 Hi everyone, this is Dan O'Neill, the executive director of the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. Before we get to our third Sunday presentation, I would like to thank the following businesses for sponsoring today's lecture. They made a vital investment in our museum, and their support is why we are able to bring you this lecture series at no charge. This month, we're really excited to bring you Marissa Dobrik. She is a reference archivist at the Vermont State Archives. She is delighted to assist everyone doing historic research. She shares some of the many historic treasures available in the vaults of the Vermont State Archives. Thank you for this opportunity to share just some of the historical treasures that are in the Vermont State Archives and Records Administration. My name is Marissa Dobrik. I'm one of the archivists at the State Archives, and I act mainly as a reference archivist. However, I also do outreach like I'm doing today, and I process archival records that are coming in to the reference and research. I'm excited to share some of these historical treasures with you. Since this is a virtual visit, I will have contact information for me personally and the reference room for your research needs at the end. I appreciate and am willing to answer as many questions as we can. We are here to assist. I am going to start today with a little bit of information about the Vermont State Archives and Records Administration. We nicknamed this Visara, so you will probably hear me refer to it as that. Also, the meat of this presentation is the treasures from our archival vaults. And lastly, there'll be some contact information, how to follow us on Twitter, and just information for your reference needs or if you'd like to contact me personally. I very much wish I could give you a full tour of the State Archives. It's a pretty interesting building. Today, we are just sharing what it looks like. This was in different times when you could see the reference room in a more busy capacity. Vermont State Archives and Records Administration or Visara as a division within the Secretary of State's office were located in Middlesex. It's very timely to be sharing this with you today because it's Sunshine Week, which is a week where we highlight and share the importance of government records and open and accessibility for those records. It's really great to have this. Usually we would do an in-person in-service or some other kind of discussion to share that excitement. So I'm happy we can at least do this. We are home to record specialists across a wide variety of work related to the life cycle of records. The life cycle sounds a little funny, but that really means that a record can go from the active use to temporary storage to either destruction or permanent retention in the State Archives. The Archives is one area of that sort of broad hole. We're also at Visara charged with administering the Statewide Records and Information Management Program. There's a lot of abbreviations. We call that RIM. In the winter, you can see what we look like up in that space of Vermont State Archives, all that snow. We have been working in the building despite much of the state government has not been and has been working from home. Most of our work really requires being in the building. Our reference room is currently open to the public on a limited capacity. So for COVID precautions, wearing masks and our staff continues to answer questions by email or telephone. And we're happy to provide copies of records. And we've sort of loosened some of our more restrictions for assisting researchers with their copy request needs. The archival files in our largest filing room can look something like this. And I always say they look like there's something from a movie. Or maybe if you're like me and watch like Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Librarians or Warehouse 13, you kind of see this and it's jaw dropping and it looks overwhelming. The truth is, we know where everything is. We're open to all of our records are catalogued and easy to find what a researcher needs. So it looks innocently complicated, but it really isn't. Our staff in the record center staff can pull a box from the holdings and catalog immediately. And it's fun to take a look at this space. I really miss people getting to see it. In the past, we've done these tours where we've done sort of a spooky tour through the archives, just because I mean any warehouse at night can be give you some atmosphere. I once accidentally got locked in a record fault that wasn't fun and I wouldn't advise it. However, we have emergency capabilities and I was aided out as soon as possible. So the Vermont State Archives and Records Administration just to give you a little bit of a background used to be two different divisions. It was the State Archives and the Public Records Division called the SARA, where a division, as I mentioned, within the office of Secretary of State. We maintain a state archive, which is the historic records of long term value, but also for more modern things, the VT retain our digital repository that has things like the governor's records from Governor Shumlin. That also includes the most recent legislative sessions, audio records and handouts. This, our room specialists administer statewide records and information management. And then we also have a state record center