Railroad Street, St Johnsbury

St Johnsbury was the first town I came to after crossing the border from New Hampshire. I knew nothing about it, but wanted to stretch my legs a bit, so parked and walked around.

The photo is from down in the valley where there is a river and a railroad (still operating, though trains don’t stop any more). I also walked up the hill and found what looked like the original part of town.

I accidentally came across the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium. The latter was closed as a new part of the building is being built to house it better.

This is Franklin Fairbanks who founded the museum in 1890 to house his extensive collections. His philosophy (as written below his portrait) was

A collection of birds, animals, shells or whatever it may be, is, after all, but a collection of dead things unless used as an illustration to help your search for knowledge.

It is very much a Victorian gentleman’s view of how to inform the public, and not how most museums would be set up nowadays.

This is the groundhog display. There are many others showing most of the fauna and birds of northern New England.

The animal to the right of this brown bear is a moose.

There were seven pictures like this one, made entirely from insects and butterfly wings. Unthinkable today!

It was a very extensive collection over two floors. Very interesting and very much one man’s view. It did emphasise how much had been lost by the excessive logging in the preceding decades.

One point to note is that Vermont had felled almost all its trees by 1837, when there were six sheep to every inhabitant. This was half a century before New Hampshire, so the regrowth trees are in general much larger in Vermont. Many animals became extinct and have been reintroduced.

My first lodging in Vermont was at Milton about 25 minutes by road north of Vermont’s largest town, Burlington – population 47,000. The total population of Vermont is around 600,000 in an area somewhat larger than the part of England from Liverpool to the Scottish border, west of the Pennines. It is the second most sparsely populated state after Wyoming.

Milton is another community that straggles round the countryside with no obvious real centre. I stayed on a 10 acre holding with Kathy and Ray. Ray has worked from home (designing sewage systems) for the last 22 years; Kathy has worked as school support for children with special needs for the last 15 years. They only started AirBnB in June this year and are so successful that she will stop working at the school next summer. They have a hobby business of making fruit and vegetable wines in micro-batches.

They have lived in this old farmhouse for 7 years, and are still a long way from finishing the work of ‘improving’ it.

They have some useful barns where the winemaking takes place.

Arlo, the cat

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pumpkin (born on Halloween) has a damaged hind leg due to one of her litter mates standing on it.  Em is 15 months old. They are extremely gentle mastiffs, who have no idea they are supposed to be a guarding breed.

And here is Kathy with Taj, a 30 year old female African Grey parrot, who talks once she knows you.

The house is very much ‘lived in’, and a very happy one.

This part of Vermont is separated from New York state by Lake Champlain, which was once part of the route from the St Lawrence to the Hudson River in New York. Just offshore are the Champlain Islands. Nowadays they are all connected by bridges and causeways, to each other and to the mainland.

Both Kathy and Ray were born and brought up on the islands. They now travel the world vicariously through their AirBnB guests. One gets no chance to question them, as they are so busy sucking all your experiences out of you with their own questions.

The islands are flat and chiefly farmland.

The bridge from Grand Isle to North Hero

Looking across from the northern mainland to La Motte island

My first stop was near the extreme southern tip of South Hero, where there is a Tool Museum. It is only open on Saturdays and that was the last day it was open until next summer. It is one man’s lifetime collection of tools used by Vermonters. Arnold Zlotoff was a local, who spend most of his life teaching hand crafts on Long Island, New York. When he died he left his collection to his son, who managed to find someone prepared to build a barn to house it, and set up a trust to run it.

It was quite difficult to find as it is on a golf resort. Not one with a large hotel, but one where people stay in their own motor homes.

Each white structure holds tools from a different craft, with some explanations.

There are large tools as well.

I think this is part of the coopering tools exhibit.

A very interesting small museum with a very knowledgeable volunteer on duty.

As it is all commutable to Burlington, the beautiful coastline is mostly private. I did manage to find the Alburg Dunes State Park (Alburg is actually on the mainland to the north of the islands) and could walk about two miles out and back.

There are sand dunes, but covered in vegetation and one is not allowed on them due to erosion problems. Behind the dunes are extensive wetlands, which are also protected, so this path between was my walk ‘out’. I gather that at the right season it is paradise for bird watchers.

