Tag: Vermont

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The Jones and Lamson Factory

It’s kind of a rarity to find abandoned industrial lots in Vermont nowadays, so when I was made hip to the existence of this old factory in Springfield, I bumped it up to the top of my to-explore list. And I’m glad I did – it’s since been demolished.

On the banks of the town’s engine; the Black River, existed the ruins of a far-reaching factory – in both its size and its metaphor.

The origin of this building goes back to 1907 and the genesis of Springfield’s metamorphosis into a hub of innovation and industry – a culture that would become inexorable to the extraordinary marvels that enhanced Springfield’s legacy and is still an enduring source of discourse even after the bustle went bust.

Seriously, it’s rumored that Springfield, Vermont was such an adversary, that Hitler allegedly put it on his number two spot to bomb into oblivion had his Nazi party of terrorists ever atrocitied their way over here to America.

That all changed after the second world war’s hunger for humans ended. Job-seeking soldiers started coming back home, while machine tool contracts stopped coming in – and the town’s prosperity stalled, before succumbing to a steady multi-decade death rattle, leaving Springfield’s postmortem giving off incredulous vibes that anything I’ve talked about in the above paragraphs ever happened here.

But, a lot of stuff used to be invented and then made here – until as recently as a few decades ago. So much so, that for about a good century – from the 1890s to the end of the 1980s – the region became to be known as “Precision Valley” – due to it practically inventing the precision tool industry, and had the highest per-capita income in all of Vermont. Even today, some locals still call their part of the state Precision Valley – which approximately is considered to be anchored from Springfield to Windsor (Windsor is another very cool little Vermont town worth a road trip). The most significant component of all this was the machine tool industry, and the decrepit factory that I’m gonna be blogging about was once the heavyweight of the genre.

In 1869, the Black River rivered too much and flooded and wrecked Springfield village, and as the town struggled to rebuild in the subsequent years, a big fire in 1880 basically undid all the progress and doubled down on the destruction. So a few Springfieldians schemed up a hook to lure people and investment.

Adna Brown, the general manager of Parks and Woolson – a manufacturer of woolen cloth finishing machinery that was both the first existing manufacturing complex and the last major mill to operate in Springfield – heard that the struggling Jones and Lamson machine tool factory up in Windsor was for sale, and was struck by cleverness. Jones and Lamson had been in business since 1829 and had made a smorgasbord of goods, from rotary pumps, rifles, machines to drill gun barrels, stone channelers, engine lathes, and sewing machines. Their old building is the present-day American Precision Museum, one of Vermont’s coolest archives that showcases many of the things invented in Precision Valley!

Brown put together a group of intrigued investors, and in 1884, persuaded the invoked of a new Springfield law that exempted any industry that would move to town from taxation for 10 years. It worked. 

Brown bought Jones and Lamson and moved it to Springfield in 1888. Construction started on the new J&L digs in 1907 on the banks of the Black River, and Brown’s good business sense kenned he’d need the right person to run the new enterprise.

After their first choice turned down the offer because he thought Springfield was too podunk for his liking, they settled for their next option, and little did they know that he’d turn out to be a renaissance tool man. That person turned out to be a young precocious machinist and inventor named James Hartness. Born on September 3, 1861 in Schenectady, New York, he already had experience from cutting his teeth working in machine shops in Connecticut since he was a lad, and used his know-how and indefatigable optimism to flip the company.

On his first day on the job, he decided that manufacturing so many different things was stupid, and declared that from that point onwards, J&L would only manufacture one thing; the eponymous Hartness Flatbed Turret Lathe, which he invented himself – the machine could shape wood, metal, or other materials by means of a rotating drive which turns the piece being worked on against changeable cutting tools.

The business decision was simple, extraordinarily effective, and a little bit revolutionary – something that seems kinda peculiar nowadays; manufacture a single item, and be really really good at it. And given Hartness’s subsequent rap sheet, it seems to work – and became inherent to the novel format.

Other turret lathe models existed, but Hartness’s was by far the most efficient – being able to mill and shape practically all lengths of metal and could combine multiple tasks with higher precision and longer cuts. It was so good, that it was nicknamed “the silent salesman”.

He also benefited pretty serendipitously from his invention, earning $1,000 a year plus a $100 bonus for every turret lathe the factory sold. Some weeks, he was bringing home more money than most Vermonters were making in a year. Hartness also gained a reputation for continuously advocating for better working conditions and more efficient company management to ensure the business would be as successful as possible. But he wasn’t unscrupulous. He also gained a reputation for pushing for the dignified treatment of the workers, which seemed a little bit weird then at a time of historic emerging social class strife, and still seems a little strange presently, in a modern America where the opposites our past generations fought to improve are becoming the norm again.

Hartness’s brilliance, though, came from the fact he didn’t just invent things, he sort of invented new versions of people and their latent talents. And that just happened to jive with his ideal of a company sticking to producing a single product to thrive.

For example, Hartness saw prospect in and hired an engineer and inventor named Edwin Fellows, who developed a machine that would accurately cut gears that he named a Gear Shaper. Hartness spun off the Fellows Gear Shaper Company in 1896, with its namesake operating as its manager. Fellows’ innovation would then opportunely overlap with the rise of the automobile industry a few years later.

After Fellows left J&L, Hartness needed to seek an engineer to replace him. He found William LeRoy Bryant, a student at the University of Vermont, who joined J&L in 1897 as a draftsman and worked closely with Hartness on the cross-sliding-head turret lathe, which is where Bryant took an interest in grinding. Building on a J&L lathe that used a chuck — a specialized type of clamp to hold a piece in place while it was shaped and bored — Bryant developed a new chuck that was both easier to use and more accurate. By 1909, Hartness conjured up another spin-off: the Bryant Chucking Grinder Company. And this pattern continued.

When Hartness hired Fred Lovejoy to replace Bryant at J&L, Lovejoy became an expert in small-tool design, and he eventually created interchangeable cutters that could be swapped in and out of machines. In 1916, Hartness provided the startup capital for the Lovejoy Tool Company, which awesomely still survives and operates in Springfield!

In 1912 Jones and Lamson acquired Philadelphia’s Fay Machine Tool Co, which made the Fay Automatic Lathe – which was designed for the automatic turning of work held between centers. The lathe was significantly improved by a team at J&L led by Ralph Flanders that would be so victorious, that it would ironically eventually evolve into the creation of CNC, which made the manually operated lathe obsolete because the new ones could now operate all by themselves.

Hartness and his prowess fueled Springfield’s combustive growth from the turn of the 20th century until well past World War II, and he did it by introducing one auspicious product after another, each named for its creator.

Because of this, Springfield astonishingly became the machine tool capital of the world.

A later portrait of James Hartness | via The Library of Congress and Wikipedia
Old postcard of the brand new Jones and Lamson Factory, Springfield, VT. Circa 1094-1918. Present-day Clinton Street/VT Route 11 runs right out front.
Jones and Lamson Factory, circa 1917 | Via Vintage Machinery
Old postcard of the sprawling former Jones and Lamson Factory in Springfield, circa 1973. The factory would expand to 270,000-square-feet over 12 acres. | Cardcow.com
A full page spread taken from Machine Tools Made In America (1921). This one includes both the Hartness Lathe and the Fay Lathe! – via MyCompanies Wiki
Advertisement from The Iron Age (Dec. 27, 1917) – via MyCompanies Wiki

However, in 1919, Hartness would break his own rule for the only time, when he collaborated with engineer, arctic explorer, and Springfieldian Russell Porter – and invented the optical comparator, a device to precisely measure screw threads that are still manufactured today – it’s so efficient, that any parts that are inspected can be magnified over 200 times, making the smallest flaws detectable!

Hartness and Porter’s mutual fascination with astronomy partially inspired this quantum leap, which is why Hartness wanted Porter to run the comparator business, but Porter was interested in literal bigger heights and decided to instead move to California, where he helped design the Palomar Observatory telescope, so in a rare move, Hartness decided to keep the comparator division close to his side in-house at J&L.

But before Porter departed, he and Hartness also founded The Springfield Telescope Makers – a club that operates in an accidentally trademark pink clubhouse atop Breezy Hill. The story of its standout color is, basically, when it was first built, its enthusiastic members were broke – so they went around to area hardware stores and asked if they’d donate some paint. They ended up with three gallons of barn red, two gallons of white, and a gallon or orange – which they mixed together and got hot pink, which is now emblematic. The clubhouse was christened Stellefane, which is Latin for “shrine to the stars” and not something that you can wrap your leftovers with, is now a national historic landmark, and is still home to both the club, and the annual Stellefane Convention of Amateur Telescope Makers.

Being an avid pilot – one of Vermont’s first – Hartness became president of the  Vermont Aero Club and donated land for Vermont’s first airport – Hartness State Airport – just north of Springfield, and had his pal Charles Lindbergh even stop by for a spell in 1927 after his world flabbergasting trans-Atlantic flight. He also served as governor of Vermont for a single term, from 1921 to 1923, but didn’t run for reelection after realizing that Vermont’s rural and poor economy of the time just wasn’t ready for his aims to further industrialize the state. He would die on February 2nd, 1934, and Springfield’s reliable factories became reverberating manifestations of the American dream. Until they didn’t.

This is a surreally enjoyable upbeat clip from a vintage informational film about the concerns and potential disasters of a dwindling economy after World War 2. At the 5:00 mark, the film showcases Springfield AND the Jones and Lamson Factory! Give it a watch – it’s pretty neat! You can get an idea of what the factory, and the town itself, used to be like in the atomic age! 

 

So, what went wrong here?

After Hartness’s death, Jones and Lamson continued to absolutely thrive and continue to become the industry benchmark for their craft, and was considered the zenith of Springfield’s enterprises, employing anywhere between 3,000-4,000 people for most of the 20th century.

So what exactly is the culprit for J&L’s, and Springfield’s, event horizon? Well, that’s a tumultuous conversation, because there isn’t just one thing at play, a lot of circumstances kinda just started to materialize on the scene and began shaking hands with one another – all contributing to Springfield’s ode to its fall-through.

Some locals point fingers at the machine tool unions, who in the 1970s, began to row with the companies about ensuring higher wages for their employees, and would hold a few long strikes to get their point across, something that, evilly, is sadly still being fought for today.

Another reason might be something that’s also been steadily plaguing America since around that time period – outsourcing jobs for cheaper labor costs. Many of these companies were family or locally owned, and when next-generation kin wasn’t interested in taking them over due to the more independent/free-spirited culture that was emerging, they were purchased by larger outside firms starting around the 1960s, which seems to be the beginning of Springfield’s ratchet blues. Detached management started to give the machine tool factories less control and began to fracture the former tight-knit inner communities.

But the bigger causality might just be the companies’ refusal to be self-aware. Japan had been studying American machine tool know-how and began to enter the market themselves – and they did so by dramatically innovating their products.

Around the 1980s, the Japanese hustled billions of dollars into the research and development of computerized machining centers that were faster, more accurate, no longer required a human operator, and cheaper than a J&L turret lathe. Back in Springfield, the factories were sticking to their traditional course, and while they were still making quality reliable machines, they began to become outdated in the new frontier of the trends, and eventually, obsolete, as the market shifted to foreign products that were offering more convenience for a cheaper purchase. I know “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, but unless these new fads aren’t just impractical enticements that won’t be good in the long haul, if you refuse to innovate and stay at pace with the competition, it can be a guaranteed ticket to extinction.

Unfortunately, that’s what happened to Springfield. 

What’s stressful is that, to be innovative, sometimes that takes substantial amounts of funds, and then, the wisdom just where you want them divested, and for smaller operations, that can be tough decision making, and sometimes, even a fatal conclusion. Hartness certainly had a special knack for it, so much so, that it was said that one bank eventually refused to give him any more loans because they thought he was too creative! I mean, Hartness would amass a little over 120 patents in his lifetime…

Jones and Lamson would be bought by a few different companies starting in the 1960s, and eventually go bankrupt in September 2001, but, the assets were sold to Bourn & Koch Inc. who coolly still continue to supply replacement parts for the extant J&L machines today. However – the optical comparators division of Jones and Lamson, called J&L Metrology, still exists! They’re the only company making optical comparators today in the United States, and are still headquartered in Springfield – attached to the ruins of the rest of the J&L empire (well, after moving to South Carolina for a stint but then coming back)!

The only other stalwart to exist from the ruins of the machine tool era is the Lovejoy Tool Company – who also still operate in town!

A good portion of the old Fellows Gear Shaper factory compound still exists too, and it’s been thoughtfully renovated into mixed commercial and industrial spaces – which is absolutely a preservation win!

Another vestige of that age is the incredible Hartness mansion itself, which has been turned into a bed and breakfast (and at the time I’m writing this blog post, is up for sale according to Yankee Magazine). I’ve visited before and was excited to investigate the house’s most curious feature – an underground telescope connected to the house by a secret tunnel that also lodged Hartness’s private underground laboratory that’s now a museum to Mr. Hartness, The Stellafane Society, and Russell Porter. Man that was cool! Even today, there are rumors that still persist that Hartness built more secret tunnels and even secret rooms that branch out underneath Springfield that have been sealed up, or kept clandestine.

The Jones and Lamson factory had been abandoned since 1986, and for decades, its ruins became a conspicuous landmark that marked one of the main entry points into town. And it was an absolutely gigantic property: 270,000 square feet of decaying building that sprawled over 12 acres of land between the Black River and VT State Route 11, known as Clinton Street through that part of town.

In 2004, the Springfield Regional Development Corporation purchased the property in hopes to, well, do something with it, but its runaway deterioration and designation as a brownfields site – or – a property that’s enormously polluted by toxic materials, usually as the residual of former industrial use, kinda problematized any headway that could have been made. The old J&L factory played host to tons of industrial chemicals, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs); trichloroethylene (TCE); and light, non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs), and to remediate hazards like those, you need to secure lots of capital and involve lots of bureaucracy.

In November of 2021, cleanup grants had been secured, and the factory was demolished, which I can’t help but be pretty bummed about. What a shame, it was such an irreplaceably neat building that I feel had the potential to morph into a great new resource for Springfield if given the love.

But – the plan is that they hope to sort of go full-circle with the lot, and lure another industrial gig to town that hopefully will continue to push back the boundaries of the unknown and isn’t just another awful Dollar General. The land is flat, which is pretty a valuable deal in Springfield because most of the village is built up around low-profile slopes that contort around the Black River. It’s also apparently hooked up into some of the fastest internet connections in all of Vermont, which is also a huge deal here given the state’s notoriously lacking rural infrastructure. It’ll be interesting to see what comes along – and I really hope that it’ll be something that will serve Precision Valley with dignity for another century. Springfield is absolutely a town worth rooting for!

An interesting side note to all this, is that because of the rich industrial history and current fading ghosts of the area, the town has kind of amassed a bit of a steampunk scene, which has since turned into a notable cultural festival.

Acreage

I was excited. I was meeting up with a friend from college I hadn’t seen in years who was getting ready to move out of state, so we figured an explore was a good way to part ways. And it was a lovely early fall afternoon – light jacket weather and foliage just barely starting to change into its death hues – the perfect adventuring weather. It had been a while since I’d had a good urbex – my soul was really jonesing for this excursion.

Finding a place to park that we hoped wasn’t suspicious, we casually made our way down the sidewalk, and then made a dash for it. The factory grounds had grown wild, and the brush was almost like it was alive – clinging and scratching with every tendril available, as we hastily stumbled our way towards the tall metal smokestack that marked the factory’s personal powerplant. We figured we’d start in there via squeezing through a hole in the door, and work our way over to the main factory building after. Man I’m glad I’m still a scrawny dude that can wiggle through holes in the walls and broken windows.

The power plant was a real unexpected treat, and my favorite portion of the grounds that we saw that day.  Unlike the main building, the generating station had most of its goodies still contained within drifting dust creating its own little universes in envelopes of light that scattered around the brawny boilers that were from an era that built things to last, and scores of gauges. Floors with hummocks of lead paint flakes and dirt. Desks and chests of drawers were still cluttered with miscellany and workshop brick-a-brack. This was definitely a pleasure to point my camera at.

Afterward, we entered the jungle that has consumed the back fringes of the main building – found our way down a forgotten concrete staircase that was being slowly crumbled by encroaching trees that we were constantly shielding from smacking us in our faces, inside an outbuilding that had totally fused with nature, and contorted through a broken window.

We wandered around for close to 5 hours and still didn’t see everything! The insides of the main plant were cavernous spaces infiltrated by glorious natural light that descended through awesome sawtooth roofs – a design I absolutely love. Lead paint, asbestos, and whatever mother nature blew inside lazily fell like snow, and nature was doing what it does best; reclaiming its territory. Trees and creeping vines had interestingly taken root on the roof and the grounds were thick with vegetation – vines fell down through busted sawtooth windowpanes and tendrilled into the atmosphere. A century of adaptations, renovations, and subsequent deferred upkeep had created a fantastic accidental pastiche on old bricks and steel girders.

Some things sagged down in fatigue, and other verdant things thrust upwards and willing. It seemed the new trees and vines almost created a muted cacoon within, where time oddly stopped and there were only wonders, a vacation world that we could borrow for a while. Strange audio hallucinations fell in all directions, and shadows waltzed behind steel beams and checkerboard walls of broken glass. Though I guess I was a bit disappointed I didn’t find a rusty old Hartness turret lathe still within, this explore was so much fun! (There IS, however, – a Hartness Turret Lathe on display at the American Precision Museum in Windsor!)

There was a tiny portion of this massive complex that was still an active business, J&L Metrology – the last remaining morsel of the greater Jones and Lamson enterprise. Their really utilitarian and ugly wing appeared to be added on much later – and it was something that I made a note of as we pulled into town hours earlier. The two spaces were divided by the original exterior brick wall, but there was a connecting pair of double doors that allowed whoever was at work over there inside the abandoned portion of the building, and that’s exactly what happened.

Just as I was snapping a few photos of some kind of rectangular cavity in the concrete floor that had long been turned into a pool of rainwater and who knows what else, those doors burst open, and some guy powerwalked into the abandoned factory with the trajectory that communicated he was on a mission – a mission that was suddenly interrupted by me.

His boots literally skidded to a halt on the gritty floor, snapped his head to his left, and gave me an appraising and surprised look through a squinty demeanor, then angrily huffed; ” Are you supposed to be in here?” I turned to look at my friend, who was still as a statue, turned back to the man, and decided that answering honestly was my best option, so with a shoulder shrug, I called over “I mean… probably not?” He just glared at me in a kind of tense silence, before pursuing his former mission – and stomped off deep into the huge spaces of light shafts and rusty steel. We both knew that was a good sign that we should leave, and we bolted.

I don’t have many pictures of myself, so thanks to my friend Jay for taking this candid shot of me doing my thing!

I’m disappointed that I never got a shot of the front exterior of the factory to include in this blog post, but I think there was some re-paving going on out front that day, and we were more focused on leaving before the cops were called on us. Unfortunately, I procrastinated a bit too long and never made it down to get that shot before the demolishing.