for offsite storage of agency records. We also handle certain statutory filings and certificates. This is just a quick overview of what the SARA is. It's really important, I think, when we're sharing public records that we tell people we have a mission, we have a vision and we have a goal. I'm not going to read every each of these, but the biggest is where public records are a cornerstone of government transparency goes back to Sunshine Week. We need to share and make the sunshine known on what people have done in the past and what people continue to do. So having an informed people who recognize, as we recognize and manage the public assets is very important. So these records have to be authentic and reliable and there have to be tools so that we can efficiently provide access to the records. Some of these things I think people find boring. You think the sounds boring, but boring and bureaucracy. Still, it's really important that people know that these are available. A lot of people have no idea what they can access in their state archives and that behind sort of these little tour facade, there is some incredible documents that are waiting for you. As I mentioned, VT retain, if you're working from home and would be interested in looking at some of the records available that have been born digital, that is where you can go. Access right now is the reference room. This is sort of the home base for people coming to visit us. There's security concerns about using records. I mean, if somebody has been to a library, there might be multiple versions of a single book. Unfortunately, an archival record is often it. We have one copy and if something happens to it, well, that is lost. And you'll hear about what has happened when other places have lost their records before later. This is just a reference room. It's not exactly the most fancy, but this is where we assist people with their research and all of the staff who work with reference very much enjoy the variety of questions that we get to help people puzzle out. This is just our landing page right now for reference. We're open by appointment and it's Monday through Friday 9am to 4pm. And you can make an appointment by calling us and you'll see that number at the end. We also have just other things that are available. We have some people come in for authentication and getting access to their some vital records. This is a quick little view of our staff. Some of it is pictures that were taken before the pandemic and some of it is taken afterwards. Can see me last year with a little more coiffed haircut pre COVID-19. I was giving a talk on historic court records in the Vermont State Archives. Nancy Austin Bradley is in the upper left hand corner. She is the primary contact with reference work up front. We have a roving archivist program that is run by Rachel Onoff. And that is an exciting program where individual historical societies can get assistance for their historical research. She also does a lot of assistance with grant writing and is a good resource to be familiar with. Tonya Marshall is in the green mask. She is the state archivist and head of this division. Can see Sally Blanchard O'Brien in the middle there doing some processing. She also assists Rachel Onoff and then not every person who works here is viewable here. And I think I cut off poor will at the very bottom, but all of our staff here are very happy to provide assistance as we can. People sometimes ask me, well, what is it that people are researching in the archives? And it's a wide, wide variety and these are just a sampler of requests we've gotten in the last month and a half. So we have people who've been doing land boundary research and that's from boundaries dating back to 1792. We've had judgment in an 1857 court case, which was the sort of the precursor to child custody. There was a transcript that was copied in 1777. It was copied about 100 years later related to Fort Ticonderoga describing sort of the pitiful conditions that soldiers were facing there. People doing railroad valuation research and plenty of people doing far more recent research in legislative history and legislative tracing. What is the legislation now? What did it used to look like? And we've had somebody kind of doing some exciting research in their home. It was built in 1800 and they're researching the history of it from the land to the house building and who lived there. The types of researchers we have at Vassar range a lot and I'm just genealogy and personal research, whatever that nature of research is, is our primary research. We have plenty of people doing legal research and that's in legislative as well as the Supreme Court briefs or previous case history documents that they can study entry orders. And agency users are other state government employees doing research either in archival records or long term storage of their own records that are stored here. We have scholars, so that's students and I consider scholars from our National History Day sixth graders up through PhDs working on major projects and initiatives. Special projects can run the gamut in pre-COVID we had some pretty exciting ones and people working on books or novels and then I just make sure you know a little nudge here you could put your project here. We would love to assist you references keeping on my feet and learning things every day and that's really what I love about