 I'm here with some colleagues from the Department of Libraries, April Shaw, Vin Levote, Josh Hughes. And we're very thrilled that you are here. This is a monthly thing that we've been doing. We started doing it in January. So once a month, it's a different topic that we hope is of interest to state employees also open to the public. So welcome to all of you. The next month is going to be about the Vermont refugee settlement. Someone from that organization will come and speak about that. So that'll be, I think, August 20th at noon, same place. Important detail, there's some free books in the back that you can take on your way out. Also, business card is back there. April is the reference librarian for state employees. So if you have any questions that you need answered, she can answer anything. You can also get a state library card if you don't already have one with that. You can get access to online databases, online classes, digital books. So a good thing to have interlibrary loans or anything you need for work or that you need for any other reason as well. So today's speaker, we're so thrilled to have Professor Paul Searles here. He's a professor at Northern Vermont University. He has a new book out which you can buy if you'd like afterwards at the VHS, the Vermont History Society store, which is right next door. And he's going to speak to us, have some video to show us, and hopefully have some time for discussion afterwards. So welcome, thank you again for coming. Oh, one more question. How did you hear about this? Because we've had a little bit of struggles with promoting these. So curious to know how people knew about this. So we can make sure to do that in the future. The new letter, Department of Human Resources. OK. Good. Got a random email from a co-worker. We love the random email. Department of Library, e-mail, and the common marketing group across the government. Excellent. Yay. Thank you, April. Any other things from Porch Forum, anybody? I think I just got a room for a little offline for the argument. Yeah. Excellent. Well, thank you all for coming, and welcome. Professor Searles, thank you. This is going to be a good one. Yeah, thanks so much for coming. I know it's really beautiful weather and all that. So I'm really grateful. And it feels like a lot of people. So yeah, I've been teaching Vermont history at the university level for 25 years. And it's incredibly a privilege to be able to do that, to say the least. And after a certain point, it's kind of like I feel an obligation to tell the Vermont history community of the Vermont people, have you learned anything? Do you have anything actually useful to say? So I wrote this book, which, as Joy said, is available upstairs in the bookstore. And to some extent, like I've said, my piece in the book. And so I hope you'll go read it. But for those of you who haven't read it, I'll do a little summary of it. And for those of you who might have, I'll give you some of the ideas behind where I was going with it. And in this small picture, what I want to get across to you within the next 25 minutes or so is why the head of the Development Commission in Vermont, which was the state body that was responsible for stimulating the economy, why the chair of the Development Commission in the late 40s and early 1950s was a refugee from New York City who was like a hard core back to the lander who hated development and hated change, which doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. But then again, one of the wonderful things about teaching Vermont history is that this state makes no sense at all. It is just a giant bundle of paradoxes and dilemmas that get more and more complex as you go through the 20th century. And so that's where I want to get you in a short, you know, and that's the narrow picture. The big picture is the book I was trying to write was about the relationship between the how people in Vermont and outside Vermont have thought about conceived and acted upon the physical landscape, how they've acted upon conceived the human landscape and the relationship between these two things. And that is the bottom line for me is the relationship between the physical and the human landscape across this state. There was a time in the 1880s, which is really sort of where the book picks up, when state leaders, generally speaking, absolutely deplored the state of the human landscape in rural Vermont. The people who lived in rural towns were the people left behind when all the ambitious people had left, all the energetic people had left and moved out to the Midwest or to Boston or wherever. And they were dissipated. They were Yankees who had married their cousins or even worse, they were French Canadians. And this was a real problem. And the problem went from the human landscape, a group of people who had the terrible flaw of liking the way things already were. There's a reason why they chose to stay. And this had an impact on the physical landscape. And people talked, state leaders, so to speak, talked about the physical landscape stemming from the human landscape as being a place that was stagnant, that was dull, that was signs of failure. And so in 1888, this guy who owned a knitting mill that made women's underwear in Bennington, whose name was Alonzo Valentine, was appointed to be the first commissioner of agriculture. And it was this new position. And he was just supposed to gather statistical evidence and make recommendations about what can we do in order to save rural Vermont since it's in such terrible decline and stagnation. And with no relationship to the actual mandate he was given, he decided what the solution for rural Vermont was, is to import Swedes. And this was his big program. Now, when I wrote my first book, for about a year, the