Williamstown Branch (October 1958 | Volume: 9, Issue: 6)

Williamstown Branch

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Authors: R. L. Duffus

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October 1958 | Volume 9, Issue 6

The time is 1898, ana the place, a small Vermont town on a branch line railroad. Any resemblance to presentday America is purely accidental., for the Williamstown that R. L. Duffus knew as a boy might just as well be part of another country on a different planet. As we read the veteran newsman’s reminiscence of his life sixty years ago (it is fair to assume that he was a typical boy in a typical rural American town), we are likely to feel something beyond mere nostalgia—perhaps a certain regret for a more peaceful, more leisurely, and less impersonal way of life that can never be recaptured.

VERMONT IN THE 1890’s:
A boy’s world full of wonder

My father said, one day when I was eight and we were living in Mill Village, that some day he’d hire a horse and rig from J. K. Linton and take us all to see the Barre Quarries. Two years later, when I was ten and we were living in the General E. Bass house, we still hadn’t gone to see the quarries, but I kept hoping we would.

The quarries, in the hills above Barre and maybe four miles from Williamstown, were the source of the granite industry in that part of Vermont. In my eyes they were among the marvels of the world, even unseen. Of course we saw in many ways the traces and effects of this primeval rock. From Graniteville a branch railroad wound down to Barre, but there was also a steep dirt road descending into Williamstown. Down this road, in some of my earliest memories, came the great stone-laden wagons, brakes making sparks at the last steep pitch into our valley, horses holding hard back, the drivers sometimes standing, reins tight in hand, and swearing blue blazes, and loving the admiration they drew from us boys.

I thought of Barre Quarries as a distant journey, though they were in fact no further away than places to which we often went on our bicycles. Not as far away, really, as Barre itself. But I wouldn’t have dreamed of going there alone, and somehow it never occurred to a group of us to ride our bicycles up there.

This may have been partly because the quarries, even then, were two hundred feet down and our parents feared their boys might go too near the edge and fall in; or be too near when a blast went off and get blown back home in small pieces; or be mashed under a few tons of granite. The Barre Quarries seemed distant because they were strange and dangerous, wonderful, legendary and romantic.

So Barre Quarries represented to me, at the time I was ten years old, the spirit of travel and adventure. When I say this I do not mean to imply that Williamstown, even then, with only dirt roads leading to and from it