Danby Evolves



Sections:

Thanksgiving Romp
Finding a not-so-secret mill.

Sheep
The social capital and literal capital of lambs.

Decline
Danby experiences some momentary setbacks.

Railroad
I inspect tracks and business heads downhill.

Mountain View
I briefly work in a logging baron's store.

School
Apparently perfected in 1880.

Thanksgiving Romp

Around the time of our expedition to the Kelley Mill, the deep well of information also known as my father asked if "that old mill up the road" was on Williams' map. It wasn't, and I was thunderstruck to hear him refer to a mysterious archaeological site so flippantly. I had no knowledge of such a mill existing "up the road"! Time and again in I'm finding that my search is not new or groundbreaking, just as my younger self found that her exploration of the woods around her house wasn't really pioneering.

But this mill, at least, presented a new challenge. There was no physical record of it on the map from 1869. What was its story?

My family has a tradition of making Christmas wreaths after eating our Thanksgiving meal. We generally clip boughs of balsam fir from the Christmas tree farm at Smokey House. The plantation is evolving into a forest now, a result of the decline in Smokey House's productivity over the course of my lifetime. But this year, I suggested that we send out a second scavenging party up the road to collect cedar, white pine, and whatever else we could find along the stream. That way I could check out the mill site and simultaneously find the materials for a delightfully varied Christmas wreath.

So my sister, dad and I set out, once again on a hunt for both man-made relics and natural resources. The mill site was a short walk up the road, along the edge of another field and down into a gully in the woods. The air was heavy with the smell of manure and the ground was covered in six inches of snow, a testament to changing seasons. In spite of the snow, we found the mill without any problem. It looked like a purposeful pile of enormous round river rocks. I was struck by how big it must have been- the wall spanned forty feet, at least.

It had to have been built before Williams' 1967 map was made, because by the late 1800's mill construction had mostly run its course in the region. Plus a lot of regrowth had to have happened for it to be so isolated, and the level of degradation in the structure ruled out the last hundred years or so.

After wandering around the base of the wall for a bit, saying things like "yep, there it is," we continued up the stream to gather our wreath supplies. Afterwards, I set out to find the story of the mill. I felt more like a historian than ever, having found the structure before the story.

But this mill turned out to be one of the frustrating reminders of how hard it is to look back. History is there, statistically represented and recorded in a few notes or piled stones, but it's like a badly written story. No character development.

The hard part wasn't confirming the mills' existence. Even though he didn't put it on the map, Williams mentions it in a concise paragraph about the "ten or twelve saw mills in town." This particular structure was a sawmill built in 1840 by Jeremy Bartlett on David Wetherby's farm. It was later run by Seneca Porter. The problem was that there was no more information than that little paragraph. The sawmill must not have been in operation very long, or else was insignificant enough that Williams omitted it from the map. The stones didn't tell me very much about the shape that the mill once had, and Williams' words didn't tell me very much about the people who built it or the outcome of their effort.

So history wasn't exactly unfolding in front of me. The most significance I can attribute to this mill is symbolic. It makes a good symbol for development in Danby in the 1800's. On the one hand, there was relative prosperity compared to the 1700's. There were no British armies marching through the countryside, terrifying the farmers. The land had been effectively cleared and the community was larger. Schools and churches were established, stores opened, and a bunch of mills were built in order to more easily and locally process food and building materials. And yet there was also famine, misfortune, and a wave of emigration as the state slowly found its footing. Like the old mill up the road, Danby was built out of optimism; and like Danby, the mill was at least partly abandoned in the 1800's. I couldn't tell you every factor that contributed to the departure of hundreds of residents, but there are quite a few I can tell you about. One of them has to do with sheep.

Sheep

Some of my earliest memories are of going with my dad and my siblings to lamb-watch. Smokey House, the farm where my dad worked, had a flock of sheep cared for by a woman named Hope. She had a daughter named Mary, and I always thought there was some significance in the fact that both of them were named for concepts (I thought Mary's name was Marry, like marriage). The fact that Hope also had a son named Matt was problematic to my theory, but mat, as in place-mat, was also an object and in that way I was able to cling to the concept.

Anyway, in late winter the ewes started to give birth, and someone had to go check on them periodically throughout the night to make sure they weren't in need of midwifery. Sometimes we would arrive to find that a lamb had been born and was lying in great confusion among the engorged ewes. Lambs were then moved to private accommodations with their mothers in order to avoid lambicide from other ewes rolling on them or trampling them. There was always a red light glowing in the sheep barn in winter, and so it seemed that there must be clouds of heat radiating from the illuminated building. My body always took a little while to accept the fact that it wasn't much warmer in the barn than it was outside, unless you were a lamb positioned directly underneath a heat lamp.