what I do. So this is just sort of the sample page. So many people tell me that records are boring or the government records are boring. And it's just not. These are three things that are straight from our holdings. Calvin Coolidge gave his Vermont is a state that I love that speech was given in 1928. Just a year after the devastating floods that managed to get Vermont pretty well flattened for a time. He always said that the brave little state moniker comes from this and says I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her inalienable people. They're a race of pioneers who have been beggars themselves to serve others and a spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the union and support of our institution language. It could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont. The document you're seeing in the middle is probably one of the more tragic pieces here but it's just so powerful. May Evelyn LaBelle was murdered in June 1911. And this is her dying statement that they used to convict Arthur Bosworth of her murder. This is a government record. It is part of an investigation and it is so very powerful. And then on the right, Vermont no longer does executions at the state level, but this was an entry ticket for the execution of Edwin C. Hayden in 1881. He murdered his wife. So government records to me are so much more than boring. And I'm going to share with you some of my very favorite pieces. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what you could find here. And my biggest argument for using archival records, especially Vermont state ones, they're not used as much as they could be and they have some treasures that are just waiting to be found because somebody's treasure is waiting to be uncovered. It might not be a treasure to anyone else until somebody tells us it is. So I'm going to start with the Vermont Constitution. It was written in 1777 and it originally had a preamble, but that preamble was removed in the 1793 when we sort of rehashed it. It was written by Ira Allen and it was very much his own personal rant against New York, New Hampshire and Great Britain for all of the fuss going on with sort of trying to not only make the colonies a little bit heal but he was pretty ticked off that they were trying to get New York was trying to force Vermont to be under its jurisdiction. It was largely drawn from Pennsylvania 1776 Constitution but went a few steps further it prohibited adult slavery, and it had universal manhood suffrage. So the stylistic writing at the top, and I think a lot of people have seen this before it's on vellum, and it's been preserved. It's pretty good you can read it very well. It gave birth to the state, and it basically Vermont's founding documents had radical innovations but what's interesting about how Vermont's Constitution worked is that it had a mechanism called the Council of Consensus that would propose amendments to the Constitution, if needed, and that was every seven years. They were proposed several that were adapted and 1786 Constitution, and really sort of set the foundation so amendments to the Constitution were very frequent but there are a few that might be up for approval by voters this year. The remarkable thing about the Constitution documents is you're seeing just the front page there's 16 pages of the 1777 Constitution and then there's also pages and pages of every time the amended editions were made, and sometimes some of the debates in the journals by the General Assembly and its predecessor to the Senate called the Governor and Council. I mean it's our Constitution and I think sometimes like you can have this idea of a piece of paper, but when you get to touch it and you see that this is a founding document that has so much history attached to it. I find that it's just a powerful piece of history that is just right here and waiting for you. Sometimes documents and treasures have a very circuitous route coming back to us. This is just a letter, George Washington's letter, and this is an article explaining how Vermont got it back. Essentially, we have two George Washington letters in the Vermont State Archives holding this one that I'm talking about today is by far the more famous of the two. The letter was purchased and donated to the state in 1984 and unlike some things that don't tend to have a monetary value it was sold at auction at Christie's for $14,300 in 1984. This is for page letter, it's one where George Washington wrote himself instead of having a secretary doing the writing. We let people look at this letter. It is interesting because as early as 1779 the United States Congress tried to issue a series of resolutions concerning Vermont and wanted and what would be required for them to join the union. There was a big debate going on and it got more and more heated and George Washington feared that Congress would order troops into Vermont. And this 1783 letter is just personally a favorite because he's telling his friend representative Joseph Jones that just the prospects of federal troops invading an independent republic was not a good idea they're seeking to join the union and it might take a while to have us join but you just shouldn't mess with that. I guess it's the easiest term. Vermont didn't want to join on the terms of the federal Congress, and there was a whole array of Vermont officials arresting and confiscating property of