But something I did get to see, was Hartness’s aforementioned personal Equatorial-Plane turret telescope back on a rainy and humid June afternoon of 2015!

The rotating green turret rides on rollers supported by the white concrete structure, and it’s also where the stainless steel telescope tube with its ten-inch achromatic objective is installed, which is a modern upgrade to the original. Hartness developed the optics of the telescope to pass through a lens in the wall of the dome, which allowed him to stay warm in Vermont’s brutal winters.

The funny-looking protrusion is in front of Mr. Hartness’s stately former home – looking exactly like something a venerable turn of the last century tycoon would dwell in. At the time, the hotel offered free tours of the telescope and tunnel, no reservations needed, but because the property is currently a real estate listing, I’m not sure if the telescope is closed to the public or not, but absolutely hope that this treasure will continue to be shared with all the inquisitive.

I’ve always been someone that has loved human ingenuity and the magic of camaraderie, so this post was a lot of fun to research and write. So many amazing things happened in this era of America from the genius of common people that I just find so remarkable – and a little bittersweet thinking that we may never have another country-defining boom quite like it.

The earth is kinda played out, so it’s amazing that these strange new frontiers and discoveries can still be made in places like this that were once mapped, and then been forgotten.

For your consideration:

The Vermont Historical Society is one of my favorite organizations in the state – and they have a few nifty videos that briefly chitchat about both James Hartness and The Precision Valley. I’ve linked them below!

There’s a terrific archived article on Mr. Hartness, Springfield, and Jones and Lamson from Mechanical Engineering Magazine thanks to the Wayback Machine!

Are you wondering how a J&L Turret Lathe works? I was able to find a really cool dual brochure and scanned instruction manual from 1910 that includes illustrations!

Since 2012, I’ve been seeking out venerable examples of Vermont weirdness, whether that be traveling around the state or taking to my internet connection and digging up forsaken places, oddities, esoterica, and unique natural features. And along the way, I’ve been sharing it with you on my website, Obscure Vermont. This is what keeps my spirit inspired.

I never expected Obscure Vermont to get as much appreciation and fanfare as it’s getting, and I’m truly grateful and humbled. Especially in recent years, where I’ve gained the opportunity to interact with and befriend more oddity lovers and outside-the-box thinkers around Vermont and New England. As Obscure Vermont has grown, I’ve been growing with it, and the developing attention is keeping me earnest and pushing me harder to be more introspective and going further into seeking out the strange.

I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to keep this blog going. Obscure Vermont is funded almost entirely by generous donations. Expenses range from hosting fees to keep the blog live, investing in research materials, travel expenses and the required planning, and updating/maintaining vital tools such as my camera and my computer. I really pride and push myself to try to put out the best of what I’m able to create, and I gauge it by only posting stuff that I personally would want to see on the glow of my computer screen.

I want to continuously diversify how I write and the odd things I write about. Your patronage would greatly help me continue bringing you cool and unusual content and keep me doing what I love!

Do you have any stories you’d like to share? Know of anything weird, wonderful, or abandoned? Email me at chad.abramovich@gmail.com

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Shunpiking to Lewis, Vermont. Population: 0

For years, I’ve been interested in Vermont’s unique political divisions; gores, grants, and ‘disorganized’ towns – just some of the things I’ve discovered thanks to being a map nerd! I found it fascinating that there were delineated areas on the map that had little, to nothing in them.

On a firey September day that felt more like July, me and my friend set out on an ODDysey towards Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, the state’s wildest and poorest corner where some of these enigmatic areas are clustered. I’ve always loved the kingdom. From my dad pulling me out of school as a kid to go fly fishing on the legendary Willoughby River in Orleans, to hustling up at Northern Vermont University in Lyndonville when I was older, I have fond memories of the NEK, and always kinda associate it with The Monkees – because whenever I used to head up that way with my mom, we’d always listen to them on CD in her car, so I totally had them in my head on the ride up.

I wanted to see one place in particular; Lewis, one of Vermont’s five “disorganized towns” (a phrase that has always amused me) – which refers to towns with populations so low, or sometimes never luring any people at all, that their charters were revoked.

It felt fitting that we were heading up to the deserted realm north of Island Pond, a rough and tumble railroad village in the town of Brighton that’s the hub of that piece of the NEK, so much so that most wayfinding signs point you to Island Pond instead of Brighton.

Island Pond has always had a sort of an eccentric reputation, and I think a lot of that has to do with the temperament of how isolated the place is. Seclusion can be a lightning rod for weirdos, outlaws, religious cults, and the preternatural.

One of my favorite Island Pond tales of intrigue involves a carpenter renovating an old farmhouse outside the village in the 1980s. Across the road was an old farmer’s pasture that had long been overgrown and disused, so imagine how startled the carpenter was when he happened to glance out the window and see a young girl herding a flock of sheep in a field that was formerly empty seconds ago. When he confusingly went to investigate, the sheep and the girl had vanished. So he got back to work, until a few minutes later when he looked out the window and saw the girl and the sheep again, only this time, the girl was waving at him. He apparently quit the job on the spot!

UFO sightings nearby at an amazing abandoned radar base, and quite a few “Bigfoot” (or some variation of a wild and wily creature) sightings have also been handed down and proclaimed through all the big woods that edge town. Who knows what other morbid or macabre things that are still skeletons in Island Ponders’ closets… (and you’re a local, feel free to send me an email and tell me!)

Island Pond got its name from the 600-acre pond with a 22-acre island in the middle of it, which lead the Abenaki to name the area Menanbawk, which literally means Island Pond. Whites decided to keep the name but use the English translation.

The pond of Island Pond has probably existed since the last glaciers grinded on through the area, but the village of Island Pond got its start in the 1850s, when the Grand Trunk Railway, the first international railway that linked Montreal to the port of Portland, Maine, laid their tracks through the kingdom, which was very much a sort of last frontier in Vermont at that time. What would become Island Pond village just happened to be the halfway point, which made it a big deal – a total of 13 tracks once merged downtown. The railroad turned into memory by the 1950s, and the town depends on outdoor tourism nowadays – it’s pretty much the snowmobile capital of Vermont – but architectural elements of its former rowdy railroad days are everywhere. Island Pond is a strangely beautiful and unique part of the state that’s very much worth a trek up towards.

Stopping at a gas station at the water’s edge to grab some suspicious sandwiches, we were on our way!

You Can’t Get There From Here

The hard-to-reach and very pretty southern Vermont town of Sandgate might have the ‘Vermontiest’ town hall sign yet and I dig it.

As that vintage Vermont vernacular goes, you can’t get there from here – and because of Vermont’s rural and inconvenient geography, that’s often somewhat the case, so we’re not really pulling your leg or anything.

Usually, it’s a now stereotypical expression of Vermont identity that means you actually can get there from here, but the “there” is usually remote, and it requires a very long-winded, confusing route, no doubt complicated because of the very mountains that give our state its name, and whether the road is plowed or not in the winter.  And that’s further complicated by mountainous parts of the state that are dead zones for GPSs and cellular service.

Taken in Stockbridge, VT, near a mountainous and mysterious area called “Notown”.

Lewis, Vermont

Lewis, Vermont has a population of zero. Charted early in 1762, it was heavily timbered, rough, and mountainous. It never attracted a single settler, so no roads, villages, or post office was ever established. The northern half of town is made up of mountains all in the 2,000-foot range, and all but one are unnamed. The southern half of town levels out into mostly semi-swamp known as Yellow Bogs, and they’re filled with mangy-looking forests that stretch out as far as you can see, which kinda backs up the ugly name.

Though Lewis is void of permanently inhabiting humans – loggers, hunters, and sugaring operations have all taken advantage of its space. At one point, most of the land within Lewis was owned by the Champion International paper company, until they sold off their 132,000 acres – most of which the state of Vermont eagerly acquired with the intention of preserving. As a result, most of the flora and fauna in Lewis is pretty young. But! Lewis – and the Northeast Kingdom – is at the southern edge of the largest biome on earth: the boreal forest! Named for Boreas, the Greek god of the Northwind, the boreal forest encircles the entire northern hemisphere in a band that stretches across Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia – the boreal forest accounts for nearly one-third of all earth’s forests! Pretty cool, right?

Lewis is also considered one of the “holy grails” of the 251 club, a cool local social club that challenges interested participants to visit all 251 of Vermont’s towns, cities, unincorporated areas, and gores. Some folks make it more fun by customizing their adventure – like making points to visit every library, post office, state park, or another Vermont icon – the general store. There’s even a film dedicated to it! It’s one of my Vermonty ‘bucket list’ items, along with eventually being able to make my own maple syrup. I even became introduced to this great Instagram account recently, where the Instagrammer plans on taking a photo in all 251 burgs. It’s also inspiring me to stop being such a procrastinator.

Lewis is hard to find. There are no state routes, ‘welcome to’ signs, green VTrans wayfinding signs, or any indications that the place actually exists. Using an atlas as a guide, we headed northeast of Island Pond and took a few class D logging roads, which are the only roads in Lewis, up into the area marked by that indicating yellow dotted line that showed we were, in fact, in a town.

According to the map, we should have been able to get there via Lewis Pond Road, but when we turned off where the unsigned road should have been, we were met with what was just a 4 wheeler trail, and a gate, and a gravel dune that would have wrecked my friend’s car. I guess you really can’t get there from here.  So we had to do a little scouting for another access point, which we found further east down Route 105 and was little more than a passable but thin forest service road.

The rough road marred with gravel banks took us deep into thick wilderness occasionally punctured by a few awesome ramshackle hunting camps that had been standing for multiple generations (which I regret not taking some photos of!) – skirted around Lewis Pond, and eventually brought us up the slopes of Gore Mountain – one of the few topographical place names in Lewis – to a cleared section of mountainside where we enjoyed a terrific view of the NEK and out towards the hazy blue bumps of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and we had the area all to ourselves.

We found an accommodating boulder to sit on, enjoyed some gas station sandwiches, and just enjoyed the silence and the view and a world that was big and full of autumn. I remember the foliage that day being just ridiculous. I had no idea the views up in Lewis were gonna be so fantastic! It was definitely an evening I’ll remember.

Lewis, Vermont. Via Google Maps
Lewis, Vermont. Via Google Maps

The other named feature in Lewis is to-the-point named Lewis Pond, which is only 7 feet deep, undeveloped, apparently has some good fishing, and as beautiful as it is silent. We spent a while just lounging around the shoreline as the water lapped calmly at the cedars.

I’m not sure why the fact that the wobbly diamond-shaped town only has two toponyms is a bit surreal, but psychologically, it is. It feels like everything else within the 39 square miles that’s considered Lewis is a sort of an uncanny terra nullius, and speaks to our control freak side of human nature to label and categorize things, to prove that something exists, to achieve just a bit more of a grip on this world.

I’m fascinated with human psychology, and how a lot of the time (but not every time), things we consider as ‘odd’ are because we make them odd, because they don’t jive with our architected ideals and social rules. The only thing truly odd to me is the fact that we blindly subscribe to so many of these rigidly particular doctrines without questioning them.

But, I’m wicked into this stuff, and I guess I’d be both out of a blog and identity if I go too deep down that rabbit hole.

Lewis Pond Road, a bit north of Lewis Pond. At one point, all of Lewis was logged, so the forests are pretty young.
Lewis Pond
A sunken island in the middle of Lewis Pond
The huge landscape of the Northeast Kingdom and New Hampshire’s White Mountains as seen from Gore Mountain.
Panorama of Lewis/Lewis Pond, the NEK, and New Hampshire’s White Mountains from Gore Mountain
Lewis Pond from Gore Mountain

Today, the Nulhegan Basin Division of the Silvio O Conte Wildlife Refuge – whose goal is to try and protect the waterways that feed the Connecticut River – occupies a huge chunk of Lewis, and is named after the Nulhegan River, which basically translates to “deadfall trap” – a savvy snare that’s usually a log that’s used to capture small game by falling on it – and is a connecting title to the Nulhegan Abenaki People who were the first inhabitants of this domain.

Though the Nulhegan Basin was formed by a pool of magma solidifying here 300 million years ago and subsequently eroding away – which developed the current scenery, it’s apparently one of the coldest places in all of the northeast, with an average of 100 inches of snowfall a year and around 100 frost-free days.

There are other ‘disorganized’ towns in Vermont, but Lewis is one the most exotic to check out because of its rawness. Because people like speaking in superlatives – my personal pick for ‘most’ captivating of them would be the next-door-neighbor ghost towns of Glastenbury and Somerset down in Bennington County if anyone was wondering.

The other three out of five disorganized Vermont towns (Averill: pop. 24, and Ferdinand: pop. 32, and of course, Lewis) are all up in remote Essex County and all border with Lewis, basically making a huge chunk of the northeastern corner of the state pretty capacious, and making them eligible for a mention in this blog post. And standing shoulder to shoulder with those three towns are three of Vermont’s other geographical curiosities, two out of our three gores (the third being Buel’s Gore which forms Chittenden County’s dagger-like southern tip and consists of the dramatic Appalachian Gap), and the state’s only grant! All this chaos by simply drawing lines on a map.

And speaking off – just “down the road” from Lewis exists another state geopolitical oddity that I just had to quickly jaunt towards before heading back home; Warren Gore.

Gores and Grants

What’s a gore? It sounds gruesome, but it’s not, even though my spellcheck is really fighting me on my use of the word.

Scottish immigrant James Whitelaw would become Vermont’s official surveyor in 1787, replacing the often error-proned Ira Allen and becoming considered as one of the best map makers and surveyors in New England. But in Ira’s defense – inaugural survey work is hard.

Survey Crews would embark into unmapped wilderness to do just that. Using a 66-foot chain and wooden posts, they’d attempt to delineate new town boundaries, and then camp out for the night.

But there were still pieces left over; awkwardly sized areas never charted to any town, or given to early land grantees as disappointing compensation for basically getting screwed out of land they were promised.

In a land where possession is about 3/4th of the law; the end result became known as gores, and Vermont once had 60 of them! Currently, we’re down to just three – the rest were eventually absorbed into their neighboring towns to make the map a little less confusing, which makes gores some of the rarest creatures in the green mountain state, and pretty much non-existent elsewhere in the country apart from northern New England, which I think sorta lends them their air of charm.

Gores are often triangular, but sometimes not, as in the case of Averys Gore, which is more trapezoidal, and Warren Gore, which is rectangular. It’s their triangular shape, though, that gave these parcels their curious name. Gore is an old English term that referred to the shape of a spearhead, which is what early cartographers thought they resembled.

Warren Gore is tandem with the Mad River Valley town of Warren. Warren was trying to get a charter in 1780, but couldn’t because it lacked the total amount of decided acreage needed to create a town – which the Vermont legislature said had to be 23,000 acres. So the grantees scrambled to find the remaining 6,595 acres of land, which they did, just completely disconnected, all the way up in the Northeast Kingdom. Technically, they had what they needed, and in 1789, Warren was charted in two pieces (also known as a “flying grant”) – the smaller part becoming Warren Gore. But the two places never had anything to do with each other.

While Warren lured settlement and skiing, Warren Gore, sometimes called “Warren’s Gore”, went the static route of most gores, and attracted only 10 people by 2000, and lost 6 of them by 2010.

The desolate State Route 114 runs pretty much through the center of the gore, and is mostly bookended by deep woods and the pretty shoreline of Norton Pond. Apparently, old guidebooks used to call it “the roller-coaster road” due to miles of continuous sharp rises and dips that made you sorta feel like you were riding a roller coaster. Well, I was absolutely down with that experience, but I guess I didn’t notice anything that was too different from a bunch of other roads in Vermont, so maybe the road had been leveled down over the decades.

I took a tour through the gore and turned around in tiny Norton, an old lumber town of around 169 people that has reverted back to forests and small hill farms. Norton is a 45th parallel town ( the latitudinal line that’s half the distance between the equator and the north pole), and until pretty recently, had one of the last remaining “line houses” in Vermont – or a building built right on the American/Canadian border which is now absolutely illegal to do, in part of northern Vermont being uncooperative during prohibition.  The most famous one is undoubtedly The Haskell Library and Opera House in the unusual village of Derby Line, where the stage is in Quebec and the seats are in Vermont. In Norton’s case, it was a general store that was split in two by the border, until it was demolished in 2021 and is now a grassy lot.

Pretty sure Vermont is the only state that does these brilliant sideways town line signs.

Inbetween Warren Gore and Lewis is Avery’s Gore – Vermont’s largest gore – a large trapezoidal wedge of land void of people or infrastructure. The only way in is on aptly named Gore Road, which is just a really nice logging road that dead-ends in the middle of the gore, near one of the only points of interest, an undeveloped pond a bit ironically named Unknown Pond.

West of Warren Gore is tiny Warner’s Grant, Vermont’s only grant, which is exotically considered to be the most inaccessible land tract in Vermont, and its existence is because of the sad plea of a troubled post-revolutionary war widow.

Hester Warner was the widow of revolutionary war hero Seth Warner (who Vermont state route 30 is named for). Warner was cousins with Vermont’s patron saint; Ethan Allen. With The Green Mountain Boys, Warner would lead the capture of the British fort at New York’s Crown Point while Allen was commandeering Fort Ticonderoga in May of 1775.

The Continental Congress was pretty impressed with that scheming lot and declared them an official militia. Warner was so well venerated that he was voted captain over Ethan Allen! But the war would eventually wreck him, and he’d retire and retreat to Connecticut in 1780, dying there a few years later at 41. His poor widow, Hester, literally and in idiom, was now burdened with the problem of having 3 children to raise but barely having the means to do so. So she despairingly reached out to the legislature. Her husband did so much for the revolution, surely they would give her some assistance.

They did wind up coming through for her, just slowly, and ironically, not in a way that would actually help the widow Warner.

Their compensation came in the form of 2,000 acres in the Northeast Kingdom of practically inaccessible highlands that was coarsely timbered, which they named Warner’s Grant.

Beyond that, history seems to have lost track of Hester Warner. Records do show that she never lived on the land. It seems that like the widow Warner, nobody else wanted to give living there a shot either. Warner’s Grant remains today as it was then, empty – apart from some logging activity.

I’d like to someday get up into Avery’s Gore and Warner’s Grant, but last time I was up that way, it was getting late. Too late to drive into the deep woods on logging traces – so those two are still on my list.

All of the places I’ve mentioned in this post are managed by a special state department – The Unified Towns & Gores of Essex County, Vermont, headquartered in the town of Brighton somewhere down a gated dirt driveway that leads off into some pines that looks more like the nondescript entrance to a sandpit than a government office.

Beers Atlas of Caledonia and Essex Counties – 1859. Shown here is Warner’s Grant, Warren Gore, Avery’s Gore, and Lewis.

Overlanding

There’s a fun hobby that’s abundant here in Vermont that always gets you near enough to some of the state’s best off-the-beaten-path places that most aren’t hip to. It’s called Overlanding, or, off-roading, and it can bring you to cool places like Lewis.

