USA > Vermont > A history of Vermont : with geological and geographical notes, bibliography, chronology, maps, and illustrations > Part 4
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We must remember also the great service of those water courses and larger streams which offered smooth passage to canoe or laden boat. The Connecticut was such a stream on the eastern side of the state ; it served the settlers now as unresistingly as it had the genera- tions of red men in the past. On the western side of the mountains there were the great tributaries of Cham- plain enticing people into the heart of the country.
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Having taken notice of some of the ways of entering the wilderness, let us now turn to the people who came and see what their work was.
FIRST SETTLEMENTS
The results of the French and Indian War from 1744 to 1749 had been the driving of the English from every fort and settlement in what is now our state, with the single exception of Fort Dummer. The result of the war from 1755 to 1760 was the driving of the French from every fort and settlement of theirs within the Champlain Valley. While we cannot expect to find permanent set- tlements within the state previous to 1749, we may be prepared to find a rapid inflow of settlers after 1760. In fact, at that date a few settlements had been made between the Massachusetts line and Bellows Falls, scattered along the west bank of the Connecticut.
When we compare this real beginning of the history of our state with that of the states just south of us, we realize with startling vividness how young we really are. Massachusetts was as old when the battle of Bennington was fought as our state is to-day. That is, in lapse of time Massachusetts and Connecticut had longer histories previous to that event than Vermont has had since. The founding of the first permanent settlement within the state stands almost exactly halfway between the landing of the Pilgrims and the present day.
As we begin to watch the progress of the settlement of the state we shall find that our attention will be drawn west of the mountains and that our interest will fasten with a peculiar fascination on one particular place.
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Bennington is the pivotal point in Vermont's history. Her record has the charm of romance. Her site was discovered by accident ; her settlement was the first one made west of the Green Mountains ; hers was the first grant of Governor Benning Wentworth in the New Hampshire Grants ; she was the first chartered town in the state; she was the center of excitement in the dis- pute with New York ; her old Catamount Tavern was the rendezvous of the Green Mountain boys; her name marks a memorable battle.
A Connecticut captain returning from service in the French and Indian wars thought to shorten his route home by taking a more direct course than that by way of Albany. His route for this purpose should have been from Lake George up the Hoosac River as far as Williamstown, Massachusetts, and thence across the mountains to his own state. But he mistook one of the branches of the river for the main stream, and did not discover the mistake until he had gone well up toward the mountain without having passed the Hoosac forts. He then correctly reasoned that he was in the Wal- loomsac Valley instead of the Hoosac. So he camped for the night. The next morning he turned southward toward Williamstown and made his way safely home. But the sight he had seen pleased his eyes, and he was not content till he had purchased rights in the township and had interested friends and acquaintances to join him in emigrating to this new land.
The grant of the town had been made as early as 1749, but the proprietors, like many other grantees, did not settle on their land themselves, but sold out their
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rights and interests to others who wished to move in as actual settlers. Bounties were offered for the building of the first gristmill and the first sawmill, those "mod- ern conveniences" of early settlers. The settlement began in 1761, in early summer, when a party of twenty- two emigrants, numbering among them women and chil- dren, came on horseback over the mountains, passed the Iloosac forts, and arrived in the promised land on the 18th of June.
The first year was like that of many another settle- ment, a year of privation and hardship. But more settlers followed, coming up from Massachusetts and Connecticut, built houses, barns, and mills, worked the roads, and established schools, until in 1765 Bennington, thus named for the governor of New Hampshire who made the grant, was a thriving little town. A beginning had been successfully made, life in the wilderness was safe, apparently, from any human foe, hopes were high, and the tide of emigration set strongly in this direction. This much for the settlement of the town ; we shall hear more of it presently in other ways.