individuals that would are claiming allegiance to New York, and they were trying to actively assert authority. The most famous little quotation in here says George Washington says about for monitors that the country is very mountainous full of defiles and extremely strong. Vermont's for the most part are a hearty race, composed of that kind of people who are best calculated for soldiers and truth, who are soldiers for many, many hundreds of them are are deserters from this army, who having acquired property there would be desperate in defense of it, while knowing that they were fighting with halters about their next. So even George Washington was just like it wasn't worth the fight. We just have a, I think, just like the brave little state we have a concept and view of ourselves as pretty hearty but hey George Washington agreed. Well what happens. I think many people know that eventually Vermont did decide that we would join the union, and that we became the 14 state the 14 star on March for 1791. This was going to happen. The Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, the federal government sent a copy of the Bill of Rights. It originally had 12 proposed amendments but only to him past the amendments were that was on compensation of members of Congress was actually finally ratified in 1992 Vermont ratified it in 1791. As I said Vermont joined the union March for 1791. So, birthday just passed. It was the 10 state at the time to join to ratify the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, and it wouldn't become law until Virginia ratified it on December 151791 a month later. It has Thomas Jefferson signature and I kind of squealing every time I see it I can't help it I've been FSR long enough but I about a decade and I still love seeing this particular document anytime we bring it out. It's also been restored on there been some staining damage on it, but it is the sort of cover sheet testing to it authenticity, and then it includes those first 12 proposed amendments. So sometimes the treasure, or what I would call a treasure doesn't look like much until you open it up and realize what it says. Vermont, it did something called the Court of Confiscation, this was authorized by the governor and Council in 1778, there had been one in each county and seven men were essentially appointed to confiscate the estates of British sympathizers, these loyalists. And then the confiscated land would be sold to benefit the Treasury. I am opening to just one page. It looks relatively innocent. It is just page 18 from January 1779. This particular document is pretty remarkable. The idea of confiscating land of Tories came by Ira Allen, Ethan Allen's brother, and he'd been the one to suggest this plan. And this page is a volume documenting proceedings when Ethan Allen accused their younger brother Levi of having Tory sympathies. And so they had Levi's property seized. So, Levi had gone to Long Island to help free Ethan when he was imprisoned there a few years earlier. And at the time he sort of made some connections to get Levi would sell to the British. The proceedings then in 1779 took his property and he was imprisoned for six months. When Levi was let out, he turned firmly to the British side, and ended up first in Florida. When Florida was sold to Spain by the British. He came back to Vermont. He sent his brother Ethan to a duel, which was not accepted, and eventually he was convinced to put his resentment behind him and be welcomed back in the family so I guess that's one thing. Family squabbles and other times is not quite as historic, but some epic family fights here, real true family feud. He eventually participated in some of these secret negotiations to potentially make Vermont a British province. But of course that went to nothing because we did in fact join the union. Levi died in Burlington's debtors prison in 1801 and he is buried in unmarked grave on the prison grounds. But you'll see there's nothing, I guess that looks fancy about this but it's still a remarkable document and it's just waiting for people to take a look. So there's some treasures abounding I'm going to share to from a set of records called the manuscript Vermont State Papers. These are records of Vermont government they date mainly from 1760 to 1860, but it sometimes goes even later than that as late as the 1950s. It was the original core of the state archives, and it includes an abundance of records from petitions to the legislature pardons. Other sorts of petitions of like just to governors, grand lists correspondence resolutions committee reports court confiscation documents mostly financial depositions and even once found a set of justice of the peace records where they're suing their friend for the theft of a deck of playing cards. It isn't there is a name and subject index of the papers and the pre 18th century indexes online so the pre 1800s excuse me. This is the landing page it's at our web page and it's just the nine index if you're looking for it. You can search by personal, like a keyword, or by name or by date or by description, I recommend keyword. So we can see Alan Ira to search by last name first name, and you can expand your results. This the second half of the index which is dates from mostly 1800 to 1860s is not online. It's only available in our reference room, and it is a very, very underused record set. And because of that I'm sharing