It’s something that I’ve dabbled with a few times with my brother over the years, starting out when we were late teens/early 20-year-olds when we started taking the family’s ’78 Toyota Landcruiser along gnarly mountain trails in the hills between Milton and Westford. For some reason, I couldn’t think about my trip to Lewis without thinking about this, so I decided to shoehorn it in this blog post.

The truck taking a muddy thrashing in the above photo was a more recent project of my brother’s – a 2 door, early ’95 project Toyota that was probably more work than it was worth. It was completely cut in half and welded back together, and all the parts came from Craigslist. It amounted to about a year of road trips, work, and headaches. But it paid off!

We rumbled in the cold and took it up bumpy logging roads and 4 wheeler trails in Vermont’s rugged north country; towns like gritty Johnson and the unassumingly vast spaces of mountainous Waterville and Belvidere – both far-flung villages that look like they’re still in the 1800s and are probably a picker’s jackpot. I still have flashes of us stopping at Tallman’s Store and rumbling down potholed route 109 and seeing the formidable wind molested haunch of Belvidere Mountain thick with snow and ridgeline alpenglow that blazed luminously.

Up in the mountains, we bumped and jarred around defunct mines, active sugarbushes, past 200-year-old cellar holes and slipped and slided up steep slopes, through stream beds, and passed cool hidden waterfalls and dead quarries – many of these areas used to be gores! It was a real thrill (and in the winter, was an activity specifically called ‘snow bashing’). If I had a metal detector, I’d probably bring that along too!

Sometimes you’d meet other off-roaders, pull over and chat about trail conditions, or get the details on the other’s ride. Other times you saw scuffed rocks or trees and knew some poor fella had to of done a real number on their vehicle. If you can make it happen, it’s a fun time, taking you places most folks don’t get to see.

It’s also a continuous mental and problem-solving situation, with the journey itself infused with self-reliance being the primary goal – so using your wits is recommend. Some of these trails aren’t easy to navigate. Another fun activity I used to do is to find some “dead roads”, a Vermont phenomenon where roads that were built in the 1700s and the 1800s have long been abandoned, but are still legal right-of-ways. Using old maps and tracking some of them down was pretty neat!

But honestly, the best part of it all? Overlanding and oddity hunting means spending time outside.

My brother Drew doing his thing!

Here’s a Youtube video of some guys having some fun! I know this made me wanna get out for an adventure!

Since 2012, I’ve been seeking out venerable examples of Vermont weirdness, whether that be traveling around the state or taking to my internet connection and digging up forsaken places, oddities, esoterica, and unique natural features. And along the way, I’ve been sharing it with you on my website, Obscure Vermont. This is what keeps my spirit inspired.

I never expected Obscure Vermont to get as much appreciation and fanfare as it’s getting, and I’m truly grateful and humbled. Especially in recent years, where I’ve gained the opportunity to interact with and befriend more oddity lovers and outside the box thinkers around Vermont and New England. As Obscure Vermont has grown, I’ve been growing with it, and the developing attention is keeping me earnest and pushing me harder to be more introspective and going further into seeking out the strange.

I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to keep this blog going. Obscure Vermont is funded almost entirely by generous donations. Expenses range from hosting fees to keep the blog live, investing in research materials, travel expenses and the required planning, and updating/maintaining vital tools such as my camera and my computer. I really pride and push myself to try to put out the best of what I’m able to create, and I gauge it by only posting stuff that I personally would want to see on the glow of my computer screen.

I want to continuously diversify how I write and the odd things I write about. Your patronage would greatly help me continue bringing you cool and unusual content and keep me doing what I love!

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A Day At The Races: The Old Green Mountain Racetrack (and Pownal Peculiarities)

I remember first passing this ugly hulking blight as a young kid on a trip to Connecticut, and never forgot it. It took me until the past few years to really investigate it, though, because I assumed it was just going to be a boring empty building enclosing rows of old stadium seats. But damn, I really under-estimated the interest factor here.

This place is so incongruous and inconspicuous in contemporary Vermont, that many people are pretty surprised to find it actually ever existed at all. And though it was never a huge success, it was a standout place for this compartment of American culture and ran for most of the latter half of the 20th century.

In the spring of 1965, a horse racing track started up in the hardscrabble town of Pownal – where three fascinating mountain ranges, the Green Mountains, Taconics, and Berkshire Hills, collide.

Its three creators’ idea was to duplicate the success of Saratoga, New York, and then compete with it by creating another track in a charming rural area – and the Pownal Valley, which has been literally viewed as one of America’s most photogenic, was chosen.

But it was also a very practical decision. Pownal is the extreme southwestern corner of Vermont – bordered to the west by New York State, and Massachusetts and their weird Berkshire Hills to the south. Pownal, being a primary portal into Vermont, is closer to the more urban burbs of southern New England and New York State than the rest of Vermont is, so the track effortlessly racked up a lot of visitors from the “flatlands”. 

Pownal’s history is a small magnum opus for yarn spinners and history nerds like me because so much has seemingly happened there, while parts of town look like so much hasn’t happened there, and I’m sure even more tales molder away in the town’s backroad hovels and neat antiquated farms. (Seriously, some environs look like they have been untouched by modern headways –  like you’ve stumbled into a deep southern Appalachia, or as my friend calls it; “Pennsyltucky”.)

Perhaps that’s because there’s just something, well, weird about the town, something endemic and enigmatic that might be as old as its mountains, and that draws me in like a torch in search of a flame. The town definitely has a different kind of vibe to it than the rest of Vermont. I really like Pownal – it’s seriously one of the coolest towns in the state! When I sat down to put together my blog post from this explore, I couldn’t think of this old racetrack without thinking about all of the other amazing things that I’ve gleaned about this town over the years.

Originally, the area was inhabited by Mahicans, whose savage fate may have been foretold by prophetic rocks on a Pownal mountainside.

Its realm was the only part of what is now Vermont that was ever trodden on by Dutch colonizers from New York in the 1600s (The Albany/Hudson Valley region of New York has a really cool lingering trace of Dutch-inspired architecture, toponyms, and seemingly ancient muniments as a result! I’d love to do far more exploring/researching there)

What might be the oldest home in Vermont is in Pownal village – The Mooar-Wright House – which was constructed around 1750.

Vermont’s only witch “trial” happened here in the early days of Pownal, where some folks victimized a Dutch widow named Mrs. Krieger for “possessing extraordinary powers,” whatever that meant. The obscure account was originally (and fortunately) recorded by lawyer and historian T.E. Brownell, and has managed to survive into the 21st century, though still pretty obscure.

I’ve read about a few Vermont women who were said to be witches, and usually, the accusations and “evidence” were in the camps of “consorting with the devil” or using “magic”, which lead to mischief like making cows stop producing milk, crop failures, townsfolk suddenly being inflicted by mysterious maladies, and innocuous stuff like predicting the weather before it happens. Other more sinister tales include the conjectured witch conjuring up a vast spectrum of malicious acts towards others she didn’t like.

I’ve been told that my great grandmother could predict the weather, held seances in her parlor, told fortunes she read in tea leaves, and once unwittingly shared a barn dance with the devil himself, but she seemed pretty well-liked and esteemed.

Unfortunately, widows were sometimes the prey of discrimination back then, because they were seen as not only a “burden” to the community, but they were easy targets because they had no family to defend them. Human beings are the real monsters.

Whatever it was that the widow Krieger was doing was seen as diabolical enough to condemn her, and a “safety committee” was organized to deal with it.

The Hoosac Valley: Its Legends And Its History by Pownal-ite Grace “Greylock” Niles tells that the committee sentenced widow Krieger (spelled “Kreigger” in her pages) to trial by ordeal, and gave her two choices. The first choice was she could climb a tree and wait for a group of men to chop it down. If she wasn’t killed outright, she was innocent. Or, she could face “trial by water” – which meant that a group of townsfolk cut a hole through the ice of the Hoosic River, bound her, and then tossed the poor woman into the frigid current. This surefire method stemmed from an old belief that water was sacred, and would undoubtedly sort these provoking preternatural things out. If she sunk, she was innocent, but if she floated, then that meant that she was in allegiance with the devil or some other variety of evil, and would have absolutely nothing to do with science/physics. I also noticed the confirming circumstances of the two methods contradict one another (if she wasn’t killed, she was innocent, versus if she was killed, she was innocent. What).

The widow Krieger chose the latter, thinking it was the safer choice, and sank like a stone. That was apparently good enough for those Pownal-ites who gathered for the show. Unlike neighboring Bay State witch hunters, though, these Vermonters seemed to be a bit more philanthropic, and a group of men suddenly panicked and scrambled down the riverbank to fetch her. Not only did she live through the ordeal, but I’m assuming things were really awkward afterward. As the committee resolutely said afterward; “If the widow Kreigger had been a witch, the powers infernal would have supported her”

Today, there’s a standout cliff near North Pownal that local parlance still knows as “Krieger Rocks” – both a homage to early Dutch influence and an informal parable of a hapless woman.

I also found this occurrence even more uncanny, because while the epoch of the infamous witch hysteria of Salem and southern New England occurred in the 1690s, Vermont’s lone delirium happened sometime in the 1760s, probably after 1761 when the town was charted. (Actually, Yankee witch based superstitions, though weakened, remained alive into the 19th century!)

Perhaps Pownal just needed to install a few witch windows? 

In October of 1874, Thomas Paddock, a well-respected farmer with an amicable character, suddenly found his property under a maelstrom from poltergeist-like activity.

Stones – varying in size from pebbles to a 20-pound boulder (!) rained down on his house and outbuildings, but neighboring properties were completely unaffected. The stones were found to be hot when handled, even on chilly nights, and a few of them reportedly defied gravity, and rolled uphill, or even up and over the peak of the roof after landing, almost as if they were propelled. Mr. Paddock dubbed whatever it was “the stone-throwing devil”, word got out, and for a brief time, it caused a sensation.

He even offered a reward of one dollar for anyone who could solve these shenanigans, but shortly after, the cache of tourists and newsmen cleared out when the odd activity finally stopped. Nobody was any wiser at what exactly happened at the Paddock farm, not even today (though cursory blame was attempted on a hired farm boy named Jerry, who coincidentally was in the vicinity of the falling rocks more often than not…) Interestingly enough, the farm just happened to be near-ish the Krieger Rocks part of town…

Local girl Addie Card, who once labored at the now-demolished and superfunded Pownal Tannery (a site I’m sorry I missed out on), was photographed by the now-famous documentarian Lewis Hines and the image became a barometer in his efforts to stoke public objection about turn of the last century child labor in America. A collection of dilapidated shacks off state route 346 on a dented dirt drive known as “French Hill” are original tenement houses of the old tannery and one of the last reminders that the place actually existed in North Pownal.  

There’s still an existing and forgotten granite tri-point state marker erected by surveyors in the 1800s that’s now lost in the thick forests of the hills – some of those slopes still cooly contain colonial-era scrawlings on glacial deposited boulders of predecessing hikers and explorers – just some of the many relics I’m sure these hills contain. I know some people that hit a jackpot with their metal detectors around it. Who knows what else can still be found within the southern Green Mountains?

Another notable person with alleged wild talents was Clara Jepson, Pownal’s official seer – a profession that you don’t hear that much of in contemporary times (except maybe advertised on television at 3 AM). But until she died at 87 in 1948, she was the best-known clairvoyant in Vermont and created a pretty venerable reputation to back up her accumulated character.

Among her professed talents, she could allegedly hunt the location of lost or hidden objects, and was consulted on several cases, including one of the terrifying disappearances in the nearby mountains that would later become an area known as the “Bennington Triangle” (one of my favorite Vermont stories). According to witnesses, her answers would manifest themselves in a cryptic language within the folds of a lacy white handkerchief she would fondle during her sessions. (If anyone is old enough to recall ‘seeing’ her in real-time, or has any kind of story related to, I’d love to hear from you!)

It seems like Pownal’s always done things a bit differently, in ways that seem to almost be a few shades deeper into the mystic that’s masqueraded by a rough enchanting landscape, and maybe that’s augmented because of the town’s historically independent spirit, mountain isolation, and influenced by its border state surroundings. I honestly don’t think that this racetrack project could have happened in any other spot in Vermont.

And speaking of the racetrack, it also seems to be the last big spike in Pownal’s histogram, for the time being anyway. The track opened in May of 1965 at a cost of six million dollars in a former cornfield along the Hoosic River.

But from the start, Vermont’s only pari-mutuel racetrack failed to draw in the crowds that its investors were anticipating – the actual attendees were half that. But it kept on keeping on, despite quite a few subsequent telltale ownership changes, and oddly became kind of significant for east coast horse racing, ironically because of the efforts made just to keep the place buoyant. It was one of the earliest to do gimmicky nighttime races, and the first to do Sunday matches anywhere east of the Mississippi during the days of yore when the rest of the country still adhered to the blue laws. It created a sort of niche fanbase and wound up employing a lot of locals, which was a boon in a region with an economy that was becoming pretty hard-up. Casual tourists enjoyed the racetrack, too, and I was told it was a popular stop for folks who’d take Sunday drives through the mountains of Southern Vermont.

Old postcard of the Green Mountain Racetrack via CardCow.com
Old postcard of the Green Mountain Racetrack, with Route 7 in the foreground – via CardCow.com
Old postcard view from inside the grandstands.

A packed parking lot at the Pownal Track – sometime in the sixties.

Twelve years later, horses were dropped from the itinerary, and Greyhound racing was the only thing occupying the oval (which I guess is the bottom echelon of these kinds of places, according to some nostalgia sites I browsed) until 1992, when the track closed for good – in part to animal rights activists, waning income, and the state making the activity illegal. A resurrection was attempted around the turn of the millennium but ultimately failed. It was strange seeing moldy flyers and banners ambitiously announcing its “grand re-opening” stored in soggy piles in the dank basement levels. I’d love there to be more economic prosperity for Pownal and Bennington County, but not in the form of animal exploitation.

Today, the 144-acre property is abandoned, despite multiple failed attempts to do something with it, and it’s a real shame that nothing has happened yet. Further damage was done when the nearby Hoosic River, a perimeter defining watercourse that wears the Indian appointed name of many local toponyms that variate between “Hoosic” and “Hoosac” – and has a history steeped in local lore – flooded its banks significantly a while back and seeped into the lower levels of the building.

The site has so much potential – especially being off the most traveled road in Vermont. Lollapalooza held their festivities on the expansive grounds in 1996, and a few antique car shows also took advantage of the space between 2005 and 2008, which fits right in seeing as the iconic Hemmings Motor News is located up the road in Bennington in a rad, restored Sunoco station.

Williams College, a few miles south of the old track, even did a study about the property in 2011 and suggested everything from affordable housing, light manufacturing, or bringing back some agriculture.

Until any of that happens, you can’t miss the place. It’s an intriguing, conspicuous eyesore at one of the main entry points into the state – dominating a portion of the view as Route 7 begins to climb the mountains towards Bennington.

One of the biggest curiosities about this property to me was the name of its access road. The unassuming road is named after a cemetery, but I’ve walked around the grounds and I couldn’t spot any boneyards. It made me wonder – back in the day, moving an old cemetery wasn’t as big of a deal as it would be nowadays. Could there have been an old family plot from an old farm that was erased? Are there still corpses trapped underneath the sea of weedy asphalt that encircles the grandstands, or maybe underneath the earth of the old track?

Well, according to Google, the cemetery still exists in a far-flung corner of the property, and it’s the oldest in town – with a gathering of faded and broken 19th-century headstones placed in the woods (Interestingly, Pownal has a lot of cool old cemeteries – and many of them are old farm family plots, which might seem kind of an odd concept in today’s world). I’ll have to give it a visit the next time I stop by.

Many of the glum-looking crumbling cinderblock stables were razed for a solar farm, which is awesome, but the gigantic grandstands building still stood at the times of my visits, and was a spooky but really fascinating time capsule of the late sixties and early seventies, with its cold cement blocks and hideous fake vinyl wooden wall paneling – an architectural design element I hate. I especially admired the extinct fonts on all the office doors; “bookkeeper”, “telegraph”, “photographers suite” etc – that was pretty neat to see. One unifying theme to the property was the use of a particular dark green – thematic of its location in the Green Mountains, which was used on everything from the exterior paint job to the color of its graphic design marketing. The appeal, though, was a little curious. Everything about the place felt cheap and kinda sleazy.

The building was an unassuming labyrinth of smelly and squalid offices and catacombs of dark and drippy maintenance and miscellany areas all filled with relics, gross puddles of goopy chemicals on the floors, and wandering birds.  The roof had long failed, and nature has been metamorphosing the structure in gross ways for over a decade.  One of the coolest things I found was the former track photographers suite, which was still filled with heaps of developed and undeveloped film of the old races. The basement had such a foul odor that, eventually, we had to dip back outside for some fresh air revitalization.

Upstairs, the former venue, snack bars, and grandstands are all cavernous spaces that have been trashed, smashed to smithereens, graffitied, succumbing to water and decay, and turning into terrariums, as moss and young plants have begun to take habitat on the floors and the rooftop. A whole colony of what was probably hundreds of pigeons had taken up residence on (and within the cavities of) the defective roof and constantly circled the large, mid-century structure.

It was a creepy explore, with lots of eerie sounds that croaked and carried through the wide spaces and dark crevices. The smell of rancid decay permeated everywhere.

Overall I thought this was a real bummer of a place – an attitude formed by the dated and ugly ruins, and the fact I’ve never enjoyed or supported the kinds of revelry that once went on here.

The real reason I chose to make multiple explores here was simply because of the fact that it exists, and my sense of wonder seduces me to explore as much of Vermont as possible – especially the abandoned stuff. And admittedly, a few visits had me appreciating it in a totally different light and discovered that it was a treasure trove of an explore and architecturally evocative of its time. But I found it a real shame that other people who’ve stopped by have decided to completely decimate this place and use it as a law-free zone.

The amount of destruction in the past few years was astonishing – I noticed a humongous difference between my visit in July of 2019 and March 2020, and towards the last months of its life, the bad road tar of the old parking lot and access road almost always had multiple cars – many with out of state plates, parked around.

The people that come here are quite a circus show of other amiable explorers, curiosity seekers, locals, and shady characters – it seems like many out of staters or area hooligans are using the old track as a law-free zone. A few people we ran into definitely made us uncomfortable.

Dusk was humming up, and as we were getting ready to leave, three boys on ATVs zoomed through the parking lot, and a Nissan Altima full of teenagers parked in the weeds in front of the building and had an “oh shit!” moment as we pulled out and all locked eyes as they were removing copious packs of Twisted Tea out of their trunk, while nearby, a young twenty-something couple was awkwardly trying to wedge a sign they had taken into the backseat of their Ford Focus.

I had this post sitting in my WordPress drafts for a while. Because I’m a perfectionist, I wanted to get the feeling right and make this post interesting and fun, but I was also concerned about posting the location. I realize that in the past few years, a larger amount of people have been using my blog to add places to their exploration checklists, and I’ve been really re-evaluating my responsibilities as a preservationist and a local weird worker, what I post, and how I write about it.

