Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 7
Bennington Preserved
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
ALL PHOTOGRAPHS IMAGES FROM THE PAST.
The history of any town, large or small, has the air of a surreal play, one on which the curtain never goes down. The cast changes constantly; the set does not—except that from time to time scene shifters steal in with fresh furnishings, backdrops, even entire buildings. The plot is improvised by the characters as they go along. It can be as somnolent as watching grass grow, or bursting with action. And such dramas, of course, never end.
Our subject here is Bennington, Vermont, a picturesque setting at the foot of the Green Mountains, tucked into the southwest corner of that state. The time is the latter part of the nineteenth century, slopping over a little into the beginning of the twentieth—the age of photography. It is about a century since the first settlement in 1761—or Act I—in what was then known as the New Hampshire Grants, land claims that were hotly disputed by the neighboring province of New York. What with border battles and then the American Revolution, followed by fourteen years of the “Independent Republic of Vermont” until statehood came as a relief in 1791, Bennington was all frantic action. The Green Mountain Boys, led by Ethan Alien and his enormous kindred, were in the thick of it. They seized Fort Ticonderoga, with its stores and invaluable cannon, from a sleepy British garrison. They fought beside Gen. John Stark’s militiamen in the Battle of Bennington, a victory that fatally weakened Gen. John Burgoyne’s attempt in 1777 to drive south from Canada to New York.
Dominating the stage is the giant figure (some say six feet six) of the legendary Ethan, variously regarded, then as now, as either a hero or a profane rowdy, or perhaps some of each. His followers state it as fact that he once killed an attacking bear by shoving his powder horn down its throat and, on another occasion, strangled a mountain lion with his bare hands. Once when Ethan and his cousin Remember Baker were in the woods at night, sleeping off a drinking bout at the Catamount Tavern, Remember was awakened by some hissing sounds and saw a rattlesnake repeatedly biting the sleeping figure beside him. He sprang to his feet and grabbed his musket, but then the snake pulled back of its own accord, weaving unsteadily, and lurched drunkenly into the underbrush. As Remember remembered, Ethan awoke complaining of “damnable, bloodsucking mosquitoes.”
A century later the setting has changed: how peaceful, how prosperous the old frontier outpost has become! Bennington is still small but is spreading out. Knitting mills have sprung up all along the Walloomsac River, and woolen and cotton mills. Bennington manufactures boxes, machinery, stereographs, and collars and cuffs. Immigrants have poured in heavily from Canada, while the Yankee farm boys ventured westward in search of better farmland. Local farms