Growing up, there was a sort of pride that came from "having sheep." Of course, the sheep weren't ours, but the fact that we sometimes fed them a handful of hay or watched them push out babies gave my siblings and I a couple extra cool points among our peers. Having and caring for livestock was something kids in my area of Vermont were proud of. There was hardly anyone in my school who didn't claim at one point or another to have cows, horses, pigs or sheep. And many of their families really did raise those animals. So the sheep were a mark of status for me in my early years. For my sister, they became something more than that. She worked with livestock throughout high school and during college, and graduated with a degree in Veterinary Technology. Sheep have been some of her main customers, and she's spent time shepherding on farms in Vermont and New York.

Growing up, there was a sort of pride that came from "having sheep." Of course, the sheep weren't ours, but the fact that we sometimes fed them a handful of hay or watched them push out babies gave my siblings and I a couple extra cool points among our peers. Having and caring for livestock was something kids in my area of Vermont were proud of. There was hardly anyone in my school who didn't claim at one point or another to have cows, horses, pigs or sheep. And many of their families really did raise those animals. So the sheep were a mark of status for me in my early years. For my sister, they became something more than that. She worked with livestock throughout high school and during college, and graduated with a degree in Veterinary Technology. Sheep have been some of her main customers, and she's spent time shepherding on farms in Vermont and New York.

Sheep farming, along with other types of small-operation farming, has experienced a rebound in Vermont in the last few decades. As baby boomers and now millennials have embarked on a rural migration and terms like "artisanal" and "locally sourced" have started to trend, the number of small farms in Vermont is increasing. Here's another moment when I have to step back and try to see the pendulum swinging. It seems like this pattern exists everywhere I look: in politics, too much liberalism gives way to conservatism. In Vermont, farming has swelled and ebbed throughout the centuries. Sheep are a good example of this motion.

In 1810, a guy named William Jarvis imported 4000 sheep to his farm in Weathersfield, Vermont. He was able to do this because Portugal had just lost a war with France, and an embargo they had placed on their highly prized merino sheep was lifted. Jarvis was an American Consul to Portugal, so he apparently had his finger on the pulse of Portuguese merino. The import of his sheep started what Vermont historians refer to as "sheep fever" in Vermont. Everyone wanted sheep. The wool industry boomed, and by 1840, there were 1.7 million ewes, lambs and rams living in the state of Vermont. Danby was by no means immune to sheep fever- according to Danby's 1840 census, there were 1,379 people and 8,950 sheep living in the town, or about 6.5 times more sheep than people. 25,488 pounds of wool were produced that year in Danby alone.

But with the boom came, of course, the eventual bust. In 1870 there were only 924 sheep left in Danby. For a multitude of reasons, from competing breeders to renewed access to cotton after the Civil War, it simply became more profitable to eat your sheep than to shear them.

Decline

Williams' History of Danby doesn't go into those details, but it does ponder the decline of farming, industry, and population in the town throughout the 19th century. There was a financial crisis that left a lot of people in trouble, though Williams only alludes to that crisis as a failure of a "credit system" which he himself puts in quotation marks. I'm not sure if he did that because this was a word of mouth account, or because he didn't really understand it himself. In any case, I understand "credit system" failure about as much as I understand the causes of the housing bubble and recession in 2012. In other words, economics isn't my particular area of intellectual excellence.

Williams also talks about a terrible famine in 1816 that killed a lot of animals and left many people in Danby on the brink of starvation. It sounds mostly like bad luck-there were nights of frost every month of the year, there was a drought, and crops subsequently failed. And, though Williams doesn't make reference to this, I'm sure that Danby was experiencing the same agricultural hardships that the rest of Vermont was also dealing with: poor land management and a shift from subsistence farming to single-product farming. These two factors were, I think, the main reasons so many people left Danby, and Vermont.

The land management part is easy to explain. You can't introduce 1.7 million lawnmower-grade sheep onto the thin soils of Vermont and expect the land to remain undamaged. Hillside farms suffered under the cloven hooves of the sheep. All through the wooded hillsides of Vermont you can see rock walls built to keep sheep in. Less obvious are the swaths of bedrock, evidence from when sheep walked the earth bare. And it wasn't just sheep that were overexploited. Deer were hunted to extinction by the end of the 19th century. The mountains were heavily logged until 80% of Vermont was deforested. You can't cut down all the trees, create a huge logging industry, and then expect 150-year old forests to reappear overnight.