newspapers are full of talk about Alonzo Valentine's Swedes program. And he actually did hire a guy he knew from Nebraska who was a Swede to go back to Sweden to this very poor rural part of Sweden and bring back Swedes. And he did. In April of 1890, the guy arrived with about 55 Swedes. It's the representatives of about 20 families. And he split them up and he put, there was a colony as he put it in Wilmington, one in Burshire, and then he dropped his third colony down in a town called Land Grove because there was a charcoal, there was a timber operation where they could get jobs. Do people, has anyone ever here been to Land Grove? It's a magical place. I didn't really know much about it until I started doing this book. But so he dropped them down in Land Grove and then the program was considered to be a complete failure and the commissionership was abandoned in the fall of 1890 and everyone in the state agreed never to talk about it again. And the Swedes persisted. There was five families and they had numerous children so that by the census of 1900, there were 32 Swedes in Land Grove counting the parents and the children. And they intermarried with French Canadians and worked, working class jobs and got up on with their lives. In the meantime, Valentine, when he had been doing this program, he'd gotten together the first ever comprehensive list of Vermont farms for sale supposedly to settle Swedes on them. But what people discovered was that Swedes didn't want these abandoned farms. The people who wanted them were people who wanted cheap summer homes. And because the program was so weird, it was like news of the weird thing, the word went up across the country, to San Francisco, to Dallas, all over that Vermont was recruiting Swedes. The message was that Vermont land is cheap. You can have all the Vermont, you can have a Vermont farm really cheap. They're practically giving them away to Swedes. And yeah, yeah. And so the boom in summer tourism that happened in the 1890s, and that is the big dividing line, in a lot of ways between the old Vermont and the Vermont that we know now, would have happened for a variety of reasons. But Valentine's program was really essential in publicizing the fact that Vermont farms were available and cheap, in drawing together a list of farms for sale, in drawing, he drew together a network of people in small towns willing to act as contacts because he received this enormous number of letters from people from Boston, Connecticut, and New York saying, I hear that farms are really cheap. So the Board of Agriculture, when the program was discontinued, took Valentine's list and discovered that you could sell these farms to people who want summer homes. So for about two decades, the Board of Agriculture was the body that promoted tourism. And people agreed that didn't make any sense after a while. So then what was founded was the Vermont Bureau of Publicity, the first agency of its kind around the country that was specifically devoted to using state money to promote tourism. And off they were running. And so the Bureau of Publicity had this very specific narrative, which was that what they were selling was the physical landscape. They were not selling the human landscape. They were selling Vermont as America's vacation land, as unspoiled was often their slogan, as a place that was America's Switzerland, as having cushiony gravel to drive on. Yeah, constantly their advertisements and big-sea newspapers are like, come see our cushiony gravel. So yeah, and I don't know what, yeah, I know, which is not a great band name, cushiony gravel. But the thing about it was that what was remarkable to me about the Bureau of Publicity in the 1910s and the 1920s, when it really hit its stride, particularly after Coolidge became president, was that they treated the transition of farms to summer homes as being this wonderful thing. And you go all the way up to like the Vermont Commission on Country Life's report in 1930, two sections of it were written by the head of the Bureau of Publicity, whose name was Walter Crockett. And that just confirmed everything that had been happening, the narrative for the last 15, 20 years, which is, hey, isn't it great? We did a study of five towns, and in 1910, there were only 11 farms available for sale, but now there's 60, and it isn't a great. And I'm thinking, well, you know, the loss of every farm, the transition of every farm from agriculture to summer homes, that's a tragedy for someone else. That's a father and a wife who can't hand the farm down to their children. That's a children who assumed they would farm themselves, who now have that future cut off from them. But there's no recognition that what is apparently wonderful for summer home buyers is a tragedy for rural Vermonters. The human landscape really didn't matter to an extraordinary extent. There are some voices in this era, the 1910s and 20s, who were like, you know what, we actually, this is weird, this is wrong. Zephyne Humphrey was a writer in Dorset, and Dorset became one of the most thoroughly summer homes, second home towns. And she wrote in the 1920s like, well, first the physical landscape gets ruined because instead of having that grazing landscape that you're selling as being beautiful, although you seem to be indifferent to the loss of the people who create that landscape, that's all turned into pleasure grounds in which she found much uglier. But the human landscape, nine months of the year, half of the buildings in town are empty and dark and foreboding. And then when these people show up, you can't go to their back door and ask for a cup of sugar. You're not gonna do that. But there was very little recognition amongst state government that it really mattered. Vermonter was stupid with, at