If we turn back once more to the days when Lord Amherst occupied Crown Point, we shall find that one of his Connecticut soldiers, Benjamin Kellogg by name, was in the habit of coming frequently to the Vermont side of the lake, to the salt licks at Panton, to shoot deer. It is said that he supplied venison to the officers of the garrison at the fortress. However this may have been, after the army was disbanded in 1760, and the provincials returned home, this man continued to come for his annual fall hunt at the salt licks. Then returning home he would
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tell his neighbors of the place where he hunted deer and what chances there were here and there for settlers to pitch. Finally, in the fall of 1765, there came with him one John Strong seeking a place for a home in the wilderness.
Three settlers in the previous spring had also come to begin a clearing about three miles north of Chimney Point, where the little stone fort had been. These men were working there when Kellogg and Strong came into the country ; so the latter made them a neighborly call, looked over the little clearing which represented their summer's work, helped them sow their wheat, and then took a look at the country to the eastward. They finally returned to the lake, and Strong decided to build there. He chose the location of an old French house as the site of his dwelling, and thus saved himself the trouble of digging a cellar and building a chimney. The three settlers requited his assistance to them by helping him put up the cabin.
In such ways the land became known and attracted the more adventurous spirits in the older colonies, until one by one or in little groups they had scattered over the state as far north as the Cohasse intervals, where the Indians had planted corn while their captives starved in the days of the French and Indian War.
It was not strange that the Cohasse intervals, or Coos meadows, as they were sometimes called, should attract settlers. They lay accessible on the well-known waters of the Connecticut ; they had long been known to captives, and rangers had more than once passed through them ; they had been used for years, perhaps
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for generations, by the Indians as maize fields ; and the broad meadows, already cleared and covered with a rank growth of wild grass, were a standing invitation to the settlers who should first deem it safe to move in after the Indians had moved out. The broad river offered a highway thither, and as early as 1762 a few families ventured up the river and settled on opposite banks. The nearest neighbors were at Charlestown, sixty miles south. Thence the newcomers brought supplies by boat in summer, on the ice in winter. The settlement grew, and by the year 1765 Newbury was a well-organized town. The neighbors southward had so multiplied that there was scarcely a town on the west bank of the river that did not have a little group of pioneers. Benning Wentworth had been busy.
We might go on narrating the stories of the settling of other towns here and there, Bellows Falls, Windsor, Manchester, Guildhall, Middlebury, Vergennes, Rutland, Burlington, St. Albans, - all settled before the war of the Revolution. By the year 1765 Governor Went- worth had made grants of no less than one hundred and thirty-eight townships. The course of settlement was not as it is now, when cities spring from the plain in a day, and railroads carry westward between sunrise and sunset people enough to populate our state. Men were few in the colonies ; capital was scarce ; and people did not rush then as they rush now. But the traveler along the widening trail would see with growing frequency the rising smoke from the solitary cabin of some newcomer, would hear the sound of the plumping-mill at the time of morning, noon, or evening meal, and would catch the
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sound of the ax as it struck at the heart of the timber along the gentler slopes of the hills or in the valleys which nestled high up among the mountains.
LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS
If the traveler, although a stranger, had entered one of those cabins, he would have been welcomed with a hospi- tality which the present generation reserves for its partic- ular friends. There was a purer democracy, a greater community of interests, and a nearer approach to equality among men than this state or this country will ever see again. When the population of a town consisted of one individual, as was sometimes the case, it enjoyed com- parative freedom from the dangers of plutocracy, from the antagonism of the classes and the masses, and from the menace of organized labor. When every guest bore in himself the possibility of becoming a distinct addition to the social and laboring force of the community, and when if he were only a passer-by he was like a touch from the outside world, there were too potent reasons for entertaining him to allow of his being lightly dismissed.