The caption, "If the ripe timber could be cut, a splendid revenue could be derived," represents the mindset of Americans before (and well into) the twentieth century.

Basically, people came to the New World and saw endless opportunity, potentially provided by God. There was no such thing as environmentalism in Vermont in the early 1800's. Silas Griffith, a Danby logging baron and Vermont's first self-made millionaire, once wrote, "I never saw anything so very sacred about a big rock... I say the landscape was made for man, and not man for the landscape." Unfortunately, it turned out the landscape wasn't made for indiscriminate use by man. Poor land management made it difficult for subsistence farmers to scrape out a living, as their families had done before them. People started to leave, coaxed west by promise of more productive soil or jobs or gold. "In several of the Western States," Williams notes dryly, "there is hardly a town that does not contain a representative from Danby."

The practice of producing one thing to sell, as Silas Griffith did (at the expense of others), was another reason for the emigration epidemic that had begun in Danby in the 1820's. It was difficult for Danby farmers to make much money selling their products locally, and for the first part of the 19th century there was no way to get those products to eager customers in the big cities to the south. But the economy was transformed, somewhat briefly, by the arrival of the railroad in the Valley of Vermont. This quick access to the big cities of Boston and New York meant that farmers could sell their perishable products to flatlanders. Dairy fever replaced sheep fever. But cows required much more land than sheep, and wealthier farmers bought adjoining farms from those who were struggling. Now relieved of their rocky fields, those families went west, too.

Railroad

It's been really hard for me to figure out what the deal is with the railroad in Danby. You can tell just by looking at the layout of the town that things didn't go as planned. The railroad goes right past downtown Danby, and "downtown" Mt. Tabor if you can call a few houses a downtown. It forms a potential connection with Rutland, Bennington, and beyond. But the buildings around the railroad are abandoned. There's a train depot crumbling into the ground. I've seen trains amble by a handful of times in my life, and they certainly don't stop. I've heard stories from boys who made a game of running alongside and hopping on the back of the trains, catching a leisurely ride to Rutland.

When I was probably twelve years old, my best friend and I went trespassing in some abandoned trailer homes next to the tracks. The trailer we entered was empty except for a few magazines. The whole building sagged to one side. It was a hot summer day and the grass growing up around the trailer was brittle and yellow. After flipping through the magazines and finding them boring, we jumped down from the doorway and examined the tracks. The railroad ties were rotting and the tracks were rusty and misaligned in some places. We examined them somberly, shaking our heads and concluding that they couldn't possibly support a train anymore. And then, in a coincidence that we took completely for granted, being preadolescents sure of our leading role in the world, the tracks began to vibrate as a train approached.

We naturally panicked. It was a single engine with no train cars attached, slowly chugging its way along. We ran back from the tracks and paused to watch, ready to bear witness to a fiery explosion or at the very least a derailment. But the engine just kept on going, slowly receding out of our day's adventure. A bit disappointed, we wandered off.

I think that's more or less the way the railroad itself affected Danby. People watched it approach, anticipating great change, but eventually it left them disappointed.

Even so, the railroad impacted the shape of the town. It changed the physical layout of Danby. I can visualize it as a kind of succession, like the growth of hardier and taller plants in areas with the best exposure to sun. When European American settlers first came to Danby, they didn't have any idea what the shape of the land would be, or what might happen in the future to make certain areas more desirable. They settled where their plots of land happened to be, close but not too close together in the cup-shaped nook in the hills. But by the time I was born, the town in the nook had grown into a bustling center and then faded away again, recognizable only on old maps and in a few piles of rocks scattered in the woods. "Downtown" had literally moved down the hill into the Valley of Vermont, to what was originally called Danby Borough. The railroad and the discovery of marble had attracted business, germinated a new town center, and then abandoned it.

The marble business was (and still is) a big deal in Danby, and in other towns of Rutland County. But when he wrote his History, Williams seemed to think that Danby's marble boom had pretty much run its course. He explains (annoyingly briefly) how the marble industry that started around 1850 "had the tendency to revive other branches of business, checking the tide of emigration." But soon after, he reports another population decline of about a hundred in the year 1860, "caused by a decline in manufactures, and other business"-

The railroad had a tendency to build up the town quite rapidly for several years, but itsfailure in 1857, had a crushing effect upon the business of the town, by ruining many of our business men, and stockholders lost quite heavily. The marble business was in a flourishing condition at that time, and some of those engaged in it had invested heavily in railroad stock, and by loosing [sic] this were unable to proceed in their business, which finally passed into other hands, and has not been carried on so extensively since.