this point, a few smaller than 30,000 farms. And it seemed like this wasn't a problem. And it's into this Vermont in 1929 that a guy named Sam Ogden arrived. And like when I say, you know, Landgrove, I was researching the Swedes, and then, but I looked around, and Landgrove, the whole town, particularly its village, is the creation of this guy named Sam Ogden. And Ogden was from Elizabeth, New Jersey. He was, his father had an insurance company, and he ended up, of course, having to go work for his dad in the insurance business, and he hated it. He'd served in the front lines in World War I, and had sort of an existential realization about the emptiness of urban life. And as soon as his dad died, well, one thing that Ogden did in New Jersey he found pleasure in is after he got out of work, he got in the business of flipping houses. And he would buy dilapidated houses, fix them up, sell them, buy another one. And, but he gave up on the city, and him and his wife Mamie drove around America. He'd summered in Peru, which is right next to Landgrove, and he went into Landgrove Village to buy cheese. And, except for one house, there was eight houses and two barns in Landgrove Village. All the structures except the store were empty, were abandoned. So he scraped together $4,000 and he bought all of the structures. He bought all of the, and he wanted to turn it specifically into a summer colony. And what was amazing to him about it was the human landscape. And he's among those sort of back-to-the-land people. If you know Scott Nearing, Sam Ogden and Scott Nearing were very close, although politically they were opposites. And there's a number of these kinds of people, refugees of the Depression. What Sam Ogden said when he got there is the thing that endeared Vermont to Mamie and me was the character of her citizens. These were unique human beings, each with his own special stamp, his peculiarities, his crotchets, and his independent individualism. These were real people, not stereotypes, some were peculiar than others, but thank the good Lord, all of them peculiar. Landgrove was poor. Landgrove had a reputation for being the people on the wrong side of the tracks. But he thought that they were the real kind of people who stood in contrast to the shallow, plastic people he knew in New York City. And so the lesson that he took from them that he wanted to already learn was that you can have in a small town a self-directed life. If you want food, you grow it. If you wanna have tools, you start a forage and you make your own tools. If you wanna have a good school, you get involved and you build yourself a good school. And most of all, if you wanna get involved in civic life, if you want to make your community a better place, then you become involved in the town's politics, which he did, he became tax collector and overseer of the poor and a number of select men right away. And this was the magical thing about small towns is that you can actually be in control of the forces that shape your own life. And that was magical for him. He got himself elected to the legislature in 1935 because he wanted to stop the Green Mountain Parkway, which was gonna go straight through Peru and destroy Landgrove. And once he did that, he became just in mess, he became the chairman of the Committee on Conservation and Development. He became engaged in conservation efforts. He was a big conservationist. He submitted the legislation that founded the Water Resources Board. He took up the fight in the late 1930s against billboards and fought a 30-year battle to fight billboards. And what he thought he was doing was trying to save the physical landscape before it became despoiled like everywhere else. But it's not really the case. What he was doing was he was trying to shape the landscape to make it look like what he thought it should look like. In the meantime, his summer colony was a big success. He knew all these artists. He was a musician. He was one of the founders of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. I mean, he's everywhere in that era in Vermont. And he attracted to Landgrove, people buying second homes, these people who were architects and musicians and puppeteers and painters so that Landgrove by the mid 1930s, late 1930s was this amazing community of artists. And when all the village houses were taken up and there were still more people from New Jersey artists, Nathan Milstein, Vladimir Horowitz, all these musicians would come there in the summer. Well, of course, when the village was full up, well, then he'd start buying the houses of people like the Swedes who had the parents had mostly stayed, but the kids were leaving because what were they gonna do? The old like foundation of the state's economy was really three things. Was dairy farms, was extractive industries, particularly in Landgrove, you're talking about lumber, but also quarrying, things like that and manufacturing, small-scale manufacturing. And it was clear by the 1930s, all three of these things are in decline. And it was clear to people like the Vermont Planning Board that we're gonna have to find something to replace these things. And meanwhile, and what the Planning Board decided, I'll just tell you in 1936 with its graphic survey was recreation, tourism. You look in dairy, it's the second biggest industry in the state, dairying's the biggest, but dairying has a dark future. Extractive industries have a dark future. Manufacturing, we can't compete with South Carolina. The only business that has the opportunity to expand, that looks rosy, like it has a good future, is tourism. And so the state increasingly threw itself in that direction. And Landgrove was becoming this well-known artist haven. And the thing about it was that when you start to talk about