Why Did They Go Away? (June 1955 | Volume: 6, Issue: 4)

Why Did They Go Away?

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Authors: Stewart Holbrook

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June 1955 | Volume 6, Issue 4

Fifty years ago on a shelf of Monadnock Mountain in Essex County, Vermont, were the empty cellar of a house, the foundations of a barn, and the stubborn remains of an orchard. To us youngsters these things were the ruins of some ancient and extinct civilization, pervaded with the same mystery that held the excavators of Pompeii. The find of a bullet mold, or a pewter spoon, was an event comparable to the uncovering of the Temple of Apollo. There was also the melancholy of times past. One felt it in contemplating the lilacs which still struggled feebly in the smothering brush to put out a few pale blossoms. The great slab of pure granite lay where the door had been; to move it a hair would have called for a yoke of oxen the like of Job’s.

Each empty cellar on all Vermont’s many hills asked the same question: Why did they go away? Forty years ago I went away, and though I am still uncertain why I left, yet in forty years and nigh forty returns to my native state, I have come to an understanding of why Vermonters deserted their beautiful country in such astounding numbers and also why those who remained have continued to live—fairly prosperous, commonly happy, and above all in a sort of bemused wonder that anybody could want to live anywhere else.

Professional genealogists have complained that Vermont is a stumbling block in their researches, that only too often a generation is “lost” somewhere in the Green Mountains. They should bear in mind that for nearly half a century after the first settlements, the region was a no man’s land. Some declared it to belong to New York province. Others held it to be the New Hampshire Grants. Until admitted as the fourteenth state in 1791, Vermont was pretty much a wilderness and a violent wilderness at that. Little wonder if few private or public records were kept, or if even fewer survived the partisan raids and general chaos of this freewheeling time, a period that was characterized perfectly by Ethan Allen, both patriot and real-estate operator, whose Onion River Land Company gave him more trouble than his celebrated military exploit at Ticonderoga. In the latter case, both Jehovah and the Continental Congress were, said he, on his side. In the former business, however, the “whole avaricious, insatiable, and inhuman land-owning class” of York State opposed him. In defying this hideous monster, Colonel Alien, who was seldom at a loss for words, delivered a line that Vermonters, it no others, have quoted often these past 185 years. “Sir,” said he to John Taber Kempe, attorney general for New York, in refusing to compromise on land titles, “Sir, the gods of the hills are not the gods of the valleys.”

 

It was cryptic. Perhaps it was meaningless. Yet it had that indefinable something about it men remember through generations.