundred years, the flood of November 3-4, 1927, was one of the most devastating (rivaled, and perhaps exceeded, by the floods in May 2011 in Central Vermont and the widespread damage from flooding related to Tropical Storm Irene in August 2011). A severe rainfall had swept across all of New England on that November weekend. But when the deluge hit Vermont, the state's soil had already become saturated and the streams were running full because of an unusually heavy precipitation in late summer and fall. For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/flood-of-27-1927

Calvin Coolidge became president of the United States as a consequence of Warren Harding's death from a cerebral embolism on August 2, 1923. Coolidge completed Harding's term and was elected to a term of his own in 1924, finally leaving office in March 1929. He was fortunate to have been president during a period of relative peach and expanding apparent prosperity. His conservative Republican policies of inaction toward domestic and international problems came to symbolize the era between World War I and the Great Depression. He skillfully restored integrity to government following the Harding scandals, and his plain-and-simple style was an appealing sign of calm and stability during the Roaring Twenties. For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/memories-of-silent-cal

Agricultural fairs have been popular annual attractions of Vermont's summer and fall seasons for at least 150 years. For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/vermont-country-fairs-1924

Vermont claims several writers and artists who, intentionally or otherwise, have become the makers or recorders of the Vermont mythology, the shapers of its image of itself or the image the rest of the world appears to share of the place and its people. Writers Rowland Robinson, Daniel L. Cady, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and Robert Frost; as well as painters Thomas Waterman Wood, James Franklin Gilman, Norman Rockwell, and Wolf Kahn are some of the best known. Few, however, seem as universally admired as Walter Hard. For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/walter-hard-sr-1924

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/kkk-in-vermont-1924

For more background information on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/edna-beard-vermonts-first-woman-legislator-1921

For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/anarchist-movement-in-barre-1920

For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/women-get-vote-1920

For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/prohibition-1920

For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/early-days-of-radio-1920

Since the first dairy coop in Vermont began marketing mild in 1895, there has been a steady growth in the volume of dairy products handled by these organizations and the scope of their services to Vermont's agricultural community. Available statistics show two dramatic tendencies—the gradual dominance by coops over proprietary dairies in the marketing of milk, and the consolidation of the dairy coops themselves over time. For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/the-coop-movement-1919

In the late summer and autumn of 1918, the population of Vermont was ravaged by the pandemic of “Spanish Influenza” that struck nationwide and worldwide. The disease, which attacked the lungs, caused high fever, delirium, excruciating pains in the back and limbs, and nausea, swept across the state rapidly. For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/flu-epidemic-1918

Camp Vail was organized in the summer of 1917 because of wartime concern about an inadequate supply of farm labor within the state. To deal with the issue, the Vermont Farm War Council, composed of representatives of agricultural organizations and agencies in the state, appointed Frederick H. Bickford of Bradford as Farm Labor Agent. Bickford conceived the idea of creating a camp to train young Vermont boys in farm work as a means of helping assure an adequate work force at wage rates Vermont farmers could afford to pay. Camp Vail at Lyndon Center, Vermont, was the result. The location was a nearly 2,000-acre area on the farm of Theodore N. Vail, president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, near the site of present-day Lyndon State College. For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/world-war-i-camp-vail-1916

In the early years of the twentieth century, before the days of radio and movies, an annual entertainment and cultural highlight for rural Vermonters was “Chautauqua Week.” The tent Chautauquas were traveling groups that operated in many parts of the United States from 1904 to 1930, usually in villages and towns of 500 to 10,000 people. Each stop lasted approximately three to seven days during which audiences could enjoy a diversified program of lectures, music, drama, and humorous entertainment. For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/traveling-entertainment-chautauquas-1915

With the decline of the Grange movement during the early part of the twentieth century, new instruments were developed to sustain the vitality of Vermont's agricultural community. The Smith-Lever Act, passed by Congress in 1914 to provide for “the advancement of agriculture,” funded the fledgling Vermont Extension Service, operating under the aegis of the University of Vermont. Monies were channeled into three broad program areas, each to be administered by the Extension Service. The first was designed to promote extensive agricultural experimentation, the second sponsored “home demonstrations” across the state to acquaint farm families with innovations in “scientific” farming, and the third organized boys' and girls' clubs to “teach them how to manage, grow, and prepare market crops and animals and to demonstrate how to save surplus products by home canning.” Lest this language prove somewhat less than alluring, 4-H clubs, specifying “head, heart, health, and hands,” were born. For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/4-h-in-vermont-1914

Following news of the Wright Brothers' exciting success at Kitty Hawk, exuberant Vermont youths took to their garages and workshops to construct their own flying machines. For more background on this episode, please visit: https://vermonthistory.org/early-aviation-1910

Preparations for hiking Vermont's 270-mile Long Trail, the first long-distance wilderness hiking trail in America, have changed considerably since the first Long Trail Guide was published in 1917. Men were advised to wear “ordinary height shoes with hobnails, felt hat, ‘generous sized' silk bandana, inch-wide leather belt with cup attached, wool underwear, wool shirt and stout wool trousers,” while female hikers should have high-laced boots with “Hungarian nails,” and wear bloomers. For more information on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/long-trail-1910

For more information about this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/number-please-telephone-comes-to-vermont-1910

For more background on this episode, visit https://vermonthistory.org/dorothy-canfield-fisher-1907

Prior to World War I, automobiles in Vermont functioned by and large as novelties or objects of curiosity. They were few in number (in 1906, there were 373 registered vehicles) and, according to William Wilgus (The Role of Transportation in the Development of Vermont), usage was confined to “individual pleasure and convenience.” For more background on this episode, visit https://vermonthistory.org/early-autos-in-vermont-1902

In the years before the First World War, the electric trolley, spitting blue sparks, saw its heyday in Vermont, also its decline. The little four-wheel “bobbers” and the big eight-wheel, two-trucked interurbans carried 10 million passengers a year. For more background on this episode, visit: https://vermonthistory.org/age-of-trolleys-1901

The “Dewey Day” celebration in Vermont occurred in Montpelier on October 12, 1899. On that day Vermonters staged a historic welcome home for native son Admiral George Dewey, whose success in destroying the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War made him the nation's number one naval hero. Dewey's exploit in the Philippines seemed to bring glory to Vermont and it became one the highlights of standard histories of the state. For more background on this episode, visit https://vermonthistory.org/dewey-day-a-century-ends-1899