I already saw the racetrack morphing into a weird beacon for trouble, and I guess I didn’t want to add to it. Thanks to the internet, nothing is a secret anymore, and I’ve seen an alarming increase in the momentum of special places, in general, being over-touristed and ruined by unlikely people.

Unfortunately, at some point on the night of September 16th, 2020, a “suspicious fire” was started in the grandstands that used the wooden seats for fuel, and the entire building was cooked and even more destroyed than it already was. The fire fueled a local outcry of folks who are fed up with all the fools turned sightseers. This is one of the many reasons why I never give out locations. Practically everything you’ll see in my photos has been reduced to ashes, but the mangled and blackened shell sadly still looms beyond Route 7 looking pretty haunted. If you’re interested, the Berkshire Eagle has some illuminating drone photography of the damage.

I’m so grateful I had the chance to enjoy a few explores and make some fun memories here when I did, and am saddened by the loss of what oddly was such an uncommon wreck. There was so much more that I wanted to see, that now I never will.

I think that the Green Mountain Racetrack was uniquely special. Because of its smooth accessibility, its literal open-door policy intrigued all kinds of souls who decided to let their curiosities lead them here. I was scanning loads of posts on Instagram and was a bit startled to see just how many people not only have snooped around here, but were genuinely fond of this place in their own ways, and had fun making multiple trips here to satisfy the natural human urge of investigation. Abandoned places inspire that kind of magic that encourages us to forget about the chains of society and our inhibitions. When the news hit that this place burned down, people started commiserating.

This was a continued lesson for me not to take places for granted. I was just speaking to a good friend a few weeks ago about planning yet another return here because of all the fun we had last time – but we took this old track for granted, and now it’s gone. Everything is finite.

So here you go; a whole bunch of photos of the old Green Mountain Racetrack!

The Green Mountain Racetrack when I visited back in Spring 2011. 

The Green Mountain Racetrack June 2019/March 2020

The old track oval, now a field growing wild. Looking at this image, I still remember this summer evening; the humidity dripping down my skin and shallow breathes in heavy air, with the gentle sound of rustling long grasses and a nocturne of peepers. The end of the Green Mountain range can be seen in the distance.

Green Mountain Racetrack June 2020

Photos from my last sojourn here. It was a sultry early summer day as mists slid of new green slopes vibrant against gloomy ashen skies and uncomfortable humidity that drenched us in sweat. The entire place reeked of something sodden and foul. It had started to rain, and the roof, which had long failed, was letting fetid water in which dripped down and baptized us and made the upper carpets like stepping on a wet sponge.

“You’ve been baptized – your soul belongs to the race track now” I joked as a trickle of mystery water dribbled down upon my friend’s head and shoulders. She involuntarily cringed at the sensation and shot me a glare.

Man oh man, I really miss this place.

I realize the noun “Paddock” means a field/enclosed area where horses are kept and exercised (duh, because it’s an old horse track), but I personally can’t help always think of the aforementionedly bedeviled Pownal farmer Thomas Paddock when I’ve passed under this sign, and all the inexplicable weirdness that went down (literally) on his local farm. Personally, I think that would have been a way cooler restaurant name reference.
A groovy old conference room in the basement

I’d really love to do more shunpiking and exploring around the Pownal area – it really is a gem of a town, with far-stretching vistas, old farms, backroads that convert into gnarly class D forest roads, and hidden swimming holes under mountain cascades.

When I was curiously searching for other people’s media from their explores here, I found quite a few talented folks who bring some great stuff to the table. Here’s one of my favorites; a great urbex video by explorer “Dark Exploration” (who, in my opinion, got wayyy better shots than I did!)

Check out this cool drone footage shot by Youtuber Dagaz FPV! It gives you a scope of just how big the property was and some rad POVs that I couldn’t capture. Maybe I should invest in one of these…

 

Are you from Pownal or the surrounding environs of Southern Vermont/The Berkshires/New York State? Or are you a Vermonter in general? I’m looking for weird and wild stories, wonderous places, incredible people, and especially abandoned locales! So if there’s something you’d like to share with me, I’d love to hear from you!

I’d also really love to grow this blog and present unique, meaningful, and extraordinary content that’s a departure from the same regurgitated stuff you find everywhere else online, and your help would be hugely appreciated! I have bad social anxiety, so I’m not always on social media as often as I probably should be.

Feel free to drop me a line at chad.abramovich@gmail.com

Also – if you appreciate me and this blog, perhaps consider making a donation at my PayPal below? The pandemic has hit my finances and my mental health pretty hard, so any amount is humbly appreciated. I’m also on Venmo if that works better.

Since 2012, I’ve been seeking out venerable examples of Vermont weirdness, whether that be traveling around the state or taking to my internet connection and digging up forsaken places, oddities, esoterica, and unique natural features. And along the way, I’ve been sharing it with you on my website, Obscure Vermont. This is what keeps my spirit inspired.

I never expected Obscure Vermont to get as much appreciation and fanfare as it’s getting, and I’m truly grateful and humbled. Especially in recent years, where I’ve gained the opportunity to interact with and befriend more oddity lovers and outside the box thinkers around Vermont and New England. As Obscure Vermont has grown, I’ve been growing with it, and the developing attention is keeping me earnest and pushing me harder to be more introspective and going further into seeking out the strange.

I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to keep this blog going. Obscure Vermont is funded almost entirely by generous donations. Expenses range from hosting fees to keep the blog live, investing in research materials, travel expenses and the required planning, and updating/maintaining vital tools such as my camera and my computer. I really pride and push myself to try to put out the best of what I’m able to create, and I gauge it by only posting stuff that I personally would want to see on the glow of my computer screen.

I want to continuously diversify how I write and the odd things I write about. Your patronage would greatly help me continue bringing you cool and unusual content and keep me doing what I love!

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Abandoned Dairy Farms

For a blog about obscure Vermont, I’m a little surprised that an abandoned farm hasn’t made the rounds in my posts yet.

Every state has stereotypes that give an oversimplified image of what it’s supposedly all about. Massachusetts is all paved suburbia and Dunkin Donuts, Maine has the ocean and fanfare for an acquired taste called Moxie, and Vermont is a bunch of farms and home to Ben and Jerry’s.

Well, in Vermont’s case, that’s not that far from the truth. Vermont is the most rural state in the nation and to prove it, we have a bunch of statistics with the word “small” in them. We have the second smallest population, the smallest largest city, the smallest tallest building, the smallest state capital, and are the 45th smallest of the states.

Growing up in Vermont, your friends most likely fall into two categories. You love it here, or you think it’s wicked boring. Personally, it’s what we don’t have that I think makes Vermont so great. There are no casinos here, no billboards, few malls and chain stores, and no amusement parks (unless you count the Pump House at Jay Peak?). And in all that space in-between our 9 cities are a lot of farms and their variations.

Agriculture has strong roots up here. Generations of Vermonters have been farmers because you did what you had to do to get by. In such a detached state, other jobs often weren’t here so you had to be self-reliant, until very recently with the emergence of the internet and a growing commuter culture. This hardscrabble lifestyle may very well have infused our culture with that independent-minded, self-sufficient ethos, devising that ‘you-can’t-get-there-from-here’ Vermonter who is crusty, stoic and has abundant old school common sense.  Stories of old farmers who toiled in the barn all day and then bootlegged whiskey at night to make enough to save their farms can still be uttered by old timers should you ask them about it.

Many surmise that this was the reasoning behind all the Poor Farm Roads that can be found across the state, because so many Vermonters were farmers who lived around the poverty line, but the actuality is more depressing. Poor Farms were institutional farm complexes that were sort of an early form of welfare, created and supported by public taxes, where anyone who couldn’t support themselves would wind up and were made to labor their days away on by doing farm work. In return, they had food, a bed, and clothes. But from what I heard about them – they were often gloomy places, and many unfortunates spent their lives there and went to the grave there. There’s a Poor Farm Road in the town I grew up in, but by the time I was aware of its namesake, most of the place had long been developed by cookie cutter rural suburbia and erased, minus one old barn which the local kids would tell me used to be part of it, and according to them, had bars on the windows and shackles still on the wall. But a trip down to the end of the road as a late teenager revealed it was just a dilapidated barn without the lingering despair.

In the 1800s, historical records say that the state was 3/4 deforested with most of the land used for sheep grazing, and later, dairy – which gave us a more cows than people ratio. Over the last century, that proportion has directly reversed, and now 3/4 of the state is back to being forested, and we now have more humans than cows – though I’m still heckled about that by flatlanders. The trend reversal started to develop during the last century when aggravated Vermonters moved westward for literal greener pastures with less rocks. We lost about half our population then, and a sizable number of towns around the state still haven’t recovered the lost numbers of their 1800 population peaks.

A good example would be the out of the way southern Vermont town of Windham. The town sharing a name with its positional county had over 1,000 bodies, a half dozen villages and 2 post offices in 1820, but by 1970, had a headcount of just 150.

There is a place name on state maps in the town of Sunderland curiously labeled”Kansas” (there’s also a tinier “East Kansas” a mile or so east), and the odd name is said to have came from a curmudgeonly old farmer who in the 1800s, kept making empty threats to his family, other Sunderlandians, and anyone else who’d listen, that he was so fed up with his rocky fields that he was going to sell his farm and move to Kansas. Only, he never did, and died right there in Bennington County. That part of town became known as Kansas by the locals and soon became a wayfinding moniker.

Vermont still has plenty of agricultural affairs left, but with milk prices not equaling the cost of production, dairy is slowly and steadily dying. Farmers are even callously getting flyers with suicide prevention hotline numbers on them in the mail.

But despite dwindling farms around the country, smaller horticultural farms are taking root all over the state and growing – mostly supporting modern-day farm to table fads, which means Vermont’s emerging restaurants and craft breweries can come blazing through wearing the future on its sleeve.

As a kid, I grew up playing in the woods of an old farm behind my house. Most of the land wasn’t tended and had grown up into a mature forest by then. We used to cut 4 wheeler trails through the growth and explore the old farm roads and examine artifacts from yesteryear we’d come across, like old barbed wire fences, a neon green AMC Hornet pushed into a ravine, and the prime find – the grimy miscellany of the old farmers’ junkyard. We used to salvage stuff from the heaps of junked appliances, tires, and barn mementos and use it to build forts with. Old tin, a couch, the front seats from an old Ford Mustang, even an old woodstove. We made some cool hangouts from the refuse we excitedly recycled.

Milton – this fading green AMC Hornet lies on a steep bank behind a rural stretch of railroad tracks, on the edge of a patch of thick swampland. it looks as if someone pushed (or quite possibly drove) the car down the hill, where it lays to rest.
Milton – this fading green AMC Hornet lies on a steep bank behind a rural stretch of railroad tracks, on the edge of a patch of thick swampland. it looks as if someone pushed (or quite possibly drove) the car down the hill, where it lays to rest.

A friend of mine got in touch with me and said she had a new location up her sleeves, an abandoned farm up in the north part of the state, the dumping ground part of it was on her property and she hadn’t gotten around to doing anything about it yet. I thought it was weird that I live in Vermont and haven’t explored a farm yet. So on a beautiful autumn day, I met up with her and she led me through some overgrown tangle woods of nettles, dead apple trees and mangey looking cedar trees that turned the area into a dark entry. A few minutes into our walk and the already fallow landscape began to change, and I began to notice mounds of discarded anything covered in moss and fallen leaves that had been dumped underneath the dead canopy.

A walk through the Vermont woods can often be revealing. It’s not uncommon to find relics from a different Vermont left to disintegrate below the trees. And in my opinion – our ruins are often one of the coolest things about the human race. We create amazing structures and accomplishments or inhabit these laborious lifestyles and let the aftereffects rot without much of a thought, leaving people like me to eagerly trace their occurrences that blur the line between litter and urban archeology. And out of any time of the year, you can be most appreciative of our habit to ruin than the fall, when visibility is best.

There was a time not that long ago, when Vermonters didn’t dig today’s Green culture. Back then, the most efficient and convenient way to get rid of anything you deemed as garbage, was to make the disposal quick and uncomplicated. This was often accomplished by dumping those items on a far corner of the farm, or let gravity take it down a river bank. Over time, these items accumulated, festering in the woods long after the farm went defunct, or their traces bleeding into our waterways or soil.

How times have changed. Today, a growing chunk of Vermonters are building a culture that feels how we coexist with our environment is a virtue, and villainize those things that don’t fall into place. And if you’re not one of those people, well, it’s also the law. But as is the trend, the movement also shakes things up, especially farmers who find it expensive and laborious to abide by new regulations, or the costs of implementing new laws or infrastructure by a government that many are losing faith in.

A lot less of Vermont is farmed now days, and much of the land has returned to forest, but these rusted and forgotten vestiges of the past still remain, now moldering in the silence of the wilderness. This particular junkyard had an eyebrow-raising amount of stuff brought there. Old tractors, snowmobiles, knob televisions, a Ford truck, religious paraphernalia, antique glass bottles, creepy childrens toys decaying in the weather, a small mound of old appliances, and so much more in depths farther down than I felt good about digging to reach. There is even rumored to be some traces of an old prohibition era still coffined back here, but there was so much to sift through, I probably wouldn’t have been able to recognize it if I was standing on it.

“I thought you’d like this, seeing how you’re into old stuff” said my friend as she went to unscrew the top from her iced tea, humorously not following me further into the collection of trash. “I figured I’d show you before I clean this all up”

“Oh, when is that happening?” I called out as I wobbled and stumbled my way over a mound of shifting garbage that squeaked and rustled underneath my crooked feet.

“Welllll…….one day.” she assured me, a tone of defeat in her voice.
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Further down the road, there was the most important cog in the farm machine, the dairy barn, which excited me lots because you never know what you’ll come across in an old Vermonter’s barn. Barns are vital storage spaces, workshops and in some cases, awesomely bizarre museums.

Traditionally, a Vermont farmer would put more money and effort into keeping up the barn than anything else they owned. So much, that many of them would let their houses fall into ruin if they had to make that hard choice of where to divvy up their cash. That even goes as far as the demolition process if the construction gets too far gone. As an old timer up in the Northeast Kingdom once explained to me; “Why tear down a perfectly good barn when it’ll just fall down when it’s ready?”

According to my friend and tour guide, the old barn was close to 100 years old, filled with accumulations of its years. As a side hobby, I’m a picker when my finances allow it, and I used to love shunpiking around rural Vermont and checking out barn finds, yard sales or whatever treasures or weirdness I could spot on our backroads, so I was already wondering what I’d find inside this old barn.

The fading red structure didn’t appear to be in bad shape, or really even abandoned. If I had just passed by, I’d probably thought it was just another working farm. We pulled over in some tall grass and began to tromp our way through the threshold.

I think barns and farms play some role in lots of Vermonters lives, even if you don’t have one of your own, chances are, you know someone who does. I remember my childhood of playing in my paternal grandparents’ dusty old barns on their farm up near East Montpelier, finding ones near Chittenden County to store our 78 Toyota Landcruiser in for the winter, and spending some of the best days of my youth riding my 4 wheeler through sugarbushes and meadows on a 250 acre farm and some of the most beautiful land I’ve had the privilege of having access to in East Wallingford. Now days, I’ve been apartment jumping around the Burlington area, but man, I wish I had a barn of my own where I could set up a workshop and have a place to do projects and space to store the 4 wheeler I would most definitely buy.

While I’m on the subject – do you folks know why red happens to be the ubiquitous choice of barn attire? Simply put – red paint is cheap. But the why behind that answer actually has to do with dying stars. Pretty much; red paint is made from Iron. Iron is created when a star eventually collapses. The ground is loaded with iron, or, an iron-oxide compound called red ochre that makes a good pigment. The ground is loaded with red ochre because when stars die, they explode, and physics decrees they generate a bunch of iron as the result, which is pretty cool.

The dusty whitewashed interior of the barn was pretty cool as well. In typical Vermont tradition, the old farmhands never threw anything away, so the spaces were stuffed with antique furniture, busted farm equipment, and some unexpecteds like a collection of bowling pins. I know barns usually lived double lives thanks to Yankee ingenuity, like this great story on State 14, of an old one in tiny East Granville that formerly was the town’s dance hall that the current owners wish to restore. Maybe these guys used their barn as a makeshift bowling alley to pass the doldrums?

Walking around through hay that stuck to my boots, I realized the barn was a little worse for wear than I had thought. Structurally, it’s wooden floors and walls were beginning their slow descent into wasting away, and some of the older items stored inside were rotting to a point beyond saving.

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While I was writing up this post, I remembered another old barn I had checked out many years ago, and decided to dig up the old photos. I want to say these were taken by an insecure me with my Nikon point and shoot, around the spring of 2010. I figured I’d include them in this post as well. It’s sort of funny how years ago, I thought the only way I would be any good at photography was to get myself a top-grade camera, but looking back, I think that heading out with my old point and shoot actually forced me to become more creative and observant with a limited focal distance and zoom range. Man, young Chad had so much to learn. The equipment sure helps, but it’s really the photographer behind the gadgets that makes the difference.

During that spring, I needed to get out of the house to clear my head, and one of the best ways for me to do that was to go shunpiking – one of my favorite activities still.

I found myself on some swampy backroads up in Franklin County. With the windows down and the wet Spring perfume coming through, I found myself passing by an abandoned farm, and next door, a rundown ranch house where the owning family still dwelled.

They agreed to let me skulk around their abandoned farm, but their elderly teenage son thought I was a weirdo for being interested in their place. Well, I am a weirdo, but I’ll never forget his furrowed eyebrow look and accompanying chuckle. According to him, the town actually condemned their old farmhouse when it began to violate building codes as it aged. So they moved into the ranch next door, which honestly didn’t look much better.

The best feature of the property was a tumbledown dairy barn covered in gray decay. The ramshackle structure was worth the potential threat of tetanus. The interior was filled with the debris of century old farm equipment, hidden doors and other relics. Like a beautiful antique sleigh.

I even found a century plus old book underneath some floorboards in an abandoned barn, which raised a few questions. Why was this book concealed under the floor? What else was below my boots?

I’m not into theology, but it was pretty cool. As a graphic design major, I really appreciated the headlining typography. Finding old religious paraphernalia hidden in Vermont buildings isn’t rare it seems. Around the same time, an acquaintance I knew found someone’s leather bound, ornate family bible from 1848 under his floorboards, along with a handgun and the skeleton key to his basement door, which they had never been able to access until then. The decaying book was scrawled with various notes and births/deaths of a family who used to live in his old house in Milton. The place was built in the 1840s as a hotel, and also functioned as a bar, vaudeville theater and silent movie house and an odd fellows hall, before being converted into shoddy apartments.

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As you all know I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to produce and sustain this blog. Obscure Vermont is funded entirely on generous donations that you the wonderful viewers and supporters have made. Expenses range from internet fees to host the blog, to investing in research materials, to traveling expenses. Also, donations help keep me current with my photography gear, computer, and computer software so that I can deliver the best quality possible. Seriously, even the small cost equivalent to a gas station cup of coffee would help greatly!