There were a great many personal questions to be asked and answered, if there were no great public ques- tions to be discussed ; and it is safe to say that few travelers ran the gauntlet of such inquisition without giv- ing some account of themselves more or less truthful. It must have been in those days that the far-famed and long-lived Yankee inquisitiveness was born. As for public questions, there were plenty of them. From the beginning of the dispute over the New Hampshire Grants to the close of the War of 1812 there were few
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days when the people of the state did not have before them public questions as vital to the integrity of Ver- mont and as insistent upon imme- diate solution as any they have ever known. This period of time would cover the events of the Revolution, which brought Bur- goyne into such unpleasant prox- imity, the period in which our state was maintaining herself as an independent republic, the em- bargo times, and the War of 18 12 certainly enough for one gen- eration of men.
Another habit than inquisitive- ness was then born of necessity among the farmers of our state, OLD WOODEN CHURN - and practically every man was then a farmer, -and that was the habit of incessant labor from dawn to dark. Along with the habit was cultivated the capacity for it. When every man must provide for himself and his family everything from the building in which they dwelt to the food with which they fed their bodies and the clothes which they put upon their backs, there was little room for idleness and small place for a man whose hand knew no cunning or did not possess a diversified and manifold skill. The home of the early settler in Vermont was as nearly self- sufficing as the necessities of an isolated situation and his own fertile inventiveness could make it. That is, it produced what it consumed to a remarkable degree.
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It is safe to say that in this respect it was nearer the manor of medieval times than like the farm life of to-day.
Modern industrial organization has reached modern farm life in all its phases and made it dependent in a thousand different ways. Take away transportation, take away markets, take away every machine-made thing, and you would throw us a long way back toward feudal times. In clothing, in food, in shelter, in household goods, in farming tools, nothing was then bought that could be made. Little money was seen, little was needed; for clothing was made at home; the forest and the pigpen furnished meat ; tolls were taken at the mills for grind- ing grain ; taxes were worked out or paid "in kind." Vermont taxes were light anyway. If a farmer raised more grain than he needed for his own use, he could exchange it for labor, which was more serviceable to him than cash.
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Let us look a little more closely at the principal features of this life. The con- ditions here por- trayed are truly typ- ical, though they would not all be present in every community, and pos- sibly not all in any single settlement.
WINNOWING BASKET
We have already noticed one instance of settlers going into the wilderness, clearing land for their first
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crops, sowing wheat, building a cabin, and thus laying in various ways the foundations of their new home before they took their families there to live. The hardships of frontier life were lightened greatly when this could be done; for a single favorable season might suffice to rear a little one-room cabin of logs, and secure grain enough from the mellow soil of the clearing to keep the house- hold alive while the next year's crops were growing. Then, if the settler could take with him on his second trip, in the following spring, a cow, a pig, and some poul- try, he would make the con- ditions of life quite tolerable for his wife and children from the start.
There were plenty, how- ever, who began life under no such favorable circum- stances. Men and women went bravely into the forest with little but stout hearts, WARMING PANS strong bodies, an ax and a gun. Their first necessity was a rude shelter ; following that the clearing of a plot for the planting of Indian corn and a few vegetables like turnips, parsnips, potatoes, and possibly pumpkins. Meantime game from the forest, fish from the stream, or provisions brought on strong shoulders from the nearest settlement supplied the forest bill of fare.
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When the nearest settlement was twenty miles away, " toting " provisions was no small task.
If there were no mill in the neighboring settlement, a homemade plumping-mill or samp mortar did service three times a day in pounding out corn for an unvaried diet. These mills were crude affairs, only a step in advance of the stone pestle and mortar of the aborigines. They were made by burning out a hollow in the end of a stump, then attaching a weight or plunger to a near-by sapling which would serve as a spring pole and in the hands of the operator act as a pestle to pound out the grain.
The sound of the mill could be heard a long dis- tance through the woods or clearings and served to notify the traveler of his BIRCH SPLINT BROOMS approach to some back- woods home, or to call the workers in the distant clearing to their simple meals. If reports are true, these mills were turned by inventive housewives into tongues of gossip when homes were too widely separated for a daily visit. If a gristmill were near, the sound of the plumping-mill was no longer heard in the land, but for a consideration
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of two and one half quarts to the bushel the " pudding- mill " furnished a 'more expeditious and less laborious means of pulverization. If by good fortune the settler was the possessor of a cow, pudding and milk then furnished him a stable article of diet.