Williams goes on to boast about how "there is probably no town in the State having a greater number of roads" than Danby, perhaps in an attempt to brush off the failure of the railroad. But at the same time, he acknowledged the economic decline of the town. He reports (exhaustively, and exhaustingly), the results of town meetings over three quarters of a century. In a meeting in 1859, the town leaders considered whether or not to establish a Town Farm. This Town Farm was approved, and became an alternative place to house impoverished people, who previously had been "disposed to those who would agree to keep them for the least money... they were scattered one or two in a place, and often kept by unfit persons." The need for a poor farm demonstrated a rise in population, but also a rise in paupers. In 1788, by contrast, the town had only one pauper, who also held the distinction of being Danby's first: a woman named Sarah Barrow. Though the decline in the railroad can't be held solely responsible for the rise in poverty in Danby, it probably played a part.

But as it turns out, the railroad wasn't quite as finished as Williams seemed to think in 1869. The infrastructure of the Bennington & Rutland Railway was purchased by the Rutland Railroad, a phoenix that rose from the economic ashes of the Rutland & Burlington Railroad. I'm practically falling asleep as I write this (I apologize to all the train enthusiasts out there), so I'll try to keep it brief, but I've got this timetable indicating that passenger trains stopped multiple times a day in Danby in 1892, so Williams had some more train action to look forward to as he wrote his History. But the story of the railroad doesn't end there, as we'll see in the 20th century. As I write this, I don't know the details of why the railroad failed, but I can see the mark that it left on my area of town. The cup-shaped nook was nearly abandoned in favor of the Borough in the valley, opening back up to quiet farmland and the woods that I thought I was discovering on behalf of humanity when I was little.

Mountain View

This is not to say that Danby became a ghost town after the railroad business failed in 1857. There were still some lively happenings downtown. A lot of the buildings that now stand along Main Street were erected in the mid-1800's. One that's been particularly significant in my life was the S. L. Griffith Co. Store, built by Griffith in 1862ish. It's a very Wild West Saloon-y looking building, with a big flat facade and two levels of porches. According to Danby Two Centuries, a retrospective put together in the 1970's, the store sold such luxuries as bananas and oranges. The store changed hands periodically for a hundred years or so, then fell into disuse until the author Pearl S. Buck, another behemoth in Danby history, revitalized it. In the 1970's it was a quaint country store and coffee shop. In my youth it was Sunnyside Café, a pillar of the community and home to the best milkshakes (and only milkshakes) in town. But even then, the building was notorious for being unable to hold a business down. I worked there for one summer when I was sixteen, for an ill-fated venture called the Mountain View Café. I was the only employee, and the owner was a desperate-eyed, unshaven chef who had just gone through a divorce and was trying to reinvent himself. He and I spent many sunny days sitting out on the porch, gazing at the mountains, waiting in vain for customers to arrive.

But when the stray lost or heat-dazed tourist did find their way off Rt. 7 and wander in, our offerings weren't great. I would take the customer's order and bring it back to the chef, who would be hovering by the kitchen door waiting for me with a manic gleam in his eye. I'd hand him the order, which he would scan distractedly. "Wonderful, Ellen," he'd say. "But listen, we're all out of [insert food item here] today. Can you run over to Nichols and buy some?"

So then I'd run out the back door and down the street to Nichols Store, pick up eggs or hot dogs or whatever it was that the customer wanted, then run back and give it to the chef. Sweaty and panting, I'd hurry out to the customer, who at this point would already be impatient, and ask if could refill their coffee. Eventually the food would be ready and I'd bring it out, and the customer would leave me the minimum possible tip and stalk off to continue their journey north or south on Rt. 7.

Toward the end of the summer, the chef started hinting that he was going to abandon the business. We'd be sitting in our rocking chairs on the porch, and he'd mention some money problems or some buddy in Florida who had a plan for a new project. I knew that after August I'd never see him again, and the building would once again be empty.

School

There was one element of Williams' map that dad and I didn't find on the day my dad and I went looking for the mill at Highbridge: a little square next to the mill labeled "Schoolhouse No. 12". The schoolhouse seems to be situated at a four-way intersection, though now there is only a three-way intersection at that spot. That first mystery was easy enough to solve: a path snakes up the hill from the intersection to the Bromleys' farm. It turns into a stream during mud season and it would take a great stretch of the imagination to call it a "road," but it follows the line marked on the map. It must have been a more significant route once upon a time, just like the horse path at the now three-cornered Four Corners intersection.