If you value, appreciate, and enjoy reading about my adventures please consider making a donation to my new Gofundme account or Paypal. Any donation would not only be greatly appreciated and help keep this blog going, it would also keep me doing what I love. Thank you!

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Richford’s Mystery Spot

The hill country up near hardscrabble East Richford is an older, left behind Vermont of farmhouses with sagging rooflines, boarded up country stores, rivers, rusted iron railroad bridges over narrow underpasses, and toothpick rows of harvested corn stocks left in bleak fields.

It was up in this part of the state under 6 inches of snow and roads that made me thankful for snow tires that I was going oddity hunting.

We were the only car on state route 105A, a pretty desolate spur road connecting route 105 to a sparsely used border crossing at Sutton, Quebec. The bad tarmac ran alongside the hypothermic waters of the Mississqoui as the snow began to tumble down to the ground in an amiable silence. “Man, I love roads that follow rivers” my friend enthused. “Yeah, roads that follow rivers are some of humankind’s’ best achievements” I returned, and we both cracked a grin.

We continued to be the only traffic as we turned onto the dirt main drag of East Richford, which was only a few older wooden homes in various states of decrepitude. Past the abandoned Gulf station, the road sharply right angles at Quebec before beginning its ascent up into the border hills. We passed an old graveyard where the invisible line between the two nations slashed through the middle of, before my friend suddenly stomped on his breaks, our car skidding for a few seconds on the slush and ice. “Oh……” he breathed, looking at the granite boundary marker to our right. “Shit, are we breaking the law? We’re in Canada! Don’t we have to check in?”

“The only law we’re breaking is the law of gravity!” I quipped.

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According to Sir Isaac Newton, objects fall. No exceptions. But if Franklin County lore has a flicker of truth to it, perhaps not.

This remote border road that made it’s way through some of Vermont’s most stark and impoverished back country near East Richford is known as “Richford’s Mystery Spot,” according to Joseph E. Citro and Diane E. Foulds in their 2004 book Curious New England: The Unconventional Traveler’s Guide to Eccentric Destinations. The “mystery” is that gravity in this spot reputedly likes to behave unorthodoxly. For example, cars are said to roll uphill! WTF?

These oddities aren’t unique to the Green Mountain State. Various places around the U.S. manifest the same puzzling phenomenon. Nearest to Vermont, there are two “mystery spots” in the Massachusetts towns of Greenfield and Harvard, and one in Middlesex, N.Y., on the awesomely named Spook Hill Road.

Citro and Foulds reported that they weren’t able to locate Richford’s mystery spot. Years ago, in a brown and bleak November, I made my own attempt. Being an avid Vermont enthusiast and local weird worker, I couldn’t pass this one up. I enlisted a friend, who couldn’t contain his mirth when I explained we were aiming to defy gravity, and quickly signed on for the road trip. I guess breaking the laws of physics is a good way to make plans.

The mystery spot is aptly named, I discovered when we turned east out of Richford village toward the looming form of Jay Peak, because it’s no easy place to find. The night before, I had consulted the state atlas and decided that the most likely location was the curiously named East Richford Slide Road, a hilly dirt byway that rolls over the foothills of Jay Peak with a few trailers and abandoned farmhouses along its length, before depositing you back on Route 105 in Jay town. It serpentines over the border a few times, but because you can’t get anywhere in Canada unless you hike through miles of mountain wilderness, the crossings aren’t guarded.

So how do you discover such an area? There had to be a first person to be bewildered here. My research had identified the late Dolph Dewing of Franklin as the first person to report experiencing the mystery spot’s effects in 1978. According to Citro in Weird New England: Your Travel Guide to New England’s Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets, Dewing started by sharing the discovery with his friends, then brought a busload from the Franklin Senior Center to witness the phenomenon.

In October 1985, County Courier reporter Nat Worman accompanied Dewing to the spot and watched as he stopped his 1979 Dodge there and revved it to prove it was in neutral. After about 60 seconds passed, the car began rolling uphill, accelerating gradually from 10 to 15 mph.

My friend and I weren’t so lucky on that windy November day. We parked our car in several places along the rural road and waited. Despite our relocations, nothing happened.

We pulled over again and mulled things over. Did we have to be in Canada for the “mystery” to work, or on the Vermont side? Maybe we just hadn’t found the right spot.

Sitting beneath border skies as the sun shone off the hood of my friend’s Chevy, I wondered if Dewing had been fooled by some sort of optical illusion. Was it really antigravity? Or magnetism? Or a hoax?

Researching later on, I found that the answers may be closer than I expected and rooted in the rational. There are a bunch of “mystery spots” around the globe, some with equally evocative names such as “gravity hills” and “gravity roads.” So, do the laws of physics simply stop applying there?

Nope. What baffles tons of spectators is actually an optical illusion, one that’s been debunked by physicists. Or, at least, that’s the prevailing theory.

“Gravity hills” and the like are places where the geography of the surrounding land produces an illusion, making a downhill slope appear to go uphill. Obstructions on the horizon can be a key factor in creating this illusion, because they rob us of the reliable reference points we use to determine which way is up. The mind, in short, is tricked.

In a 2006 Science Daily article, Brock Weiss, a physics professor at Penn State Altoona, investigates a gravity hill in Bucks County, Penn., and concludes that this local oddity isn’t that odd. “You are, indeed, going downhill even though your brain gives you the impression that you’re going uphill,” Weiss explains. Using GPS, the investigators demonstrated that the hill’s starting point had a greater elevation than its ending point, despite appearances to the contrary. And, if these mystery spots really were gravitational anomalies, wouldn’t your sense of balance and the objects around you be affected, instead of just your vehicle?

Just as I was pretty much convinced that I could put this into my “mystery solved” pile, Linda Collins of the Richford Historical Society brought me back into a sentiment of uncertainty. I phoned the town offices looking for answers, and instead had an awkward silence sent my way. I had almost thought they hung up on me, before the town clerk spoke up and said she had no idea what I was talking about. So she directed my call to Linda, who had a lot to say about Richford’s weird side.

“Oh yeah, I know about the hill. I think it’s called a ‘gravity hill’. I learned about it when I was researching the UFO sightings in town” said an amused Collins.

Back in the 1970s, she related, a few Richford residents reported seeing strange moving lights over town. Wanting to chronicle the frenzy for the Burlington Free Press, Collins made phone calls, which led her to a government facility in Boulder, Colo. She refers to it as “the strange things facility,” because “I don’t remember what they were called — it’s been so long since I’ve talked about this!”

According to Collins, the feds told her that a singular magnetic pull or gravitational force in the Richford area had the potential to “attract things.” They didn’t specify what things, and she surmised there was probably more that they weren’t telling her. “You know, government secrecy? They were probably doing some testing or something and didn’t want that getting out to the public,” Collins said. Later on, Collins learned of the “mystery spot” phenomenon.

“Does the historical society get many inquiries about it?” I asked. “No one up here really knows that much about it,” she said with a laugh. “It was such a small deal when it happened. Lots of folks in town now don’t really know a lot about our history anymore.”

“So what’s your opinion on it? Do you think it’s an illusion, or is there something actually weird with gravity in Richford?”

“Well….I mean, I don’t know what to tell you. Richford is a weird town. If all this business about the UFOs and gravitational pulls are true, then who knows.”

Border towns are weird in general, in both their local lore and for political complications and the infrastructure meant to delineate a sense of placement. Richford’s mythology resume is a bulky one of giant birds that have swooped down and snatched babies, UFOs, giant wolves that may live around the border, a possible “window area” near Jay Peak, and a former rendezvous for rumrunners and smugglers.

But Richford has it easy, compared to what may be New England’s strangest border community, which I hope to check out one day.

If the Richford, VT/Sutton, QC area really does have some sort of unique magnetic force, that would set Vermont’s mystery spot apart from the scores of others around the globe that can be debunked by aesthetic tomfoolery.

One of my favorite Richford landmarks, as seen downtown.
One of my favorite Richford landmarks, as seen downtown.

Because I was trying to write about this for Seven Days, I decided that was a great excuse to take another trip up to border country with another friend, and give it another go, this time in a Ford (if that makes any sort of difference)

Back up the East Richford Slide Road, we drove around looking for answers and an outlandishly cool experience, stopping and going almost the entire length of the slick road, with some situationally motivating Jazz coming quietly through the radio.

We think there was one spot where the car rolled in a direction that wasn’t backward, but after getting out of the car and scrutinizing the area, the very very gradual incline of the road may have actually been inconspicuously dipping downhill, but the eye is fooled from a larger uphill lip of an intersection beyond it which forms the horizon line. Was this the spot? If so, Dewing’s car was recorded going at least 15mph, while we were going 5.

I’m not sure if I left empty handed or not to be honest, but it was an enjoyable way to spend my morning.

Whatever the explanation for the mystique, the Richford Mystery Spot is still one of my favorite examples of Vermont obscura, because it’s accessible and fun. If only it were a little easier to locate the exact spot where the optical illusion — if that’s what it is — kicks in.

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One of our many stops up the East Richford Slide Road, where we were definitely sliding all over the place.
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The mowed down strip of forest cutting over those snowy mountains is an aesthetic reminder of where the U.S./Canada border is that’s called “The Slash”, created by homeland security when they deemed all of the 150 plus year old granite obelisk markers formerly doing the job as obsolete. So far, the clear cut runs from Maine to Minnesota, with the eventual finish line being Alaska. I read in a newspaper write up years ago that they defended their forestry project by arguing that a lot of Americans would be confused and wind up in Canada accidentally if they didn’t. I’m not sure if I buy that. I mean, I’ve never bumbled my way into Quebec before. But who are we to question the government?

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Off The Beaten Path in Southern Vermont

I woke up at 5 AM, was reminded that I wasn’t a morning person, and stumbled out my back door at 6. My friend was waiting for me in his parked car as the headlights cast a dull amber pallor onto quiet streets that were under the cold gray dawn. It was 41 degrees and I was all shiver bones in the new coming chill.

I stopped for a few gas station coffees and was rewarded with my early rise by wicked fog that obscured the landscape off route 7 in a glorious visceral veil that turned everything into mutated shadows. I caught some of it on my cell phone hanging around Dorset Peak, before it burned off.  

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The weather lately has been prime for adventuring, and I’ve been aching to get out. This trip would give me that spark in my brains I was looking for. Feeding off my desire to visit as many obscure places as I can, I figured that two ghost towns in southern Vermont would be a great way to spend my day. These vanished places are probably some of the most obscure in the state. But everyone pays the price to feed, and I arrived back home exhausted and practically limping, so I suppose that can be gauged as one hell of an adventure. But I’m also someone who’d willingly drive 8 hours just to find an oddity, so a follow-up day of sluggish exhaustion was easily worth it for me.

Somerset

I’m willing to assume that plenty of Vermonters haven’t heard of Somerset. If you take a gander at a state atlas, it’s a narrow rectangle at the western edge of Windham County that nudges into eastern Bennington County – giving the latter county its block lettered “C” shape.

The entire burg is filled by the Green Mountain National Forest. It has a year-round population of 2 people and is only accessible by a forest service road that is all too easy to miss because of its small, squint-to-read street sign. But out of the two destinations I was planning on scouting, Somerset was the only one that was somewhat accessible by vehicle, so we started out with that one. I was still sipping my coffee which was getting unsatisfyingly cold, trying to shake off a road trip thematic Tom Waits song beating around in my head.

Somerset Road sort of plunges immediately down an embankment right off The Molly Stark Byway in woodsy Searsburg, and almost as quickly, turns to washboarded gravel after passing a few houses with scores of signs telling you that they’re not into people trespassing on their land. The increasingly destitute road now follows the Deerfield River and is thick with trees. We noticed that some older power lines had still been strung up along the road, and ran the length of the Searsburg portion. But it was evident these lines were archaic predecessors of modern day utility infrastructure. Some of the poles were leaning pretty horizontally as we got further down the road, and that’s when we noticed that they had glass insulators still on their lower rungs, now defunct as the power company had long clipped those wires and modernized things a bit a few feet higher up. Glass insulators were developed in the 1850s originally for telegraph wires, but were later utilized for initiative telephone wires and electric power lines, until the 1960s when they began to be phased out and simultaneously became a feature of interest.

I thought it was pretty cool to see them, and that there are still more or less untouched Vermont back roads that still exist. Older relics like these are becoming increasingly hard to find nowadays. And, apparently, there is a collectors market, clubs and even shows dedicated to them. Anything can have fanfare it seems.

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The Somerset Road as it winds through Searsburg.
The blue glass insulators are on the bottom rung, while the modernized installation sits on top.

As soon as we hit the Somerset town line, which was marked by an omnipresently strange country icon of a bullet-perforated speed limit sign and an abrupt transition of bad gravel road to worse gravel road. The power lines stopped, and for the next several miles, we were deep in the type of woods where you really couldn’t see the forest through the trees, and they were all in the throes of their glorious descent into their perennial death.

There are really no places in Vermont like Somerset. Though there are 2 census documented year-round denizens, the amount of people gets to about 24-ish during the summer months – they’re all people who have camps there. In a 2011 interview done by WCAX, one of two Somersetians, Don Gero, explained that people don’t stick around here. Both residents are bachelors, and he quipped that because Somerset has no electricity or phones, women don’t want to live there. “They can’t use their hair dryers or wash their clothes” he said. He’s also not happy about the summer camping population, who are “two dozen too many” for his tastes, and paeaned for the good ol’ days when I guess none of them were there. Often, the current culture of these odd places is more interesting than the past events that created them.

Charted by Benning Wentworth back when Vermont wasn’t Vermont and its land was quarreled over by New York and New Hampshire, the New Hampshire governor and businessman (in no particular order) just drew a whole bunch of lines on a map and granted towns without knowing anything of the area’s geography. The most important thing was that New York couldn’t get their hands on any of the land, so he didn’t concern himself with pesky things like that. Vermonters decided they preferred anarchy, and would later orgonize an independent republic in 1777 with our own currency and postal service, and then, the 14th state in 1791 when we tried on our current name. 

Somerset is all mountains, far away from anything and hard to get to. Despite that it wasn’t great real estate to early settlers, 321 people tried to live here in the town’s 1880s apex. Logging was the only way to make a few bucks, so they deforested all of the area mountains. They attempted to have log drives down the Deerfield River, except for when it was low, which it was, a lot. 

The demand for timber was ravenous, and that convinced a railroad line to lay tracks up to the mills, which were a huge boon to the town, but also helped speed up its death. A town depending on a finite resource comes and goes like fads always do, and most of the trees in the area were hacked down, the inevitable consequence was that both the logging industry and the town became a literal washout. 

The town’s last hurrah was when the Deerfield River valley was eyed for a future facing wonder like hydropower and the cash it could bring. In 1911, the Somerset Dam began to take form. The dam was built by massive work crews of about 100 men in shifts, doing everything by hand and took about 3 years to complete. The reservoir did what reservoirs do best and collected the desired water, which submerged what was left of town and the railroad and the mills. 

At some point, there was an airfield in Somerset, which has also vanished. Today it’s a free and minimal amenitied national forest campground under the same name. According to campers who post reviews online, it’s either wonderfully remote or a place where amateur outdoors folk or “Massholes” go to belt loud music and litter. Given my experience at campgrounds, I’d say it’s probably both.

I also found out, which isn’t detrimental to your life if you don’t know, that you can take class D forest roads from Somerset all the way north to the Kelly Stand Road – a west-east oriented forest road that’s also one of Southern Vermont’s most scenic. If you enjoy shunpiking, finding more of these back road byways to explore is usually not a bad thing.

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The Somerset Road in Somerset.
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A small and mowed cemetery surprisingly pops out of miles of wilderness as you travel up the forest road. Many of the weathered and matching headstones were kids. One sad entombment was uniquely chiseled with a sheep on top, and quickly caught my wondering eyes. Lancelot was 3 years old. Life up here was tough, especially for kids.

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The further away from civilization we drove, the more apple trees started to distinguish appear from the northern forests. These apples trees appeared somewhat old, some of them were haunted by the thick woods and lack of sunlight needed to grow. Others still carried apple crops of various qualities, apple strands that are heirloom seeds, and are not commercially available anymore in an increasingly controlled GMO market, leaving these trees to one by one drift away or die off.
The further away from civilization we drove, the more apple trees started to distinguishly appear from the northern forests. I’m not sure how old some of these trees were, and if they were original to former Somerset residents, or planted after the national forest took over. These apple trees appeared somewhat haunted by the thick woods and lack of sunlight needed to grow. Others still carried apple crops which varied in how rotten they were. These apple strands that are heirloom seeds, and are not commercially available anymore in an increasingly lack of choice based GMO market, leaving these trees to one by one die off.
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A brown and white national forest sign explained at the trees that were still able to produce apples were part of an “apples for wildlife program”,which is pretty self-explanatory.
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I could have hung out in Somerset all day, it was just so beautiful and almost intimidatingly wild. All I’d need is a few Vermont microbrews to accompany me. This little brook paralleled the forest road, but I wouldn’t have found it if I didn’t stop to spark my interest in an old apple orchard.
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Only 3 things remain of Somerset’s days as a town – one of them being its restored but locked one-room schoolhouse, also found a ways up the forest road. I heard it was a private camp, but not positive about those details. I’d love to see the inside. Or to live in a restored one-room schoolhouse.
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The forests of Somerset. Are any of my blog followers into Geocaching like me? Somerset may be remote, but the area is loaded with caches!

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The Somerset Reservoir is where the Somerset Road comes to an end, and in my humble opinion, one of the more stunning places in Vermont. The sinuous and currently blustery cold water body is about 5-6 miles long and undeveloped. The dam's roadside appearance is really just a high grassy wall with a nearby unmanned rickety tin shack that has a TransCanada logo sign plate on it. But atop the dam is this awesome view of one of Vermont's largest wilderness areas. I really wish I had brought a kayak or something. Seriously, places like this are therapy to me. I couldn't contain my approval and swore a few times to prove it.
The Somerset Reservoir is where the Somerset Road comes to an end, and in my humble opinion, one of the more stunning places in Vermont. The sinuous and currently blustery cold water body is about 5-6 miles long and undeveloped. The long form of Stratton’s rounded mountain top could be seen in the distance . The dam’s roadside appearance is really just a high grassy wall with a nearby unmanned rickety tin shack that has a TransCanada logo sign plate on it. But atop the dam is this awesome view of one of Vermont’s largest wilderness areas. I really wish I had brought a kayak or something. Seriously, places like this are therapy to me. I couldn’t contain my approval and swore a few times to prove it.

Glastenbury

Vermont author Joseph Citro introduced Connecticut’s faded hamlet of Duddleytown (which was really only a place name in the town of Cornwall named after the trio of brothers who bought land there) as “the granddaddy of all New England window areas” in his book Passing Strange, which to me made a pretty good lead-in to that chapter (it was actually the last sentence in his chapter on Glastenbury). I’d like to term swipe that to introduce Glastenbury on a more localized level, as the granddaddy of Vermont’s lost areas, for multifarious justifications.

