About Vermont

The Green Mountain Character

Climate, terrain, and history molded the resilient Vermont personality.

Here’s what everyone already knows about Vermont, courtesy of wall calendars, postcards, and coffee table books: Vermont is beautiful. Vermont is pastoral. Vermont is a time capsule of America’s rural heritage.

All true, but those insights alone go no deeper into the paradoxical culture of Vermont than does the breathless, “It really looks like this!” on the flip side of the postcard.

One simplistic equation says that that Vermont people and culture were formed by the region’s geography, particularly hard climate and hard rock. Snowfall, fueling the 45-year-old skiing industry, is heavy, and temperatures can drop well below zero. Volcanic action and the work of glaciers formed the Green Mountain range and covered the land thickly with rock and boulders.

[Old Vermonter joke: Flatlander tourist (leaning on a roadside wall, watching the Old Vermonter picking rock from his field, asks jocularly): “Where’d all that rock come from?” Old Vermonter: “The glacier brought it. Flatlander: “Oh yeah? Where’s the glacier gone to?” Old Vermonter: “Back to get more.”]

Among the things that this species of joke tells us about the old Vermonter is that he is taciturn. [Side note: the monosyllabic President Calvin Coolidge, a Vermonter, was once accosted by gushing society lady who told him: Mrs. So-And-So bet me that I couldn’t get you to say three words in a row!” Cal’s answer: “You lose.”]

We also know from the Old Vermonter jokes that old Vermonters are stoic, flinty, hardy, resourceful, frugal, practical (if Fate gives you stones, use them to build a foundation), and independent.

The independent part goes back to before there was a Vermont. About 1750, the royal governor of New Hampshire began selling land grants in present-day Vermont. After the French and Indian War ended in 1763, Englishmen based in New York also claimed the land under the British crown. Ethan Allen, Vermont’s folk hero a major holder of New Hampshire land grants, quickly formed a citizens’ militia to chase the interlopers back to New York.

Later, in 1776, Vermont’s petition to statehood in the new United States was rejected. In 1777, Vermont formed the independent Republic of Vermont, which coined money, maintained a militia, and naturalized new citizens. The Republic existed for 14 years, until Vermont was admitted to the Union as the 14th state in 1791. (Vermont’s reflex for independent action reared up again in 1941, when the Vermont Legislature declared war on Germany three months before Pearl Harbor.)

Vermonters are resourceful; the state made a conscious decision in the mid-20th century to market itself as a tourist destination. (Tourism appeals to many Vermonters partly because it is non-polluting. Vermonters don’t tolerate pollution or its dirty little cousin, littering. A 1968 Billboard Law bans billboards from highway corridors and a Beverage Container law keeps roadways clear of bottles and cans.)

Vermont has had to be creative with economic development; its industries and population have gone through several cycles of boom and bust since the Revolutionary War. From its admission to the Union in 1791 through 1810, the state’s population grew 150 percent as people arrived to work in the lumbering industry, potash production, gristmills, sawmills, tanneries, quarrying, road building, canal building.

But from the 1820s through the end of the century, people fled Vermont because of the hard weather, the declining fertility of farmland; and the opening of the Ohio Valley and the Great Plains.

In a countervailing pattern, immigrants from other parts of the United States and Europe (particularly master stonecutters from Italy), began arriving during the middle third of the 1800s to work in the rising stonecutting, iron-casting, and furniture-making industries. A few people began importing merino sheep in the 1840s, sparking a minor industry of wool production. But this business soon collapsed when this industry also moved west. Between 1850 and 1900, 40 percent of Vermonters left the state.

Following the Civil War (to which Vermont sacrificed more of its men – proportionate to its population – than any other state), Vermont began to cultivate dairy farming. (This economic development plan of 140 years ago is expressed today in businesses like Ben& Jerry’s Ice Cream, Cabot cheeses, and Lake Champlain Chocolates).

Finally, the start of the 20th century brought greater cultivation of the outdoor recreation industry and tourism, driven by the growing popularity of the automobile. In the winter of 1934, a tow rope was strung up the side of a hill near the town of Woodstock and powered by a Ford Model T engine. This moment could be called the birth of the Vermont skiing industry.

Skiing and outdoor sports in general, as well as the fall foliage season, brought more and more visitors from Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and other near neighbors during the last third of the 20th century. Many of the visitors and tourists ultimately moved to the state, boosting the population by 45 percent from 1960 to 1990. Vermont became a magnet for “furriners” seeking the kind of Brigadoon they find in the aforementioned calendars, coffee table books, and postcards.

The boundaries between the new arrivals and old Vermonters, and the boundaries between various groups of newcomers, can be fractious (an example: about 30 years ago, rival immigrant groups from Boston and from New York used to hold an annual Tomato War near the end of the summer. Opposing teams would gather on a field near Manchester and heave tomatoes at each other, in a pulpy competition similar to dodge ball.)

Vermont looks politically liberal, but that image hides a more complicated soul. Vermonters value individual rights and responsibilities – you mind your business and I’ll mind mine. Under the state gun laws – the most lax in the nation -- anyone who can buy a gun may carry it loaded and concealed in public, without a police permit, police notification, or safety training. Also along the lines of individual rights, the Vermont Legislature voted in 2000 to institute civil unions for same-sex couples. Vermonters are conservative in the traditional sense: they seek to protect and preserve. In 1936, after three years of debate, the state voted down a Green Mountain Parkway that would have broken the state wide open to tourists, millions of dollars, and potentially wrenching change.

Vermonters’ voting behavior defies easy categories. Hotly abolitionist, Vermont voted for the party of Lincoln from the Civil War until the 1960s, including its vote against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. In the 1980s, Vermont voted three terms for Governor Madeleine Kunin, a woman and a Swiss-born Jew. Now, its senators are the liberal-voting Patrick Leahy and the Republican-turned-Independent James Jeffords. Its Congressman is the former Socialist mayor of Burlington.

No discussion of Vermont would be complete without a mention of its mix of spectacular fall foliage, which gets its extra oomph from the sugar maples. It’s been said that this particular blend of color --- and the combination of soils, tree species, and climate that make it possible – are duplicated no place else on Earth except parts of China, Japan, and central South America. This biology note may or may not be apocryphal, but there is no doubt that people come to see Vermont from all parts of the globe. Undoubtedly, they’ve see the pictures first.