This sandy beach is the reason erosion is an issue. During the season one has to pay to enter the park (which is relatively new), and I imagine the sandy beach (rare on Lake Champlain) gets packed. It is also how I walked back to my car.

From Alburg it was across a causeway to La Motte island. This is limestone and was once extensively quarried. As is not unusual, the limestone contains fossils beds.

This is on the Goodsell Ridge Preserve. In season there are guided walks, but I was able to just wander around. Not that I really knew what I was looking for, my knowledge of geology is minimal.

I spotted this, which I think is an ammonite.

There was a sign saying these are glacial erratics, but of different origins as they are different types of rock.

It was an interesting wander through some quiet woodland, and there were at least seven marked fossil beds to peer at.

The next day I drove about 50 miles south to the Green Mountains for some more serious exercise.

The ‘Long Trail’ is a hiking path up the spine of Vermont from the Massachusetts border to the Canadian border. After many miles ascending on a dirt road I reached 2000 ft, a car park and this trail head. I was to gradually climb 1500 ft to a ridge.

It was nearly all deciduous woodland. At this height the leaves already were falling all round, but it made it all feel much more open, though there were no views from the path. After reaching the ‘Long Trail’ intersection I went on downhill a very short way.

This is the Skylight Pond mountain hut, which provides a ‘camp’ for ‘Long Trail’ hikers.

The five older ladies are members of a large ladies only walking club from Burlington which has 6 grades of walk every Tuesday. They were on the third most difficult grade, and we had a lovely chat. Later I caught up with them on the way down as well.

This is the very basic interior of the hut.

This was the view down to Skylight Pond. Unfortunately there is no way down to the pond, so I don’t know where those staying overnight find any water. The pond is bigger than this photo makes it appear.

Going a little way south on the “Long Trail’ there was a short side path to a vertical cliff with this view west.

Near the bottom there were several small streams to cross (going and returning). They were easy that day, but as I write this a week later they may be impassable. We have had a lot of rain in the last 24 hours. Two inches where I am now in Newport, and almost certainly much more in the mountains.

It was a lovely satisfying walk. It is popular as there were 11 cars in the car park when I got back, and I saw at least 17 people on a Tuesday in school term time.

This is Vermont State House in the smallest state capital, Montpelier. It is the third building as the first was too small and the second burned down. This one dates from 1859. Much of the interior has recently been restored to how it was in 1859.

The Senate chamber

The Representatives chamber

I thought New Hampshire had the fewest constituents per representative at about 35,000, but with 150 representatives Vermont works out at about 25,000!

On my way back to my car I was curious what this little brass plate said. It shows the high water mark of the great flood of November 1927. This is astonishing as the State House seems to be well above the general level of Montpelier (as are most State Houses). It is worth searching the internet about these floods, which were catastrophic for much of New England. In Vermont they have built quite a number of reservoirs to control the flow of rivers in future, and have seen nothing on the same scale since.

At Barre, about 5 miles from Montpelier, I visited the Vermont Granite Museum.

There are still significant working quarries in the area. The museum is on the site of a former large works where the granite was processed.

All that remains on the site is this 400 ft long shed. The works had been derelict for 25 years when the state decided to buy it and set up the museum. They have gathered quite a lot of stuff and archives, but it is very badly curated. It might be interesting if you knew the history, but to try and discern the history from this museum is challenging to say the least.

It is not helped by the building also being used as a space for meetings, weddings etc. Stuffed any which way around the exhibits are tables and chairs for the events.

These are the original founders of the business on this site, four brothers from Pennsylvania, whose father, Hugh Jones was born only two years after the family arrived in the USA. As the family knew about quarrying, I surmise that their origins were in north west Wales.

They seem to have made just about anything from stone.

And there were lots of tools about.

To be fair, part of the shed was partitioned off and seems to be used by local sculptors. They also hold workshops to encourage more.

However it was probably the least effective museum I have visited.

This post covers my journey to Milton, part of my journey on to Newport and two full days at Milton. However I was there for four days. The other two days were spent at just one amazing museum, which I will write about in my next post. I will have to reduce about 250 photos to a relative handful, which is going to be very difficult.