Getting to the ill-fated town is nothing short of a challenge today, and was for the people who tried to make a life for themselves up there over a century ago. It’s isolation, stubbornly built up in an area of 12 peaks over 3,000 feet with no convenient access, makes it one of the most unique places in the Green Mountain State, then and now.

If you’ve been following my blog, you might know that I’ve been very interested in Glastenbury since I was a kid, and wrote about it extensively, my long winded self trying to pack as much detail as I could into a blog post. This entry expands on that.

To summarize things; the vanished town of Glastenbury was charted in 1761, and reflected the circumstances of its neighbor Somerset when it was naively plotted over some of the worst topography in the state. As a consequence, it wasn’t really until the 1850s when anyone paid interest to the town, when people figured out they had an entire mountain of wood to deforest for profit, and a logging/charcoal duality became Glastenbury’s only industry.

About 12 brick kilns for charcoal production were built in southern Glastenbury at an area known as “the forks”, because it was a distinguishable location where Bolles Brook split in two in a V-shaped parting of ways. A small and rough, lawless village designated as South Glastenbury grew up around these kilns, including a one-room schoolhouse, loggers boardinghouse and company store.

The steepest railroad ever built in the U.S. was developed to get up into South Glastenbury. The electric trolly line was the only element that made the town a pragmatic place; bringing down money making lumber and charcoal, and later, bringing up tourists. Many have no idea that aforementioned rail bed still exists, and if you follow it, will bring you deep into indistinguishable wilderness to the grave of the old town. Our adventure started well before we got out of the car when we navigated our way to the portal into the forest. 

Funny enough, Glastenbury is still technically a town, at least in the haze of Vermont law. A gaze at a state atlas, or a Google map search, will show you a dotted lined square that represents a town boundary, only, there is nothing within the square. It’s considered an unincorporated town – or, one of 5 Vermont communities with a population so low, that instead of a town government handling its affairs, those things are managed by a county or the state. Or the national forest service I guess. There are a few people who still do live in Glastenbury – populated by just 6 people ( their properties are pretty much clustered near the borders of either Shaftsbury or Woodford), who also have achieved somewhat of a level of intrigue beyond the strange phenomena that describes the town.

I’m going to stay quiet on the access road we took, because it’s pretty evident that the people who have their addresses there don’t want the crowds. (Like the folks in Somerset, they live in the boonies for a reason, only, these folks express their discontent via threatening scrawl) When we drove up the gravel roadway, we immediately began to pass some shabby looking properties, all of them with handwritten and somewhat threatening signs warning nonlocals not to park their cars there, or else.

Fearing our car would be cannibalized for its wheels in an uncomfortable back woods “we warned you!” sort of situation, we decided to find what we designated as the safest parking space on the road, far away from any discernable houses and no parking signs. Hoping that we didn’t make a stupid mistake, we trekked up the road on foot, found the forest road, and began our hike into one of the most fabled places in state mythology.

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This is a shot of the trail slash old rail bed, miles into our hike. Unexpectedly to me, this might be the most grueling of Vermont hikes I’ve endured. The amount of rocks ravished my feet to a point where I was literally limping down the trail, silently no longer caring if I was there and begging to rest my weary bones in the car.
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Further up the trail, we started to find original rail spikes from when the railroad was built over a century ago!
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This was a sign that got me revved up. We began to notice chunks of Slag along the trail. Slag is a stony waste matter separated from metals during the smelting or refining of ore, and since Glastenbury was built around charcoal furnaces, there is plenty of the stuff in the woods today. We were even to find some rare green and blue slag. I’m not very savvy about the jewelry culture, but I guess you can polish and buffer up slag chunks pretty attractively and make accented miscellany from them. I dig them in their natural form, and grabbed a few chunks of the green for my collection of oddities.
The Bennington-Woodford Railroad ran electric trolleys up to South Glastenbury

We hushed our sound as we heard another one that was all too familiar to me. We heard an approaching 4 wheeler. Because of my suspicious nature and not knowing what sort of people were this deep up in the woods, I decided to relocate myself as far to the side of the trail as I could, give a friendly nod and let them pass. As they got closer, I saw it was a younger couple, a man and a woman, and they slowed down as they saw us. I decided to take the mutual encounter and get past my social anxiety and spark up a conversation with them.

Actually, I wanted directions, because we were beginning to second guess ourselves as to where we were, and if we could find any of the ruins, and I really didn’t want to leave disappointed.

The front handbrakes were pulled and their 4 wheeler slowed down to a stop. The gentleman, who was wearing a camo baseball cap and sunglasses smiled at us and wished us a good afternoon, his wife sat behind him silently observing us with a friendly expression. I returned the greeting and asked him if he could direct us to South Glastenbury.

“Oh, the forks?” he asked. That casual nickname drop meant that they were aware of it, and I nodded my head, my excitement immediately betrayed my casual expression I was trying to keep. I also thought it was pretty rad that locals today still use the place’s old handle.

“Yes, the forks. Are we close? Would it even be traceable in all this?” I gestured to the thick woods around me to make a point. “Well, yeah you can find it. But this is sort of the wrong time of year to be looking for that sort of stuff. Also, it’s bear season up here you know. Uhh, how’d you guys know about Glastenbury, just curious?” he asked us with a backdrop set to his tone.

I wasn’t quite sure if my candor had triggered a nerve, or how to give him a cropped statement of how Glastenbury found itself sticking to the flypaper of New England mythology, but I had a feeling he already knew that. “So, you know about Middie Rivers?” his wife spoke up. “Yeah, I do” I stated. There was no need to be superfluous there. But for those of you who are unfamiliar with Glastenbury and it’s monsters;

Local lore includes a froth of big hairy monsters, a cursed Indian stone that swallows humans, UFOs, mysterious lights, sounds and odors detected by colonial settlers, and numerous hikers walking off the face of the earth here between 1945 to 1950 – earning it the nickname; “The Bennington Triangle” in 1992, which has adhered itself to the flypaper of popular culture.

Fortean researchers like John A. Keel conjured up the term “Window Area”, which I had referenced at the beginning of this section, as a place where some sort of interdimensional trapdoor can be found. Well, that’s one theory anyways. New England is loaded with so-called “Window Areas”. Cryptozoologist and researcher Loren Coleman identified Massachusetts’ “Bridgewater Triangle”, using the term “triangle” to designate any odd geographical area. Joseph Citro followed up by coining “The Bennington Triangle” – both are said to be “window areas” It’s also one of my favorite terms to use when talking about this caliber of local weirdness.

Who knows where the flickers of truth are in all this. And that’s what makes everything so damn fascinating, because there is truth in these tales tall and true.

It’s also the mountain’s paranormal and controversial tales that attract modern day professed ghost hunting clubs and social media sensationalists, whose meddling are an affront to both locals and reasonable judgment, which really seemed to have damned the wilderness area.

Don’t get me wrong, these haunting stories are partially why I found myself hiking up the mountain, because of how impressionable they were and still are to me, but I find that there is also a line between being a civilized researcher, and becoming one of the monsters you’re chasing and exploiting it on a tawdry clickbait website with a headline that reads something like “{insert subject} will give you NIGHTMARES!”

Middie Rivers

The elderly Middie Rivers was the first of a handful of people who reputedly disappeared in the mountains in or near Glastenbury. Anyone who tells the story of southern Vermont’s Shangri-La recants that Rivers was an experienced woodsman who, while leading other hunters on the mountain, got a bit ahead on the trail, and was never seen again.

“None of that is true”, his wife said declaredly. “Rivers wasn’t a hunter or an experienced woodsman at all! He was actually from Massachusetts, and he had borrowed a rifle from his brother-in-law, who he was hunting with. He’d probably never even hunted before, and certainly never guided other hunters up here. The only thing that’s true about that story, is that he did disappear.”

“One theory is that he might have fallen down an old well. That seems pretty plausible to me”, I added. She nodded her head. “Yup, that’s what we think too. I mean, there are plenty of them up in the hills. But vanishing without a trace…people love to say that, because it backs up the mystic or, I don’t know, the ghostly impression about this place. They’d rather believe that than the facts, because it’s more interesting” she furrowed her brows and cut herself off in annoyed contemplation – like she knew what she wanted to say but couldn’t get it out. I was loving this conversation. “I know a bit about Middie Rivers” she continued after a moment. “I know a lot of stories and legends, passed down by relations to him. The Loziers – that’s the family who is related to him – we knew/know them, they passed down all sorts of stuff to us growing up. They have a camp up in Glastenbury still, like us. I even have a picture of Middie Rivers”.

“Ah, that explains the 4 wheeler then. I was a little surprised to see you folks! I assumed this was just a hiking trail or forest road”.

“Yup, we’re one of two camps in Glastenbury on this trail. My wife’s father built it years ago. We were grandfathered in. After the national forest took over, no one else was allowed to build up here or drive up this trail anymore. As it is, we need a special permit to have 4 wheelers so we can ride up here” – the husband cut in. “Did you see all of the gates?” I nodded in confirmation. We had to crawl underneath a few of them just to advance our hike. He continued; “We used to have friends up all the time, they used to come up in huge parties on ATVs up the trail. Now you can’t do that. It’s ridiculous, but hell, we’re not going to fucking lug all of our shit up to the camp on foot” – he then gestured to a cooler on the back rack of his 4 wheeler to emphasize his point. I got it. My friend and I had been walking for over an hour now, and I was already exhausted. “Our camps have been here for a long time – they started out as plywood cabins with dirt floors, and over the years as they were passed down, we’ve improved them a bit. No one else can build up here now.”

“I mean, it’s really probable that Middie could have fallen down a sink hole”, his wife interjected herself back into the already broadening conversation. “Sinkholes?” I asked, hoping I delivered a cue to get any sort of further information. “Ayuh, it happens more often than you think. Sinkholes swallow hunters all the time! There’s tons of them up here. People have hunted this mountain all their lives and still report getting turned around in the woods and intimidated here.”

“Because of the cross winds that meet on Glastenbury Mountain?” I prodded, a showing a little pride in my research. She nodded her head.

“I’d love to hear more about Middie Rivers, or any stories you guys have, if you’d be interested in chatting? I can give you my email or something?” I attempted. I couldn’t help it, I live for stuff like this. There is just something underneath my skin, a desire to make sense of everything. I’m definitely the type to overload myself with information.

At this point, his wife broke out in a lopsided grin and told me that she wasn’t interested in speaking any further about Glastenbury, without actually telling me she didn’t want to speak anymore about Glastenbury. “Well, we’ll be on our way now” said her husband, his thumb pushing the ignition and the engine promptly firing up. He gave us directions that were incredibly vague, but given the lack of wayfinding points, were the best he could do with people who’ve never been in those woods before. I thanked the both of them, tipped my hat in gesture, and both groups parted our opposite ways down the trail.

The Forks

It didn’t take long before we were unclear of the given directions and insecure about how much we remembered. It didn’t help that there were plenty of brook forks along the trail, tripping my thoughts up to think that any of them could be the forks.

As we continued our trek up the trail, we sighted something that sort of sketched us out. I’m laughing to myself as I type this sentence, but it was a cozy looking, nicely upkept log cabin which was probably one of the camps the baseball capped guy was talking about. There was an open lawn area out front that was mindfully mowed and solar panels on the roof, with an outhouse in back.  It’s hard to explain what it is about off grid living, or seeing a home way out in the boonies, that sends odd reactions that crawl up your spine. I suppose that so many of us are just accustomed to being hooked up to utility poles (in some more repressive states, it’s actually against the law to be off the grid), that this sort of makes us subconsciously weary, like there is something “weird” about the arrangement, and easy to stereotype the people that chose to live like that and how they’re of their own sort. But then I remember that I’d live like that too if I could.

But still, I picked up my pace a bit, wanting to get out of sight of the cabin and back into the woods. Then, we ran into another fellow on a 4 wheeler. This time, our approaching character was an older gentleman. We side-stepped off the trail again, nodded our heads, and went through the same rounds of introductions as last time.

“The forks, huh? Well, I mean….you can’t make out much of the old hotel foundation anymore, but it’s right off this trail. Nothing much left of the kilns. Might be some iron bands, maybe bricks.” Then he pointed to an offshoot 4 wheeler trail that ran through an area thick with prickers and berry bushes. “There’s more kilns up that knoll there” he said, his wisdom rolled confidently off his tongue wrapped up in his heavy Vermont accent. “Oh, uh, that trail looks like it goes behind the camp we just passed,” I said uncomfortably. Though my hobby of exploration often involves trespassing, I wasn’t about to skulk around someone’s land up in those hills, especially inhabited land. People in the boondocks have guns. “They aren’t home are they?!” He said, a little wonderment in his inotation.

“No, we didn’t see anyone when we walked by”, I returned, grinning at his unexpected humorous reaction.

“Oh, good!” he said, his enthusiasm almost made me crack up. I wondered if they got along or not. “But yeah – there’s more of em’ down that trail. Well, I’ve never seen them, but I know they’re there!” This time, I didn’t contain my mirth. I liked this guy. I asked him to clarify our misdirections a bit, and he gave us some of the most Vermont directions I’ve ever gotten – far superior to the ones I got when searching for some of our state’s mysterious stone chambers.

“Well, when you get to the forks, take a right instead of the left crossing over the brook, then go up the mountain a ways but still make sure to parallel the river – look down and you’ll eventually see the kilns. Or what’s left of ’em anyways. ” Just then, a Glastenbury traffic jam formed behind the old timer on his 4 wheeler, as three teenage rednecks on dirtbikes pulled up and sort of just looked at my friend and I stoically, the last one in line revved his engine impatiently while refusing to make eye contact and tried to flaunt his, I don’t know, machismo? Or maybe he was just impatient. I shook his hand and wished him a good afternoon, and we were on our way.

More walking down the trail later, and we approached a very standout fork in Bolles Brook and the rail bed portion of the trail we were on ended and transitioned into a slender path beyond a wooden bridge that crossed the brook. We had found the forks.

The village of South Glastenbury circa 1897. Bolles Brook is in the middle of the photo. The hotel (former logger's boardinghouse) is to the left, with the double story porch, and the casino (former company store), is up the hill a ways to the right. You can also see the electric trolly on the lower right hand corner of the photo - the same tracks we hiked to get up into town.
The village of South Glastenbury circa 1897. Bolles Brook is in the middle of the photo. The hotel is to the left, with the double story porch, and the casino is up the hill a ways to the right. You can also see the electric trolly on the lower right corner of the photo – the same tracks we hiked to get up into town. This is my favorite picture of Glastenbury.
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This is “the forks” or Bolles Brook today. The village of South Glastenbury is practically intractable.
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Taken on the forest road bridge that crosses Bolles Brook. Someone cryptically carved either “The Kilns” or “The Kill” on the railings.
The Glastenbury casino, 1897. I really like the architecture on this old building, like the multi-story porches and the clocktower. You still get a good sense of how isolated it was.
The Glastenbury casino, 1897. I really like the architecture on this old building, like the multi-story porches and the clocktower. You still get a good sense of how isolated it was.
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You can’t really tell, but this landslide filled in pitted portion of hillside is a foundation. This is where Glastenbury’s casino used to be. The logging and charcoal industry decimated the forests of Glastenbury, so the townsfolk, with a lot of urging from the railroad who didn’t want to go broke, developed South Glastenbury into a mountain tourism getaway. The loggers’ boardinghouse became a hotel and the company store became a casino. It was open for business by 1897 after much painstaking work was put into sprucing up the area, and visitors loved it. Glastenbury must have been pretty cool in its day, way up in the mountains over 2,000 feet. And during the time of inconvenient travel, it must have been a novelty. But a year later, a flood destroyed the tracks to a quality beyond repair, and it successfully killed the town. Most of the buildings just rotted away and fell into their cellar holes, and the national forest took control of the area in the 1930s.

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“Well….” I dragged out the word, in a reverie of run down indecisiveness. “Should we try to scout the hillside a bit? See if we can find anything?” I asked. My friend enthusiastically agreed, not being constantly annoyed by an abused foot throbbing in pain. So, off the trail we went, regardless of the reminders that we were in “The Bennington Triangle” and “this is how people disappear” that my brain was trying to communicate with me. To my relief, which quickly muted by lethargy, my friend ecstatically yelled; “I found bricks!”
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I clambered over to where his form was through the foliage and found myself stumbling over piles and piles of bricks that practically made up the slope we were on. Further up the hill, we began finding some old stone foundations filled in by a century of erosion.

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I read that there were very few photos of any of the charcoal kilns in Glastenbury. Here's one of the few I was able to find.
I read that there were very few photos of any of the charcoal kilns in Glastenbury – and the few that do exist are only after the kilns went defunct. Here’s one of the few I was able to find, with two men standing nearby.
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The further up the slopes we ventured, our efforts paid off. I began finding tons of moss covered bricks and bent up iron bands from the old charcoal kilns! I was so excited to find artifacts that have survived the ravages of time – things that help us reconstruct our past culture.
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A contorted iron band from one of the old kilns.

Visiting the peaceful and secluded location of Glastenbury town was a strange experience. Knowing the lore and the history there sort of make you look at this otherwise banal stream crossing in the woods through a different set of lenses, ones that makes professed monsters a bit more discernable. Unless there is just something in Bolles Brook that made/makes the locals morbidly imaginative.

On our way down the mountain, we saw a couple fellas standing barefoot in the chilly waters of the brook smoking pot – a scent that followed us halfway through the rest of our hike. One gave us a toothless smile and a wave, and kept on giggling at whatever it was they were talking about. I won’t deny that they picked a nice afternoon for woodsy shenanigans.

Thankfully, our car was as we left it when we got back, and we sluggishly made our way back down to Bennington to grab a burger.

My friend and fellow explorer Josh is into video editing and decided to film our oddysey. Cinematography is something I keep saying I’m going to get into more, but my laziness and reserved nature always seem to prevent that from getting a checkmark on my list. If videos are your thing, and you want to see my friend and this blogger being sort of goofy/awkward while tromping through the woods, I’ll link you below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnQWzRuiTCo&app=desktop

Things worth mentioning:

If any of you are interested further in Glastenbury, I’d highly recommend author Tyler Resch’s venerable book about the history of the town. I have a copy of it in my library.

I’d also like to suggest Joseph Citro’s Passing Strange, a detailed compendium of New England folklore and weirdness. It was one of the first books I bought as a kid, and my worn out copy is still with me. Both of these books helped further my research and curiosity.

If you missed it, here is my first post on Glastenbury, if you want more on the town’s history and ghastliness.

—————————————————————————————————————————————–

To all of my fans and supporters, I am truly grateful and humbled by all of the support and donations throughout the years that have kept Obscure Vermont up and running.