But even with the fourth road identified, we couldn't find anything that looked even remotely like the site of an old schoolhouse. There was a steep hillside and a paved road in the spot where it should have been. We puzzled over that section of the map, which to be fair was about three square inches in size. Then we wandered around, trying to avoid the sporadic traffic that came whipping around a steep s-turn in the road.

Schoolhouse?

Finally, it was the s-turn that gave us our theory. The schoolhouse, or rather the site where it used to be, was buried underneath the road. Looking at the contour of the woods, it was clear that the paved Brook Road was built ten or twelve feet above where the original ground must have been. Years of paving and stabilization had lifted the road, and according to the 1869 map it had also shifted slightly, like a streambed after a heavy storm.

We stared at the asphalt for a little while, disappointed. Hugh Bromley, whose son now runs the dairy farm at the top of the hill, told my dad that he went to school in one of these one-room schoolhouses. They were once dotted all over the town, established wherever there were children to teach. In 1860 there were fourteen different school districts in Danby. A woman named Libby Soule Griffith taught at Schoolhouse No. 12, though like with so many people in Danby's history, I couldn't learn more than her name.

I did learn more about what school was like for students in Danby in the 19th century, though. According to Williams, Danby was a beacon of scholarly enlightenment from the very moment it was established. In fact, late-nineteenth-century historians from Rutland County all seem to give similar descriptions of their forefathers' education.

Our friend John C. Williams:

As soon as they had provided for themselves a shelter and the common necessaries of life, schools were established. Our fathers considered this of the highest importance, as they were, in general, men of strong and penetrating minds, and clearly perceived the advantages which education confers.

Pawlet historian and school teacher Hiel Hollister:

Next to providing themselves with shelter and the most common necessaries of life, ourfathers, true to the institutions under which they had been reared, directed their attentionto education. Schools were established as soon as a sufficient number of scholars could be gathered in any locality.

And finally H.P. Smith and W.S. Rann, authors of A History of Rutland County:

Their laws were crude in style and form and they were intolerant to those who differedfrom them in religious faith and doctrine, yet with an unflinching adherence to duty, asthey understood it, and their firm reliance upon the church and the school-house, theymade their way on in the progress of civilization, and succeeded in opening the way for the best government the sun ever shone upon.

Smith, thankfully, did more than just extol virtues of the settlers of Rutland County. He also considered how the Puritan roots of early Vermonters influenced the way they viewed education. The Puritans were some of the original European settlers of the New World. They're the ones who wore black and feared God and came across the ocean to escape religious persecution. They're the ones who stoned witches. On the other hand, they also highly valued education. The first European settlers in Vermont were descendants of the Puritans, and Smith points out that they inherited both the Puritans' stoicism and their love of learning.

But even more interesting to me is Smith's description of his own early education in a one-roomed schoolhouse. The room was heated by a large fireplace, fueled by wood brought from home by the students. Each family contributed to heating the room in winter. Older students sat at writing benches around the walls, while younger students gathered in the middle.

Williams' description of Danby schools, on the other hand, focuses on legislation about education and the flagellations endured by students during the early years of Danby. Corporal punishment, Williams delicately notes, had become very unpopular by the time he began writing his book. As for legislation, Vermont towns were responsible for identifying convenient school districts beginning in 1782. Basically wherever there were kids, there had to be a school. The schoolhouse my dad and I searched for in The Oxbow was closed and reopened several times, depending on whether or not there were school-aged kids living within walking distance.

Families were responsible for ensuring the education of their children and servants, at least enough that they could read and do basic arithmetic. Some Vermonters were fiercely proud of their right to decide on how their towns educated their children. They valued education, but they also valued doing it their way. Vermont lawmakers, though, thought education should be consistent and guaranteed by the government. In 1840, Vermont began paying for teachers' wages through tax dollars, meaning that individual families didn't have to bear the responsibility for paying their kids' tuitions. Around 1860, teachers started attending State Normal School, a weird name for what was essentially a teacher training program.

What with these new advancements, Smith and Rann felt comfortable stating, in the year 1886, that "Our school system seems now as perfect as it can be made." As a Vermont teacher, I feel an urge to cackle hysterically at that assertion. School reform has been a constant in Vermont for as long as any current teacher can remember, and to me it seems like an unsolvable puzzle. But it must have been nice for these historians to sit back in satisfaction, confident that their schools were nothing short of perfect.

Up next: Danby in the 20th Century

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