By the second harvest a greater variety would break the monotony of his fare. Occasional wheat cakes would appear, to be eaten with maple sugar made from the trees of the near-by woods. Sugar making under such primitive conditions resembled the crude Indian methods more than our present-day process with its improved buckets, spouts, holders, carriers, evaporators and all, to say nothing of the trim little sugar-houses, which then would have seemed like palaces to dwell in. Sugar making was conducted in the open, or by the side of the rough lean-to, with great open kettles or pots for the boiling; while the sap dripped from great gashes in the trees through homemade spouts of sumach or basswood into rough-hewn troughs.
It is said that the Indians used to make large troughs of pine trees, large enough to hold a thousand gallons of sap, and that the Indian women boiled this sap down by heating large stones in great fires and plunging them ยท into the liquid mass until it had reached the desired consistency. A writer who traveled through portions of the state previous to the last century said that the sugar of the hard maple was of good grain and flavor, "fully equal in quality to the best muscavado." What- ever the quality, - and it probably varied as much then as now, - it served in many homes as the sole sweeten- ing for cooking from one year's end to the other, unless
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by some good luck a swarm of bees was discovered in the woods, or lined from the wild flowers of the clear- ing to their honeyed homes in some hollow tree.
The settlers planted fruit seeds on their first coming, and a few years rewarded them with gooseberries and currants, and presently with apples and plums. In some parts of the state grapes, peaches, and pears were also raised in con- siderable quanti- ties. In conse- quence of the abundance of apples, great quantities of cider were made to save them and then drunk to save the cider ; while an occasional dis- tillery appeared to accommodate AN OLD WELL-SWEEP those who thought their mortal frames required the stimulus of a more potent liquid. Homemade malt and hop beer became popular drinks, and in time the demands of politics and a growing civilization evolved rum and molasses, punch, flip, and toddy. There was some water drunk, of course, even then, and plenty more of it to be
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had in the cold springs that came bubbling up through the sand and stones; clear and sparkling.
When a beaver meadow lay near the settler's pitch his task of keeping cattle alive through the first winter was much simplified. Here was hay that could be cut and stacked without the labor of first clearing land. If several settlers dwelt near the meadow, it was only fair to hold it as common property. A good many interest- ing little bits of communal organization may be found in the histories of our first towns. The hay reeve and the hog ward became as necessary as any town officers, when cattle were plentier than fences. At such times it became a convenient and economical expedient to have one man assume authority over the several and indi- vidual members of the herd. When cattle ran in one common drove it sometimes became necessary as num- bers multiplied to brand them or clip their ears with some distinguishing mark to identify the animals of different owners. Swine found pasturage in the woods, where they could live on roots and nuts. At Swanton a convenient disposal of them was made by taking them over to an island in the lake, where they could roam at will. Another reminder this of medieval times, when the right of their hogs to run in the woods was made one of the demands of the peasants.
As the building of a gristmill marked an epoch in the life of the inner man, so the advent of the sawmill marked a change in outward appearances. It provided settlers with means of constructing more comfortable and less picturesque habitations than those of rough logs. The little one-room cabin with its great chimney
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and fireplace at the end, through which as much light came as through the windows, could now be easily divided by a board partition into two rooms ; perhaps it could be supplied with a floor beneath, and a loft over- head where the children could lie o' nights and watch the stars through the cracks in the roof till the sleepy eyes closed in slumber. Newcomers would build no longer log cabins but frame houses, if they built within con- venient distance of the mill. Public buildings of some importance could now arise, and the more prosperous farmers could indulge in the luxury of board fences.