I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to produce and sustain this blog. Obscure Vermont is funded entirely on generous donations that you the wonderful viewers and supporters have made. Expenses range from internet fees to host the blog, to investing in research materials, to traveling expenses. Also, donations help keep me current with my photography gear, computer, and computer software so that I can deliver the best quality possible. Seriously, even the small cost equivalent to a gas station cup of coffee would help greatly! Especially now, as my camera is in need of repairs and I can’t afford the bill, which is distressing me greatly.

If you value, appreciate, and enjoy reading about my adventures please consider making a donation to my new Gofundme account or Paypal. Any donation would not only be greatly appreciated and help keep this blog going, it would also keep me doing what I love. Thank you!

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Gofundme: https://www.gofundme.com/b5jp97d4

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The Franklin County Wolf Monument

“Wait – there it is!” I shouted, pointing to the top of a long rock emergence that confined a rootsy trail between a steep descent down to more rocks and dead leaves. I hastily bushwacked off from the path, clambered up the small incline thick with lots of scratchy underbrush and got to a plateaued area at the top, and found what I had been searching for – the very camouflaged Franklin County wolf monument.

This boulder clumped pitch on Saint Albans’ Aldis Hill was apparently where the last gray wolf in Franklin County was seen in 1839. But instead of memorializing the wolf, it memorialized how it ended up. Dead.

As my confused friend shuffled up after me, I let out a fulfilling “yes!” like I wasn’t still in ear shot of residential neighborhoods.

According to the inscribed story on the supine slab; the beast, 6 feet in length, had been “ravaging” in unidentified ways around northeastern Franklin County until local businessman and politician Lawrence Brainerd had some sort of run-in with it, pursued it up the hill, and shot it, which inspired someone to then erect a pretty modest, somewhat macabre commemoration of the event. That person remains a mystery. People react to these sort of situations in different ways.

Then, shooting a wolf, which was seen as a predator to sheep farmers, was probably seen as a good riddance worthy of recognition. In current times, I’m sure the reactions would be social media spitfire. Wolves, like Vermont’s mythical Catamount (which is still committedly debated still exist here despite the ‘last one’ being shot near Barnard in 1881), probably roamed our forests until the late 1800s according to wildlife biologists.

The monument serves as a mark of distinction of the area, and makes me wonder what other secrets or conditions have long been buried?

The area around the monument is some of the hill’s wildest topography. It would be easy to envision having a run-in with a wolf up there, or maybe some other wild beast. Though I’m not sure how many Brainerd’s are left in the maple city, there is still a Brainerd Street today that runs upwards from North Main Street in the direction of the hill, commemorating the obviously influential family. Although, it’s disappointingly not marked with the city’s signature white street signs emblazoned with green maple leaf silhouettes.

The monument is a local legend and cool piece of Franklin County obscura. It’s a totem that I kind of found strange, too. I guess it’s because the idea of wolves in Vermont is so out there nowadays.

Many don’t know about it – which doesn’t surprise me. And if you do, you fall into two camps; you know where it is, or don’t. And if you do, it’s a pretty hard thing to give directions to. On my second time hiking up the hill, it was July and come down humidity, I was trampling through the heat and trying to discern my friend’s text message directions, only to walk back down the hill no longer caring if I found it or not and just wanting to sit in some air conditioning for a while.

Plenty of others have tried to find it – but it’s a challenge. Trust me, this was my third time on the hill, which is surprisingly steep and tredded with a network of overlapping trails that can screw up a mental compass. Generally, if you use the hum of the interstate nearby, you can get a good orientation of where you are. But the monument is small, doesn’t distinguish itself from the woods, and isn’t really on the trailside.

I knew the Hard’ack ski area existed, a local rope tow operation on the east slope of the hill. But I wasn’t aware that there were trails beyond Hard’ack, that lead up and all over Aldis Hill. And that’s a shame, because once I found out just how to get up to the un-signed recreation area, I really liked it. Its terrain was rugged and wild, not what I was expecting for a little green rise that separates Saint Albans city from interstate 89.

Aldis Hill, or, the area that’s not Hard’ack, was gifted to the city of Saint Albans in 1892 by the family that owned it, the Aldis’s. The idea was to turn the rocky eminent into a recreation area for Saint Albans-ites. Somewhere on the 849-foot hill is a lookout, framed by old-growth trees that rewards the finder a pretty awesome view of the architecture of the city, and beyond looking out towards Saint Albans Bay. However, this was one of those Aldis Hill points of interest that I haven’t been able to find yet. Seriously, there are a lot of trails here, and none of them are marked. But the very noticeable lack of signage is, in my opinion, another thing that makes this woodsy area so satisfying.

I won’t give out the location of the monument, because honestly, 3/4th of the fun was actually trying to find the damn thing myself. The wanting brought me exploring all over Aldis Hill, which in my opinion, is worth it. Who knows, you might find the cool stone cut staircase, the lookout, the monument, remnants of barbed wire fencing being consumed by trees, and rusting artifacts that somehow ended up in the woods on the hill.

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If you have found it - you might have scratched your name into the large boulder nearby with smaller rocks.
If you have found it – you might have scratched your name into the large boulder nearby with smaller rocks.
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Or on this tree, which someone decided should have a content face.

—————————————————————————————————————————————–

To all of my fans and supporters, I am truly grateful and humbled by all of the support and donations throughout the years that have kept Obscure Vermont up and running.

As you all know I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to produce and sustain this blog. Obscure Vermont is funded entirely on generous donations that you the wonderful viewers and supporters have made. Expenses range from internet fees to host the blog, to investing in research materials, to traveling expenses. Also, donations help keep me current with my photography gear, computer, and computer software so that I can deliver the best quality possible. Seriously, even the small cost equivalent to a gas station cup of coffee would help greatly! Especially now, as my camera is in need of repairs and I can’t afford the bill, which is distressing me greatly.

If you value, appreciate, and enjoy reading about my adventures please consider making a donation to my new Gofundme account or Paypal. Any donation would not only be greatly appreciated and help keep this blog going, it would also keep me doing what I love. Thank you!

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Gofundme: https://www.gofundme.com/b5jp97d4

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Hogback Mountain and A 100 Mile View

Queen Connie

Vermont’s roads are pretty regulated, so there isn’t much here in terms of weird or kitschy personalized properties that people like to put into the broad category of roadside Americana – which includes a perpetually growing compilation of the same genre (nonstandardized) but vary widely in sentiment and imagery.

But, that doesn’t mean obscurities can’t be found along Vermont’s byways. Take the tiny farm town of Leicester, whose most famous denizen can be seen lumbering over the small oval-shaped lawn of Pioneer Auto Sales, right along the side of Route 7 either before or after you approach the tiny village center – which is pretty much an intersection with a few houses and a newly reopened gas station that now has a growler filling station.

“Queen Connie”, which it’s sometimes referred as when it’s not called “that big gorilla holding the VW bug”, is a huge 20-ft. tall, 16 ton, concrete ape, holding up a progressively rotting Volkswagon Beetle in one of her upraised arms, while the other arm is stretched out, palm upward, acting as a place where someone could grab an uncomfortable seat and a gimmicky photo opportunity.

But how did something like Queen Connie end up in aesthetic conscious Vermont? And what’s the story behind it? Actually, the answer is pretty straight forward – according to what I was told anyways. The owner of the car dealership had commissioned local artist T.J. Neil to do some concrete work around his pool at home. He was impressed with Neil’s work, and casually suggested another project; to do something cool to spruce up his business. Neil surprised him by suggesting a hyperbolized gorilla – his only reason was because he wanted to see it holding up a car. In 1987, Queen Connie was constructed using steel reinforced concrete, and she’s been observing activity on Route 7 with a disgruntled facial expression ever since, and for Vermonters who are into the weird, might be one of their first forays into oddity hunting.

Though I’m glad Vermont isn’t carelessly overdeveloped like other states, emblems like this are a pejorative thing to build here in the present tense, so it makes it all the more enjoyable.

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Your blogger and local weird worker, posing for a photo.

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Up The Molly Stark Trail

I was heading down to explore parts of southern Vermont with a friend. My summer turned into a lot of stress and setbacks, and I felt like my life was becoming as standard as my white apartment walls. My prescription was a long drive, and the lure of autumn’s sway just makes road trips better. Passing through my favorite town of Wallingford always cures a frown on my face, and as we got farther south and the trees began to turn gold in the hills around Mount Tabor and Dorset, I enthusiastically recalled a defunct marble quarry I hiked to last summer.

Route 7 turns into a limited access highway through most of Bennington County, until it reverts back to full access in Bennington and brings you right into its historic downtown district, the center of town being where it intersects with state route 9. I took a quick jaunt up the hill to the Old Bennington neighborhood to take a few photos of one of my favorite buildings in Vermont, The Walloomsac Inn, then ventured up route 9 eastwards into the mountains.

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The Walloomsac Inn, my favorite haunt in Bennington.

Route 9, also known as The Molly Stark Trail or The Molly Stark Byway as the state issued scenic byway signs tell you –  is one of my favorite drives in Vermont, and the same sentiment could probably be said for quite a few other people. It’s an extraordinary road to gawk at through the windshield of your car, and even better when you’re stopping to get out and look around. The mountain road twists and turns through the innards of the national forest and gains elevation and grade pretty much as soon as you get beyond Bennington’s limits as it starts to climb the first of many hills and parallels the boulder filled Walloomsac River. To be honest, lots of things on this road vie for your attention.

A sense of awe and anticipation builds in me when I see a trademark brown and white national forest sign, telling drivers that there are various access spaces to Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest for the next 15 miles or so. That includes the massive Glastenbury wilderness, one of Vermont’s largest undeveloped areas, but more known for the titular defunct town and about 2 centuries worth of weirdness that culminated on its many slopes and took off like a contagion shotgun blast into paranormal sensationalism. But it”s hard not to be fascinated by the large expanse of wilderness. The huge area holds ghost towns, a slew of trails and forest roads, man-made feats of engineering, and plenty of mysteries. Just ask the Geocaching community.

We passed through forested Woodford, the highest town in elevation in Vermont at around 2,215 feet, then descended into Wilmington. Which is where I unintentionally found some local curio. A green 1915 iron truss bridge first caught my eye, because it was obviously abandoned, as indicated by all the trees growing through it. The underwhelming replacement was a simple concrete and steel span that bridged the river inches away. As I was gazing at the bridge, I noticed a strange white sign across the bridge that was put up on a small weedy embankment that welcomed me to “Medburyville”, and gave me a precise census of 31 people and 26 pets who I guess lived somewhere nearby in the rural area.

I was at a loss here. The area around the sign was pretty much an undeveloped light wilderness area, and I knew that we had already crossed the Woodford/Wilmington town line. I’m a pundit on Vermont geography and had never heard of Medburyville before, so I was pretty curious. What was/is Medburyville? A local parody or some kind of irony? A name of an obscure back road Wilmington neighborhood?

My camera was acting up, so looks like Google street view will have to suffice for an image of the sign.
My camera was acting up, so looks like Google street view will have to suffice for an image of the sign.

I was curious if there was a mystery or story here, so I sent an email to the Wilmington Historical Society. In their reply, Julie Moore explained that Medburyville was a village in Wilmington, but was erased when the Harriman Reservoir was constructed for the purpose of flood control. There was a mill, several houses and a railroad line that ran through the area at one point.

Today there is only a small aluminum sign that raises more questions than answers. Just a few feet from what was/is the Medburyville area is a narrow arm of the aforementioned reservoir, which is experiencing pretty low water levels lately so it was more sandbars than water when I drove by. Local lore has it that when the reservoir is low, a slimy church steeple from the former village is exposed, but I didn’t see anything that day that looked out of place in a reservoir.

Another obscure footnote is that there once was a placename along the reservoir that had the post office address of “Surge Tank” – a name of a temporary settlement that sheltered the men who built the Harriman Reservoir dam that had it’s own recognized post office. The post office also moved around between Readsboro and Whittingham – depending on wherever construction was happening. I still see Surge Tank sometimes on obscure place name lists. Like Medburyville, Surge Tank is long gone, and without a sign to commemorate it.

Back on the road, the forests occasionally break up a little and you got a positioning glimpse that you were right in the middle of the green mountain chain. Unlike some parts of Vermont where a high elevation isn’t surrounded by other mountains and instead reduces off into valleys, the mountains around Wilmington and Marlboro stretched as far as the vistas, with various 440 million-year eroded summits slanting into other rounded domes. A few “runaway truck ramps” with large yellow signs and rhythmic blinking lights were a reminder that the undulating byway had the potential to be more dangerous than scenic for other drivers, and judging by the scars and pit marks in one of them, it had been used recently.

The “100-Mile View”

But it was the so-called “100-mile view” in Marlboro that was the most impressive. I’m not sure if that name is superlative or not, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter because the view is awesome. From a large wooden deck with coin functioning viewing apparatuses for the tourist crowd, you can see what’s left of southern Vermont before it transitions into the Berkshire Hills, and the bumps of southern New Hampshire, including Mount Monadnock.

One of the ramshackle old lodging cabins from a deceased ski resort, which I was about to hike to, sits on the edge of a drop off below the overlook, and might be one of the most photographed site among the sights. I took a walk down, and there was a laminated sign taped to the twisting floorboards telling people like myself to keep out – it’s not actively maintained (as evident by the peeling paint) and can be dangerous if the building decides to tumble down the hill. But I was able to get a shot through a dusty old window along the side and gaze curiously at a few items of older furniture left inside.

I live in Vermont’s largest city, and dig the scene there, but sometimes my hometown is just too oversaturated with people for my taste. I really ache for having access to land like I did when I was younger, where I could go 4 wheeling and hiking and just let out the things storming in my mind. So my predilection was that I could sit on that porch all day or night and gaze off into the distance in my own reverie, listening to Gregory Alan Isakov albums. 

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It seems like I was racing storms all day as I traveled around the state yesterday. They finally caught up with me at the top of the Molly Stark Trail, one of Vermont’s most scenic byways. Someone once told me how the few street signs (mostly stop signs) in Greenland’s research bases and camp cities are completely coated with stickers. It’s a way to get the story of its visitors or inhabitants. Where you’re from, what you like, what you stand for, etc. I thought that was pretty cool, and remembered that when I saw the guardrail that hemmed in the road atop Hogback Mountain. Though that’s not quite the case in Vermont, I’ve seen a few guardrails covered in visitor mementos, many just confessing fannish love for various companies or organizations, alongside sharpied graffiti, names and dates. Appalachian Gap on state route 17 has a similar theme.

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The cluster of tourist buildings that sort of delineate the maximum height of land between Bennington and Brattleboro were all once a part of Hogback Mountain, a defunct ski area cut out of the slopes of Mount Olga which has mostly been recovered by nature.

Hiking Around Hogback Mountain

Hogback was one of the longest lasting family owned traditional ski resorts in the state, and arguably is one of the best lost ski areas in Vermont to explore, though you’d probably guess either of these things while driving by the few diminutive red buildings sitting in tangled underbrush along a slight rise above the wide shoulder of route 9. You’d probably never guess the property was even a ski hill unless you were able to catch the white lettering affixed to the former first aid building that reads “Hog ark Ski Area”, which in all honestly would be a memorable name for a functioning ski hill.

I decided to walk down from the overlook and have a look around at the property. Good thing I wore jeans – the land was wild with tangled undergrowth, and most likely, ticks. Having been bitten by one a month ago, I didn’t want to go through that debacle again. A few old buildings, the rusted bones of an old lift line and a squint-to-make-out overgrown ski trail could still be traced.

Vermont is the land of skiing (and snowboarding) and our pioneering ski hills ranged from extremely plain rope tow affairs to more detailed mom and pop establishments.

If you’re a New Englander, I’d say we’re pretty lucky to have a great site like the New England Lost Ski Area Project. Between that and the book Lost Ski Areas of Southern Vermont by Jeremy K. Davis, I got a startling impression of how many ski areas we once had just in the lower part of Vermont, and how many of them have been, well, lost.

Hogback Mountain itself seemed to be something special. The ski area warranted a pretty long chapter in Davis’s book and a long entry on NELSAP – considering other areas had merely a few sentences. It has a lot of history, so much I had to condense it a bit for the sake of keeping people reading this blog post.

The truth seemed to be that Hogback was envisioned by a community of people who loved skiing, and the consequences were real. Hogback opened for the 1946-47 ski season on prime real estate owned by Harold White, and was operated by the Hogback Mountain Ski Lift Company out of Brattleboro, as well as several of the families who owned the various businesses along route 9, like the White’s who owned the gift shop, the rental shop, the Marlboro Inn and other rental properties. The Douglass’s who were involved with the ski shop, and the Hamelton’s who were involved with the skyline restaurant.

It featured a Constam T-Bar which could move 900 skiers an hour and was the highest capacity lift in the country at the time. Old brochures and trail maps promote the ski hill’s location in Vermont’s “snow belt”, a high annual snowfall area of the Green Mountains which at the time, received an average of 120 inches. The Vermont winters of today are a bit more disparate.

Hogback’s highest elevation was about 2,400 feet (the base area being at around 1,900), which helped preserve the natural snowfall much better than lower area ski hills, which made it so beloved. I observed some older trail maps, and discovered that Hogback had a unique layout. You’d begin your day along route 9 where a hotel, gift shop and Skyline Restaurant were, and ride a rope tow to the practice slope, but intermediate or expert level skiers would have to transport over to a different face of the mountain to access the main T-Bar and more advanced trails.

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A trail map from the 1970s -Hogback Mountain had 12 trails to ride on. To give you an idea of the weird layout and a wayfinding point: number 21 is the first aid building, and below it is Route 9. The first aid building is abandoned and still visible from the road today. That is also where the practice slopes/beginners area was. The more advanced trails were over on another side of the mountain, where numbers 3, 4 and 6 are.

Over the years, the laid back ski hill caught enough popularity from a top notch ski school, excellent snowfall and a gorgeous mountain where skiers would admire spruce trees crusted in snow. In the 50s, it started to expand, and would continue that momentum through the 70s. More trails were cut down the slopes and made easier accessible by a Pomalift and the addition of 4 more Doppelmayr T-bars. There was also a Quonset Hut brought to the property that served as a ski-in snack hut.

Seriously, this place was a big deal. A lot of the history or accounts I read about the mountain was that plenty of southern Vermont kids learned to ski here. It also helped develop a local interest in ski races and became home to the Southern Vermont Racing Team. If a nearby community, like Brattleboro, had an outing club, they probably went to Hogback. The mountain developed a pretty enthusiastically devoted fanbase. The ski school changed instructors a few times over the decades, each new presence contributing to it in their own way.