two documents I found there. This is a letter from the famous Secretary of State Daniel Webster. This is actually part of a whole other piece of cool Vermont history. Christian Meadows was a skilled engraver and he'd been pretty respectable citizen but he got roped into counterfeiting in 1849 under the leadership of somebody who called himself Bristol Bill. And that story was all over the news for a couple of years because they gone to Groton, Vermont thinking that, well, you know they can't catch us in Boston they can't catch us in other big cities they're not going to catch us here. Well, they did. Christian Meadows was a model prisoner and was also repentant. And so he had worked on some engraving and wanted to get back to good citizenship. Daniel Webster had seen some of his engravings and had written to the governor at the time that's Charles Williams to pardon Meadows. So he could use his talents engraving maps for the federal government. Well, Governor Williams declined and but eventually harasses Fairbanks issue to pardon and Meadows was freed. He did live in Windsor for a little while but eventually he sort of disappeared into Canada and was not heard from so we don't even know what happened to Christian Meadows. The whole set of records related to Christian Meadows, Bristol Bill and sort of the adventures of their, their time counterfeiting is something I felt should be a movie so if anybody out there would like to research them and start writing that screenplay. I have some suggestions for you. So Hiram Turner is not a famous scholar or famous statesman he is just a person, writing in 1867. He was very not impressed with his neighbor, I mean we're talking in the time of war. He had put up the Confederate battle flag, and he wrote that he was offering the governor to I would cordially tender my services to take that or any other flag of that character down with its possessor also. And of course he signed it your obedient servant as was the norm at the time. He was a regular East Randall for a month or giving his opinion to the governor. People still do that today, not quite as beautifully written, but they write to their governor for all sorts of reasons and those correspondence are just as valid. This one just cracks me up. One of the other generals papers is a set of records that I would say, given sort of the nature of getting them back because they had been sold and were repurchased at the most part in 1919. The records date from 1779 to 1838, and they show gorgeous surveys and plans done by Ira Allen James White Law Samuel Kraft and ebb and Judd. They're absolutely stunning documents. The index is readily available as a PDF form online but it takes a little bit of challenge to use. Every time I look at them I'm just blown away by the artistry of early surveyors and we're talking importance of laying out Vermont landscape, but when you look at these things it's just stunning it's just beautiful. But after saying that I'm going to share something that's not really beautiful but it just cracks me up. I have a bit of a sense of humor and ebb and Judd it was one of these surveyors. He was a legendary figure in Essex County he was a statesman land agent, farmer merchant a mill operator I think he also published almanacs and compiled and invented and surveyed and he surveyed much of Essex County. Many researchers use the survey or general records for what they're intended to take a look at the town, how towns and roads were laid out in the early part of Vermont history but this one is seeing this famous man at age 25. His personal journal as he was going through and surveying. It has the reflections of a young man with some kind of comedic timing says he went to a Thanksgiving day dance. It was Thanksgiving day in the state of Vermont went to Mr halls at night and was entertained with a fine supper of roasted turkey chicken pies and apple pies. This apple pie or apple I have tasted at coups. We had a fiddler and a coups dance and went tense to Mr. Mr Lucy's about 10 o'clock at night, when we found a company drinking scalded rum or hot toddy as they called it. We had a high caper as it is usually called about midnight we returned to Esquire Eames and made out to get to bed without help. So anybody who's commonly experienced some slight tipsiness. I thought, I feel like I could talk to Evan Judd, I get where he's coming from, and his whole journal was edited by D Gregory Sanford for Vermont history article. I just love some of his plane thoughts on life. Another treasure we have here is the New York inferior court of common pleas was created under British rule and a jurisdiction of the province of New York. And these records range from 1770 to 1774 so all of the cases are going to be instead of the people or the state of Vermont it's going to be the crown versus the defendant in a criminal matter. The county seat was chosen as the unsettled town of Kinsley, which is now the town of Washington, and that seat was eventually moved to Newberry and 1771 it was a much broader swatch of land than the current county setup. Again, maybe you're seeing here in a time of being home and cooped up a lot I've looked for humor. How many of you out there I'm sure can talk about how much you hate the Vermont roads, mud season, all of that. Let me tell you a lot. This is the 1774 and in it, it says that they traveled until night, there being no road