Indoors, life would go on much the same as before. When trees were standing around waiting to be cut and the woodsman needed his blows for clearing land, he did not stop to chop the firewood fine. Four-foot lengths for the CANDLE DIPS fireplace were not extravagant, and the bigger the backlog that could be placed upon the irons the bet- ter. In days when matches were unknown and the nearest neighbor from whom fire could be borrowed was perhaps a mile away, it was a virtue if not a neces- sity to keep fire always going. The evening's light from the fireplace was cked out by the "taller dip" or
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candle, and candle-making time came to be a greasy day as much reckoned on in the calendar of labor as soap-making time or the fall slaughtering of the hogs. Bear's grease, deer suet, and moose fat were all scrupulously saved and tried into tallow for candles ; and some farmers kept bees for the wax as well as for honey, for wax can- dles were also used. The fireplace was OLD CANDLE MOLDS the cooking stove of many a backwoods housewife, and it served its purpose well for many years, equipped with cranes and pots. Later, when bricks were made, ovens became a necessity instead of a luxury. Some women were enterprising and skillful enough to anticipate the brick oven by constructing of stones and clay ovens for themselves.
The women of those days deserve especial honor. Wives and mothers they, who were helpmates and workers always, in hardship and danger making the home life sweet, diligent with hands and head, with little time for thoughts of finery or any but the plain and simple and necessary things of life. Not that they lacked appreciation of fine things or that their period of exile killed the feminine taste for fashion. Indeed it did not ; it was transmitted to their daughters, to blossom out in all its glory even to the third and fourth
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- and nobody knows how many more - generations. But those women in seedtime and harvest worked beside their husbands in the field, or in the absence of the men guarded the pigpen, sheepfold, and poultry house from the predatory bear, wolf, or fox. If their husbands were clearing in the field, they could pile brush ; in potato digging, flax pulling, husking, and sugaring they lent helping hands. In addition to these tasks they did work within the cabin which would con- found a housewife of the present day. In their hands rested in no small measure the training of the children ; and in the life of the neighbor- hood, when doc- tors were few and far between, they were the ones who minis- tered to every ill that befell humanity from the cradle to the grave. What wonder that we still bow down to the virtue of "old AN OLD-TIME FIREPLACE, BRICK OVEN, AND UTENSILS wives' remedies."
It was a golden augury for the welfare of the state that schools and churches were among the first thoughts of the settlers after they had made the barest provision for their own homes. It speaks no less eloquently for
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their efforts that the first schools were taught in corn barns by the light of the open doorway and the rays that came silting through the cracks between the boards, or in the hay barns vacant in summer, or on the stoops of log houses. Schools were begun when the means of their support were but a few bushels of corn or wheat voted by the town. Salaries of teachers were not high then ; they never have been since. The story of one backwoods pedagogue is that when asked his terms he replied, gazing at the great mouth of the fireplace which occupied one end of the room, that GOOSE BASKET, USED TO HOLD GOOSE FEATHERS AND SOME- TIMES USED TO HOLD WASTE FLAX he guessed he could cut the wood and teach the school for the ashes he could make. The meaning of the remark will presently appear. Of course in winter school keeping on porches and in barns was out of question, and some of the more commodious private houses were called into requisition if no regular schoolhouse existed.
The first schoolhouses could hardly compare with ours, but they served well the purpose of their day. They were oftentimes plain log structures, with a fire- place at one end, a door at the other, and a window on
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each side. Along the clay-chinked walls pegs were driven, and on these rough boards were laid to serve as desks. Some were more elaborately planned with a nearer approach to individual desks.
The early histories of the towns throughout the state reveal the high place in the life of the community which was taken by the churches and their pastors. The great number of preachers and religious denominations testify to a wholesome regard for spiritual things, to freedom of worship, independence of opinion, religious toleration, and, so far as such a thing can exist, religious equality.
As time went on a few new industries arose, based on the bounties of Nature. An iron forge was built here, a limekiln there; asheries, brickyards, and black- smith shops began to appear. The beginnings were humble, but they were significant of far greater changes to come, when business should divide into multifold branches, and trades and crafts multiply almost beyond the comprehension of man.
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