One of my favorite images I found of Hogback. Love the front of those old cars parked along Route 9, with equipped skiers ready to ride. The hill was literally along the roadside. | Photo: UVM Landscape Change Program.
One of my favorite images I found of Hogback. Love the front of those old cars parked along Route 9, with equipped skiers ready to ride. The trails were literally along the roadside. | Photo: UVM Landscape Change Program.
People on skies at Hogback, circa 1953. I read stories about how wooden shacks were built around the property and used as warming huts, with pot belly stoves inside burning wood continuously. There were signs nearby warning skiers not to get too close. Several learned the hard way when the back of their nylon packs had melted off. | Photo: UVM Landscape Change Program
People on skies at Hogback, circa 1953. I read stories about how wooden shacks were built around the property and used as warming huts, with pot belly stoves inside burning wood continuously. There were signs posted nearby warning skiers not to get too close because of the heat. Several learned the hard way when the back of their nylon packs had melted off. | Photo: UVM Landscape Change Program
Skiers getting on a T-Bar, circa 1956. | Photo UVM Landscape Change Project.
Skiers getting on a T-Bar, circa 1956. | Photo UVM Landscape Change Project.
Skiers waiting in line. Sometime vaguely between 1930-1950. | Photo: UVM Landscape Change Program
Skiers waiting in line. Sometime vaguely between 1930-1950. | Photo: UVM Landscape Change Program
T-Bar lift, circa 1948. | Photo: UVM Landscape Change Program.
T-Bar lift, circa 1948. | Photo: UVM Landscape Change Program.

But towards the 1980s, snowfall began to change to a lack of snowfall. Between not enough natural snow to ski on, rising costs of operation and increasing competition from bigger resorts that were becoming more common on the scene in Vermont mountains, the small mom and pop ski hill eventually couldn’t compete. Hogback’s story is similar to most of Vermont’s lost ski areas. Not being able to compete or stay consistent, most of them became fading ghosts.

Abandoned ski hills are interesting real estate. What do you do with them? Some have subsumed away in the caprices of nature and others re-opened or became private operations. In Hogback’s case, the Vermont Land Trust and a group of adamant people worked pretty tirelessly over the years to secure the funds to purchase and secure the land to save it from becoming a condominium development with a marketed quintessential nature-esque type of name. The purchased acreage was then transferred over to the town of Marlboro, and the cool Hogback Mountain Conservation Area was the result. It’s now glorious protected land, with an abandoned ski hill in the middle that Vermonters can enjoy.

Some of the old ski trails are still maintained and pruned, so hikers, snowshoers and cross-country skiers can still enjoy them. Though, for me anyways, I found that finding those trails was a bit of a challenge.

To my delight and surprise combination, if you bushwhack through some waist-high tangle weeds and growth, you can still find some of the old ski trails, which were still hikable! Well, it’s subjective I guess, but I thought it was achievable. Using the linear rusted cables of the former chairlift as wayfinding points, I decided a short early autumn hike was a good idea. The trail oddly cleared out the farther up I climbed, until both the trail and the lift sort of ended in a blissful and fragrant silence. I was a little bummed I didn’t find an old chairlift or more paraphernalia. If I had gone up farther, I would have eventually stumbled upon the Mount Olga fire tower, which I’m told had splendid far reaching views. You can get there far easier than scrambling up Hogback Mountain, by hiking over via Molly Stark State Park. 

My list of places to visit in Vermont alone is so long, it’s hard to cross stuff off of. I’ll get up there one day.

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There were still old ski poles left behind in the first aid building
There were still old ski poles left behind in the first aid building

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To all of my fans and supporters, I am truly grateful and humbled by all of the support and donations through out the years that have kept Obscure Vermont up and running.

As you all know I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to produce and sustain this blog. Obscure Vermont is funded entirely on generous donations that you the wonderful viewers and supporters have made. Expenses range from internet fees to host the blog, to investing in research materials, to traveling expenses. Also, donations help keep me current with my photography gear, computer, and computer software so that I can deliver the best quality possible. Seriously, even the small cost equivalent to a gas station cup of coffee would help greatly! Especially now, as my camera is in need of repairs and I can’t afford the bill, which is distressing me greatly.

If you value, appreciate, and enjoy reading about my adventures please consider making a donation to my new Gofundme account or Paypal. Any donation would not only be greatly appreciated and help keep this blog going, it would also keep me doing what I love. Thank you!

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Gofundme: https://www.gofundme.com/b5jp97d4

 

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The Hungry Gorge

The deadliest place in Vermont is simultaneously one of it’s least dead places. The head of the state’s public safety commission once dubbed the Huntington Gorge as “the deadliest place in the state”, and according to those who make it their business to track this sort of stuff, this is considered the most dangerous swimming hole in all of New England. But despite that macabre distinction, in the summer the chasm is absolutely crawling with bodies, energy, and canned beer, all which dive impetuously off of the dangerous cliffs.

It’s not hard to see the appeal to this spectacular rocky crevice carved deep into the Richmond hills. Vertical undulating cliffs rise intimidatingly around a twisting boulder deposited river that corkscrews through several waterfalls, ranging from 6 to 12 feet in height, underneath a ceiling of evergreen trees. But this stunning crevice successfully conceals real dangers, masking strong currents that can easily whisk an unsuspecting person away. With high levels of water rushing rapidly down a steep rise constricted in a narrow spot, it’s an easy place to be greeted by the grim reaper.

Some refer to the spot by its unofficial nickname; “The Hungry Gorge”, probably because of the place’s appetite for human beings. Since 1950, a great number of people have lost their lives here, but just how many people is up for debate apparently. A few books, newspaper articles and the Richmond town records list the number at 25, but other accounts say the number is probably high as 40. The victims’ ages so far range from between 15 and 30, and all lost their lives by drowning. This information may even be out of date by the time I actually get around to publishing this entry. The casualties even include heroic would be rescuers, including a state police officer who attempted to retrieve a body and drowned in the process. And the numbers continue to grow, despite numerous attempts to stem the death tolls.

The most tactile approach happened in 1976 when a band of locals got together and blasted away a dangerous underwater chute where several swimmers had gotten swept into and trapped by strong currents. But the gorge continues to take lives.

In 2005, a 19-year-old UVM student became another statistic when he slipped on some rocks and plummeted fatally into the gorge. Frazzled people wanted a solution. There were demands to make the gorge off limits entirely, with heavy trespassing fines as intimidation to visitors. Some even wanted to build a giant wall around the gorge. That same year, Gary Bressor would purchase the property for $20,000 to preserve it and keep it open to the public, so future generations can continue to enjoy the unique area – or as others would argue, so future generations can die here. It’s a matter of perspective I guess.

The purchase made other gorge goers happy, unequivocally saying that anyone can enjoy themselves here, you just need some common sense and some information – something I’d agree with. Bressor was one of those people as well, so he bought the land to stop the quarreling over what to do with it and formed the Huntington River Gorge LLC, who wish to protect and preserve the natural area. Because it’s now under private ownership, an official ban isn’t possible.

But why do so many seem to die here? Apart from entrapping geography, the answer may lie within its tourist population. Many people who drown here are out of towners, who aren’t aware of the gorge’s concealed dangers, seeing things through youthful impunity. The surprising and frustrating thing about Huntington Gorge is that some of the deaths here could have been easily avoided. According to my research, a few deaths were related to drug or alcohol use before diving in. And sometimes, well, accidents just happen.

The locals know when to avoid the gorge, especially when the river is swollen with high runoffs from snow melt or rainwater, and they know where the safe parts are to swim. Some people have lived near the gorge all their lives and have never set foot down there.

A drive up Dugway Road, the dirt thoroughfare that runs along the rim of the gorge, reveals a plentiful amount of parking ban notices and warning signs nailed to any available tree or fence post that would be visible through a windshield. At the top of the gorge sits an official dark green state historic marker chronologically listing deaths here over the years. But the dates end ominously in 1994 which was probably around the time the sign was erected, and an updated replacement hasn’t been commissioned yet – if it ever will. There is talk of even more signs are planned to be erected when the project gets official zoning approval. But, knowing how human nature works, those signs won’t be of much help unless the visitor actually chooses to heed their warnings. Despite the dangers, this swimming hole remains widely popular, partially because of it’s harrowing reputation, or maybe some just have a perverse interest in tragedy. Humans have always had a fascination with death after all. That’s partially the reason why I visited. Also because I run a blog on Vermont weirdness, and love being outdoors.

Regardless, it’s easy to fall for this site’s charm and majestic splendor. Even in the dead cold of winter when I first visited, it was impressive. Icy waters churned over the surfaces of halfway frozen waterfalls and the cacophony of solid vs. liquid echoed up over the gorge walls. But I stayed well away from the edges, because a very slick layer of ice had glazed over the rocks, and I definitely didn’t want my name emblazoned on a tragedy induced warning sign.

Having a blog has offered quite a crash course on social culture. One of the benefits is befriending cool people through it. My friend Timothy is one such person. We hit it off last fall and even went on a few adventures together. He grew up down the road from the gorge as a kid and agreed to show me around on a sultry summer day.

After a morning of metal detecting at a ghost town and being pestered by mosquitoes, a dip in the Huntington River sounded fantastic, and visiting with someone who was intimate with the place excited me. I wanted to know it’s secrets and it’s stories. But within minutes of arriving, I wanted to go home. The gorge was thick with people in sports jerseys and cheap beer. Timothy groaned and said he missed the days when the gorge something that really only the locals knew about. Today, it’s all overran with bros and frat boys he complained, who, at least on that particular day, were making quite the ruckus as a crew who set up camp on a rock below were challenging someone’s manhood as they waited to see if the guy would jump off the cliffs as a group of distantly perched girls laughed snootily at them. There’s nothing wrong with people flocking to a great spot on a hot summers afternoon, it just wasn’t my particular scene.

Subsequently, the growth of the college kid crowd pushed out a lot of the locals from the gorge said my friend. When he was younger in the 90s, he loved spending his summer days there as he developed a fascination with diving off of the cliffs. Doing this, he got to know several of the old timers who were very familiar with it and knew all of its secrets and idiosyncrasies, like the best places to jump, when to go, and places to avoid. During this time, he explored every nook he could and got very familiar with it. During one of his dives, he found a wheel from a car that was from the early 20th century. On his other expeditions, he told stories of caves he found, and how if you were patient enough after diving into a pool near the falls, minnows would swim into you, hundreds if you had the patience. There are even certain rocks that have seen so many people sunning themselves or used as a launching point to jump off of that they have grooves in their surfaces now. “I remember always trying to make it down there before ten in the morning when I was a kid – that was always before the crowds would come down – and you’d always see the usual people, all jumping off the ledges and trying to out-do one another in the flamboyance of their dives. But it was all in good fun, and some of those guys were really good. Others looked up to them. Everyone knew each other, it was sort of like a club”. Today, those characters may have more or less, vanished from its boulder strewn walls. To my surprise, one of the last vestiges of older crowds to still hang out here, are nudists. We saw a few on our trek down the ledges to the river.

But the gorge is so popular, its entangled its way inside the frothy forefront of local legends. Some put enough emphasis on the gorge in conversation as if it’s the only swimming hole in the area, sort of like how Vermonters refer to Lake Champlain as “the lake”, even though Vermont has numerous other bodies of water.

As we were cringing at the site of a 20 something-year-old girl try to park an orange VW Bus, which was continuously ending in a position where two of the four wheels would be lifted off the road, my friend postulated that he thinks some of the locals might be hanging out at the upper gorge again. The upper portion of the gorge was the original gathering spot for visitors, and the locals hung out at the lower portion away from the crowds, until bad press moved most of the frenzy down to the lower gorge. But here’s the thing; both parts of the gorge are just as dangerous as one another. The only difference is that one area has been stained by hysteria and numerous signs about death, and one hasn’t.

Not surprisingly, a location with such grim stories attached to it has also spawned a few ghost stories. The only one I heard was years ago, where an unsuspecting swimmer was resting on some rocks and got a creeping feeling that someone was watching them. When they gazed around, they noticed a fully clothed teenage boy staring at them, standing on top of a large boulder down river a bit. But they noticed he was sopping wet, and he was standing there still as a stone. Concerned, the swimmer went to stand up, thinking that the boy may have needed help, but when they turned back around, he was gone. It was an open area, so he couldn’t have managed to clamber back up the gorge walls without being detected. But somehow, he had completely vanished. Whether these grim cautionary stories are preternatural occurrences or a local method of driving people away is anyone’s guess.

But the Huntington Gorge’s grim veneer isn’t exclusive. All swimming holes have the potential to be monstrous places if the right circumstances are applied. And seemingly, it seems to be a certain shade of visitors who ruin these sort of places, as opposed to the places themselves. A bit north, the landmark Bolton Potholes are a good example.

Bolton town is an often interstate passed Chittenden County fringe town where it’s old designation as “the land of boulders and bears” is undiluted verisimilitude. It’s charted land acreage is mostly taken up by steep rises in elevation, which suck for farming, but are great for outdoor recreational pursuits like a ski area and part of the 250 mile Long Trail.

A go-to summer relief for many area Vermonters, the potholes are where 3 impressive glacial waterfalls that pour into emerald-tinted holes are formed where Joiner Brook plunges about 45 feet down the Bolton slopes. It’s a cool area, but now days, the site also draws other sights in the form of large herds and obnoxious visitors, who litter, crowd the road and party there which bothers both long time visitors and denizens of the road that runs alongside of it. I used to go there as a teenager, but not so much anymore, opting for quieter locales.

Every action has a reaction, and now, there is talk of possibly closing it or restricting access to the public. Maybe. There is also a fight against that, wanting to keep these special places accessible for present and future Vermonters, which blew up on the Vermont subreddit page. Only time will tell, I guess. I’m more on the side of using common sense, and that it would be a shame to loose our state swimming holes – a deep-rooted tradition up here which is something that we tend to dig a lot. They’re free, all inclusive, and often outlandishly beautiful. The type of thing that summer memories up here are made of. But if you trash the place, well, your part of the problem.

If you visit, just be careful.

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This summer, my camera has developed some technical problems that are above my ability to fix them, and I’m trying to save up some money to have it diagnosed by a professional, and then for subsequent repairs. Because my camera is self designated as the most important item I own, this is a real bummer for me. Any donations would be hugely appreciated.

As you all know I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to produce and sustain this blog. Obscure Vermont is funded entirely on generous donations that you the wonderful viewers and supporters have made. Expenses range from internet fees to host the blog, to investing in research materials, to traveling expenses. Also, donations help keep me current with my photography gear, computer, and computer software so that I can deliver the best quality possible. Seriously, even the small cost equivalent to a gas station cup of coffee would help greatly!

If you value, appreciate, and enjoy reading about my adventures please consider making a donation to my new Gofundme account or Paypal. Any donation would not only be greatly appreciated and help keep this blog going, it would also keep me doing what I love. Thank you!

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Gofundme: https://www.gofundme.com/b5jp97d4

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The Vermont Character: Coffin Windows

One of my favorite pieces of Obscure Vermont is a mixture of architectural vernacular, and good old fashioned Yankee Ingenuity.

Do you see the diagonally tilted window placed in the gable end of this old farmhouse with its long edge parallel to the roof? A lot of people, Vermonters or flatlanders, seem to be flummoxed about these peculiarly slanted windows. That’s because their orientational existence isn’t found in any other states (though someone did tell me that they think they saw one somewhere in New Hampshire not too long ago.) To add a bit more rapturous froth to the isolated mystery, our Vermont parlance labels them “coffin windows”, or sometimes “witch windows”, depending on who you are I guess. Growing up, my mother would always point them out as “coffin windows” whenever we would take a trip out of suburban Chittenden County to more rural parts of the state, where older structures far outnumbered the new. I wasn’t introduced to “witch windows” until much later.

The etymology behind the monikers vary, and can’t really be traced back to a materialized point of origin.

Going alphabetically – it’s said these are called coffin windows because if a family member died upstairs, it was far easier to maneuver the needed coffin out the window and slide it down the roof as opposed to figuring out just how to haul it down a steep and narrow Vermont farmhouse staircase. And trust me, some of them are very steep and narrow to a point of over-cautiousness when walking up or down one – enough for me to sympathize with anyone who would groan at the prospect of dragging anything up or down them.

The name witch window gets a bit more on the superstitious side. It’s said that an old belief was that a witch couldn’t enter your dwelling through a crooked window or opening. A similar superstition that comes to mind is how the ancient Chinese thought bad spirits traveled in straight lines, so their architecture took on steeply peaked rooflines.

I know old Vermonters were a superstitious bunch. Our collective state history and folklore include such grim things as incriminating real people accused of Vampirism, or desecrating the graves of dead people accused of postmortem vampirism (our most famous Vampire execution was a man named Corwin, whose remains still loam underneath Woodstock’s boat shaped town green).

But witches? There isn’t much known on how scared Vermonters were of witches, leaving this as intriguing speculation. However, I was able to dig up a small number of succinct accounts in old state newspapers around the late 1700s and early 1800s of various Vermonters who locals suspected were witches, but in reality were probably nothing more than eccentrics living in a more narrow-minded time. One article amusingly reported that a Stowe woman was blamed for making several farmers’ milk cows run dry.

A more practical theory and probably the most likely of the three, was that these windows were a creative solution to let light into the cramped spaces upstairs. Gables didn’t often leave rooms for traditional sized windows and poor farmers didn’t want to spend the money on drafty dormers or getting a custom window made – which was a costly purchase many families couldn’t afford. They also enabled fresh air and ventilation to keep the house inhabitable. Though there are far more scolding environments than Vermont, our summers do get pretty humid, and the upper floors of an old house easily turn into ovens. 

Further down the line, these windows adopted yet another sobriquet with less dour and more civic pride; Vermont Windows. Though I haven’t heard that term nearly as much as the afore-referenced other two. 

In a world that loves things to fall into human-made symmetry, who knew that a window installed at a tilt could conjure up so many declaratory ideologies.

It seems that these windows have a bit of cool fanfare behind them, apart from your blogger. Some cool individual even made an Instagram account dedicated to them!

Route 100 in South Duxbury
Found one in this abandoned farmhouse I was exploring.
Found one in this abandoned farmhouse I was exploring.
East Calais
Calais
Calais
South Woodbury village
South Woodbury village
South Woodbury village
South Woodbury village
Peacham
Turkey Hill in Northfield.
Warren village
Warren Village
Cornwall
DOUBLE coffin/witch windows in Stowe! I guess these folks didn’t want to take any chances just in case a pesky witch decided to curse them.

Any of you folks know of a coffin window near you? Let me know! I love road tripping around Vermont, and I always make excuses to shunpike somewhere!

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To all of my fans and supporters, I am truly grateful and humbled by all of the support and donations throughout the years that have kept Obscure Vermont up and running.

As you all know I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to produce and sustain this blog. Obscure Vermont is funded entirely on generous donations that you the wonderful viewers and supporters have made. Expenses range from internet fees to host the blog, to investing in research materials, to traveling expenses. Also, donations help keep me current with my photography gear, computer, and computer software so that I can deliver the best quality possible. Seriously, even the small cost equivalent to a gas station cup of coffee would help greatly!

If you value, appreciate, and enjoy reading about my adventures please consider making a donation to my Paypal. Any donation would not only be greatly appreciated and help keep this blog going, it would also keep me doing what I love. Thank you!

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Gofundme: https://www.gofundme.com/b5jp97d4