and the snow very deep. We traveled on snowshoes, we traveled some ways and held a council. When it was concluded it was best to open the court that we saw not it was whether in Kingsland or not, but we concluded we were far in the woods. So this is continued or adjourned over the next turn to court. If one adjourned over into the last Tuesday and May next. So they didn't know where they were. So they weren't sure if they were actually in the Kingsland. This is part of the problem of settling and having a jurisdiction where there's no settlers there wasn't any place so they couldn't say where they were, but they could say that the roads were very bad. So those that are found in this early set of records includes just some very basic topics. Debt cases tavern license assaults by individuals against others mostly bar room probably and then appointments of officers to see the needs of the developing area, especially road construction, which makes sense. It's an interesting case where Rebecca Martin had what was considered an early kind of child custody case against somebody called his Echia silhouette. And at the time, he was cleared on the charges because of the timing of the child's birth, and then Rebecca's brought up on charges of what was called whoredom in the next term. So our court records are one of those things where I could just go on at length about and I have, I've given that talk before. I'm always happy to point people in the direction of some of the untapped treasures of historic documents for court record research. The probate court records, I think a lot of people think even just something this mundane can't be a treasure, but the probate would do wills and settlements of the states but it also did adoptions guardianships name changes. Later the correction of vital records civil commitments to the state hospital, and also people committed another instances and then insolvency up until the United States took over bankruptcy in the 1890s. So, for example, what kind of treasure you find I mean I think a lot of people are familiar with the Morgan horse. And I just kind of, we came across this. Justin Morgan, the figure of fame died and Randolph in 1798 he was impoverished at the time so his estate was insolvent, and they were doing an inventory to see what they could sell for his creditors to pay off his debts. He wasn't as the owner figure but at the time. He was better known as a composer and a musician of church music, mostly a him. And you can see in the estate inventory that there's no horses anymore at his property but they do mention tack saddle bags and other writing equipment. That's medical opium. And one of the things about inventorying about one in four of our mantras had an estate that went through the probate court process whether they had enough property that had to go through a court mediation, or if they were insolvent and somebody had to sit down and figure out who was going to be paid and how they were going to maintain any widows or children. People who find their own ancestors find treasures and you might not think that that's true but for many it is you can find some remarkable things like even down to what sort of books they were reading. Newspapers, the entire microphone collection from the state library is now in the state archives and includes most Vermont titles. The microphone collection spans from late 1700s to the present day, and nearly all the papers are available online through a newspapers.com access. Newspapers are fill in the blanks for what the public record just simply doesn't have whether the records don't exist because fires or floods or lack of keeping something. Newspapers recorded all sorts of things from day to day life or what was historic happening in the town or location at the time. So newspapers.com portal is available free to Vermont residents. There is access through our webpage that points you on how to get access to these records. There's some very interesting things you find in newspapers, and my most exciting is the obituary of Lucie Terry Prince. There are so much people whose lives aren't well documented in the government record, but this is the obituary of Lucy Terry Prince she was stolen from Africa as a baby. When she was born around 1730, she was sold into slavery enrolled island and she married a Abu Jaya Prince, who bought her freedom in 1756. The family moved to Guilford in 1764 and she died in Sunderland in 1821. She's remembered for her ballad bar fights. It was a 1746 incident that she was writing about, but it was preserved orally until it was published in 1855. It is considered one of the oldest known works of literature by an African American, and she was also known to have argued before the Vermont Supreme Court against racial sabotage that her neighbors were trying on their property. She had a really remarkable life and there's not much in the state archives about her, but this obituary gives her just how remarkable she was in a time where people didn't think she could do the thing she could. If possible, she's well worth researching further and reading more about her. In the seal of Vermont. There are documents and in the series of records that document does say at the seal. It was designed by Ira Allen and 1778, but a new seal was created in 1821 and variations of what were used until 1937, which is when they decided to return to the original and the