the paradoxes involved in Vermont, here's one for you that Sam ran across, which is that he loved the people who were there when he arrived. He loved the people that he brought there who were these wonderful artists who were really stimulating to him. And he wanted the town to stay the same size. And something had to give. And what gave was the original human landscape that he had so much admiration for. So he then was appointed in 1939 to the Department of Conservation Development, which became the Development Commission. And then after World War II, he became the head of that. And he was very clear about what he thought Vermont should be, because coalescing in his mind and in the mind of other people around him was this concept of the Vermont way of life. And the Vermont way of life wasn't just like in the 1920s about the physical landscape being beautiful, it was about a physical landscape but about a human landscape, about a kind of community, a community where you can know everyone, where you can be interdependent, where your voice will really matter, where a small-scale democracy really works, the Vermont way of life, which stood in contrast to modernization everywhere else. And so when he became the head of the Development Commission, he very specifically tried to make it so that any development that occurred would be consistent with his and other people's vision of the Vermont way of life, which ruled some kinds of industries and jobs out. Skiing, he thought, was very consistent with the Vermont way of life. And so he was heavily involved in the early ski industry. His fingerprints were all over it. Other big industries that dispoiled the landscape, he was absolutely hard against. And in 1948, this guy, Earl Newton, who was the head of the Vermont Historical Society and was a good friend of Sam's like everyone else, he wrote in this book, Sam Ogden is no booster. He served first as a member of the Vermont Development Commission and in 1947 became its chairman, yet he has no vast plans to lure great industries into the state nor to promote a great wave of indiscriminate tourist travel. He represents the wise synthesis of the native and the newcomer in his desire to see the state develop along progressive lines without a sacrifice of its individuality and its more or less unique way of life. And so you might ask, what kind of a Development Commissioner is like? No, we don't want any big industries. Sorry, go to New Hampshire. But that's what he wanted. And it is clear that the kinds of jobs that he directed the state away from are the kinds of jobs that the descendants of the Swedes who are in their second and third generation now would have had. And what happened to the Swedes and Landgrove is they gravitated to the cities. They gravitated to Brattleboro, White River Junction, Rutland, Arlington, and they worked truck drivers, sign painters, lumber yards was a big one. And a place like Landgrove had no space for them anymore. But the extent to which Vermonters were still wrestling with, well, the physical landscape's one thing, but the human landscape, that really matters. That's what community is all about, was complicated. And what they did recognize is something that Earl Newton said also in that book, which is something that Sam Ogden would have agreed with. He said, Newton wrote, life in rural communities in Vermont offers the newcomer and his family opportunities for participation in the affairs of the community to an extent not possible elsewhere. In the city's interest in community affairs has practically disappeared. The growth of large centers of population implacably absorbing surrounding towns and villages, the gathering together of ruthless thousands and impersonal and unnatural apartment houses have comprised to bring about the complete disappearance of community spirit in cities. But this isn't so in the country. In the country, the individual finds himself called upon to participate in the affairs of the community in which he lives. It had to remain on a small scale. And the Development Commission and a lot of state leaders recognized that the thing by the 1950s, by the late 40s is Vermont has to stay on a small scale. And if there's a human cost to the landscape, it's worth it. And what they have a hard time wrapping their brain around is the definition of community, which historians have been over many times. Community's not physical. It's about shared relationships. It's about shared experiences. Community accrues over a long period of time. It's like a coral reef, you know? And community exists not in what you can see but what you can't see. And if you replace, and always the Bureau of Publicity, the Development Commission, wanted to keep things dignified. They wanted to attract a smaller number of elite people. And if you're constantly replacing the people who constitute those shared experiences, then you're losing the very community that you're selling. And this is a hard thing for people back in the 50s to wrap their brain around. And in the late 40s, while Sam was the head of the Development Commission, well, Sam was the leader in the founding of Vermont Life Magazine, which very much sells a Vermont way of life that is in contrast to the urban world around it. But he made a series of movies. He commissioned a series of movies that were meant to show to the world what the Vermont way of life was like. And so I'm gonna show you a couple of clips from that just to get a sense about where people were at, where Sam Ogden was at at this point. So this is called Background for Living, 1948. This is a family resort center. While others choose the more rural Vermont of apple blossoms signaling spring in hillside orchids. Some prefer summer horseback trips over miles of little traveled roads and woodland trails. Trails which turned red and gold when autumn shimmers north and through the mountains. And of course, there are the famous mountain slopes where snow lies crisp and deep throughout the winter. What did Vermont need for you? Well, if you're an artist like William Chowdhatt, it would mean an infinite variety of subjects for your brush and can. To Sam Ogden, it is meant to create a satisfaction of restoring a once abandoned community to figure out life largely by the work of his own hands. So two things about this. First, if I was the head of the Development Commission and I had licensed these movies, I'd be like, oh, I totally wanna be in it. Oh yeah, you're not gonna make it with that. I gotta be in it, you know? Also, I can't think of what says development commission, development more than senior citizens playing croquet. So yeah. So that's just so you get a sense of where it's going. Now, part three here, Small Town Democracy. What do you mean as a place of work and a place to live? Need the church on the ground or perhaps on the hill? And above all, it will mean a community. It will mean a community that's home then. And that's what the Development Commission was selling. They're selling not just the physical landscape but the community landscape, the churches, the town meeting, the main street with the buildings around it, the people who you will be best friends with and to depend upon and rely upon and have those long-term relationships with. But it's not as easy as that. That sense of deep community doesn't develop the minute you buy a house. It doesn't work that way. And interspersed through this movie in four separate segments is a story about this very white, very middle-class family of four from this city who are looking for that special sense of community. And they come up to Vermont and they're looking at houses and there's real estate agents showing them around. And all the while, the real estate agents are like, well, I'm not gonna sell you a house now because I don't know if you're the right kind of people. And he interviews them and browbeats them and humiliates them and on and on until at the end, it comes to a very happy conclusion. And this is the very end of the movie. And it goes like this. That's the real estate agent. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, now the first thing you think, what is this, Alabama? Like in what world does the real estate agent have the right to choose who gets to live in town or not? Is that really how it worked? And clearly the message on the part of the development commission is these people don't fit in. If you're black, if you're gay, if you're Catholic, I don't know. Depends. If you have only two kids, you're probably okay. If you have six. I mean, really clearly what they're doing as they had been doing for the previous going back to the SWE program was trying to manipulate the human landscape so it mirrored what they thought it should be like and in some way be consistent with the physical landscape that had been so carefully cultivated all this time. There's one more point to this movie that really does it for me, which is I think a really salient point. And that kid. And that girl. Are they gonna stay after they're 18? What are the chances they're gonna stay in that town when they're after their college age? And I live in Danville. And I have no problem. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to have, say that heterosexual white families of four should not occupy these towns. The problem is when there's too many, when it becomes the critical mass. In a place like Danville, it's really clear who are the kids, you can tell in kindergarten who are the kids who are gonna stay, who are being raised to stay and who are the kids being raised to leave. And I mean, if my kids wanna live in Danville, it's fine. It's not gonna happen though. I mean, which is fine. But there needs to be some sort of recognition that you can't replace the human landscape and not lose that sense of community that's so important. And Sam Ogden had gotten a big fight with the governor and resigned from the Development Commission and went on to serve on this board and that board and soil advisory boards. And he was heavily involved in conservation. He founded, was one of the founders and that was the first chair of the Vermont Natural Resources Council. He was Governor Hoffs, the chairman of the Committee on scenery and preservation. I mean, he was intimately involved through the 1960s in efforts to conserve the state. He finally got his billboard law. He was thrilled about that. But what he really wanted was a statewide zoning law because he understood and he'd been a bureaucrat and had been building bureaucratic structures for a long time now that what happens in one town affects a region. What happens in a region affects the state. And he understood that, but he also loved the small town and small town democracy. And so when reapportionment happened in 1965, he was horrified. He thought it was the worst thing that could happen to the state. And after reapportionment, it was finally possible for him to get that statewide zoning law, which would have been impossible while people from small towns dominated the legislature. And that's the position that Vermonters found themselves in by the 1950s and 60s. And after, which is you're pulled in lots of different directions. There's a lot of paradoxes involved in Vermont by that point. And the central one, if I can state it succinctly, is that making Vermont look natural take a lot of work. And that's what people discovered. Making Vermont look natural took a lot of work. And if you wanna have a traditional landscape, you need to have a dynamic community. If you wanna have Vermont look