legislature had a counter created by Tiffany and company cast in 1937 and I think the purpose of a seal from the historic day to now is to market document is official. You can see the seal as the impression that it has document documenting things that are important to Vermonters from cow pine tree, which makes Vermont, you know the green mountains. Sheaves of wheat for the agriculture economy. And then of course prime place for months motto freedom and unity on the left you can see the proclamation when they ordained the great seal. And you can see the impression in gold. This is how it looks. I mean it just looks so small and this guy was done in 37 but I love holding it. It just there's just something about the weightiness of history when you see something that was re envisioned from the original in the 1770s and brought back in 1937 and is still what we use to seal of Vermont today. Photographs in archival holdings are very rich, but they're very hard to find what you need. Unfortunately, indexing wasn't all that well done. Edwin T Houston photographs from his studio are in the state archives and they are well indexed and so I'm going to talk a little bit about some of those. I was based in Montpelier from 1920 to 1942 and the studio continued kind of under new ownership for a while after that. And he took many photographs of government buildings officials legislators, and then views in and around Montpelier as the state capital that included a photograph of Amelia Earhart. So this photo is, she visited Vermont in March 1935. It was a really exciting visit for Vermont she visited before sort of in passing because she had friends here, but she was giving a speech to the legislature in support of aviation. Her speech is published in the journal for the time in the senate journal. And she also had spoken to cadets at the Norris University, her friend was the president Porter Adams. And this photograph has been a popular one, I mean, she disappeared just two years later, and you can see there's all sorts of people crowded around to see her from the dignitaries to school children. This is a somewhat large photograph. How do you really put the price on something that is completely disappeared. As a treasure goes, you could maybe even though it's black and white walk off and look right into this. I think it's flipped but this photograph was taken of rights fill in 1933 and rights fill is the town that doesn't exist anymore. The 1927 floods forced sort of some reevaluation and the needs to build reservoirs to keep that flooding from happening. So the Civil Affilian Conservation Corps the CCC built the rights for them from 1933 to 35, and that required disbanding and flooding the village and so they took pictures of the village before it was inundated and you can see like it just looks like a town, but it doesn't exist anymore. And eventually, they had to move even the bodies out of from the cemetery and move them to middle sex. This is just a photograph of Sheldon from 1914 hand colored slide. I have shown you photos and items and stories that I consider treasures of the Vermont State Archives, but archival records are meant to be of enduring value and state public records are held in the name of the people of the state of Vermont. These are your records, they're part of your story as an archivist I feel privileged to know that the records and then I know some of the stories that come with them. I'm happy to share the stories and the documents with researchers. These that I've selected document famous people Vermont history, some humor. And whenever though I help someone uncover a piece of their own family history, or a new understanding about Vermont history, I consider those connections to be just as valuable and just as much a treasure. So if you look at this kind of image I feel like I could walk off onto that dirt road into Sheldon of 1914, an archive like ours is so much more than the stereotypical of a hidden away place, or something that isn't relevant today. This document comes to life with sort of humor, solemnity, feuds, beauty of Vermont and so it documents what happens in the state archives. I still very very wish I could have this conversation live and take your questions, but I very much appreciate your time. If you have questions you can contact the reference room at 802-828-2308. We respond within one business day. Our email is sosperiodarchivesatremont.gov for your reference queries, and then you can email me personally at marisa.dobrickatremont.gov. Our reference room is opened by appointment from nine to four, and we have a Twitter handle. Eventually we look forward to being open again without appointment and to assist people far more. I very much appreciate having visitors and would love to see you again soon. Thank you so much. Thank you Marisa for a wonderful presentation. Next month we are really excited to bring you Dr. Jess Robinson. He is the Vermont State Archaeologist and a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont, and he is going to present on some of the latest findings about the early Woodlands period here in Vermont. We look forward to seeing you then. And as always, if you enjoyed this presentation and would like to support the Ethan Allen Homestead, please go to the donation link in the description box below or on our website, ethanallenhomestead.org. Thank you very much and we'll see you next month.