traditional, you need to think in unconventional ways. If you wanna save small town democracy, you need to build the infrastructure of bureaucracies and management and zoning and regulation that makes Vermont theoretically continue to be the same state and have Vermonters be in control of its future. And so that was the problem. And it ended up that Sam Ogden ended up very unhappy late in life. He got really grouchy by the late 60s. He was upset a lot of things to say the least, but he would often say, I know about planning because I'm one of the biggest planners in the history of this state and there's too much planning. And we need to have a lot less planning because planning destroys democracy even though we need planning. And that's kind of like the position that I think that Vermonters found themselves in as the 20th century moved along. I wrote this book about the 19th century a while back and it was about team A and team B. The rural people and the urban people and they hated each other and they fought over things like schools and whatever else. And increasingly in the 20th century, it's not a matter of the conflict between this group and that group. It's the conflict within people. Because we all want this and we all want that but you can't have both at the same time and you have to choose and you have to make compromises and you have to make sacrifices. And that's the story, the lesson of the 20th century for Vermonters. And so the tension between preserving the physical landscape while changing and preserving the human landscape while still bringing new people here to improve the state because of course that's something we essentially need leaves us as a conflicted people. And I don't think it's 1910 where we're completely indifferent to the recognition that the human landscape really matters as much as the physical landscape. But I am always now having said my piece interested in how people feel Vermont's doing recognizing and acting upon the need to know that if you wanna have strong communities you need to preserve the human landscape too. So I mean historians are terrible at this is what we should do in the future. That's not our job. Or this is what it's like now. But I mean how good a job does Vermont do preserving the, acting in order to make communities strong communities by preserving the human landscape. And so that was 35 minutes. I actually started about four minutes late. It was my, I'm telling you I'm a pro. Anyway, I, you know, and that's what I have to say and these are the things I think about when I teach and you know, obviously I have students who are like, oh yeah, I mean it seems like my town's not a place for people like me anymore. I hear that all the time. And I think that's sad because a lot of the people who move here are looking for a special kind of community. And if they too many of them move here then they'll find that that sense of community is obliterated by people very much like themselves. And so if you can find the perfect balance that'd be great. But it's quite elusive. Anyway, Joy, I think that I really want to turn the conversation over in the time you have or if you want to bolt and go out in the sun I'd be happy. Yeah, please. I'm talking just the people, the people. It's much easier to make a town continue to look the same or to mandate that everyone have a white house with black shutters than it is to mandate that the people who are raising their kids to stay should be able to see their kids stay. And that last, one of the last comments you made about your students feel like the town they grew up in isn't there where they can live anymore. What, can you say more about them? Is it too rich or? Well too rich is often a problem. And there are these big forces that is not Sam Ogden's problem, is not the Bureau of Publicities' problem in which there was an old economy, a 19th century economy, depending on agriculture and extractive industries, that would have died anyway. But the question is what do you replace it with? And to a great extent what the state decided as policy was we're gonna replace it with tourism, second homes, skiing, recreation, and then we're going to put in place policy zoning regulation that make it so the state looks consistent with that. And that does lead to the state choosing we're gonna have these jobs and not those jobs. And a lot of the people who grew up in really rural towns would like to stay but they can't figure out how are you gonna make it work? And they feel aggrieved quite often about it. And I'm not sure that the state being like well what are we gonna do? What is the second half of the 20th century gonna look like? Tourism, that's the answer. I'm not sure that was the wrong decision but it did have consequences. And not just on the physical landscape but on the people, on the human landscape. Does that make sense? Yeah, please. I'm thinking about Kentucky today, coal mines and things like that where the Rust Belt on this town is just dying now. Are there other states that went through a similar process to Vermont during that same timeframe that you would compare and contrast to? Did it better or worse? Okay, well, I'm a Vermont historian, you know. I know. So, I mean, I think that Maine is a better example of New Hampshire. And one of the things that seems to have been the development in Maine for my reading of it is that there's 95 and on the coast side of 95 it's one culture and on the interior it's a completely different one. And the people in the interior feel similarly aggrieved about well how are we gonna make this work? What are the resources we have? How can our kids stay? So, I mean, speaking regionally I think that is probably a similar in some ways although Vermont seems to be more of a statewide comprehensive thing. I mean, and I'd be happy to hear about Kentucky. I mean, how is Kentucky facing these problems? Is that the infrastructure? I thought it was almost to keep the coal mines so I'm not really sure how they're facing the coal mines. Yeah. Well, is that what you're saying? You're talking about the coal mines? Uh-huh. And yeah, coal mines is dead. People are leaving. I think there's a similar feeling to this but you're not gonna get too rid of it about that much of a lot of talk. Well, yeah, I mean, Vermont, what particularly same Ogden what he faced in the 60s when he was in his late 60s, early 70s was the interstates. And so you go from Vermont being this rural backwater in which you're facing one set of challenges to keep Vermont looking the same to the state being within a day's drive of 100 million people. And he called the highways death traps and said, there's no reason we don't need them. They're all this, you know, but there was this recognition. The Hoff administration is such a crucial turning point in the state's history. Where it was like, all right, we know this is coming. We know that we have lost the old economy. We've got the highways coming, we've got this new economy. Something needs to be done now. And Governor Davis, of course, shared that concern and acted upon it, you know. And so if you look around the state now the way that we think and talk and act about it. I mean, really the 60s up through the early 70s that's the crucial point when it was like, we can be this, we can that. We're gonna do that. To which there are consequences. Yeah, please. So a lot of this talk sort of focused on the homogeneity or at least the kind of replication of that. Is there anything to talk about the 60s and 70s? Did the counter-cultural movements sort of later became associated with sort of the fabric of the state having an economic or developmental impact at this time? Or does that predate the book or the focus of the book? So the book ends in the mid-70s. And well, the biggest impact was that Vermont exceeded the nation's population growth rate between 1800 and 1810. And then it did not exceed the nation's population growth rate on average again until the 1970s. So that's a long period of stagnation. 170 years of stagnation or whatever. And so that did reinforce for people the idea that something needs to be done. Or else we're gonna get run over like a freight train and the state's gonna end up being something which we haven't been carefully carving it to be for the last 70 or 80 years. I mean, that was the big impact. People came not just because they were hippies but they came for IBM. And the impact on Chittenden County obviously was dramatic in that era. So generally speaking, I mean, that was a period where people were like, well, how are we gonna control this growth? How are we gonna shape it? So that it's consistent with the Vermont way of life. And I think that probably everyone here knows as well as I do that the long-term impact of that cohort of people who moved here in the 60s and 70s is that they're reaching retirement. And people between 30 and 60 produce all of the wealth and then children and senior citizens eat it up, sop it up and so that cohort moving into retirement age, obviously as probably more of you know than I do is some people think is a ticking time bomb. That's a long-term impact. Yeah. Oh, God, Sam Ogden hated the hippies but he wrote all of these books about country living and he was big on writing about organic farming. He was an expert on organic farming. And in the early 70s, he would be out there in his field and all these hippies would show up. He'd be like, dude, you're my guru, teach me. He was like a really conservative guy who hated hippies. Yeah, his son says he was unfailingly polite and helpful even though he was gritting his teeth the whole time. But yeah. Yeah, he esteemed Scott Nearing more highly than anyone else on this earth even though they were politically at opposite ends of the scale. They were complete political opposites. But they got along. But I mean they had to some extent different goals. Like Sam Ogden was like, we need, excuse me, excuse me, and he was a big promoter of Stratton. And of course it was the development of Stratton that drove Scott to Maine. So the NCI down there. Yeah. I've lived in rural England. Whenever the, this ish escape, what we need in Florida, et cetera, those are areas that are common models. Okay, they have state, I mean country-wide state and industrial planning. But you go to rural England and there are these wonderful villages. They're no longer affordable by the average person, but not all that long ago. I lived there 30 years ago and they were affordable. But now it's all section homes. Rich actors from London buy these old houses. In the Cotswolds, yeah. Yeah, this is closer to Oxford, but yeah. But they have transportation. They have rail. So people can live in a village and work in Oxford, London, and Reading. And the same journey, they're unique as a big employment center, obviously, as we've seen. But people can easily find rail. And so the current conversation about reestablishment of some rail in Vermont, they could be different. But they easily get to have their own rail. You know, the rest of the world has done it. There are other parts of the world. Yeah, and I mean it's been pointed out to me, people point to like Switzerland as an example where they made a big plan, well what we're gonna do is we're gonna save the small farms and we're gonna, each individual place has its own little cheese and it's a craft economy and we're gonna, that's wherever Vermont should go. So the farm to table movement and the farmer's markets and all that, I'm skeptical just on the, I mean I think those things are wonderful but I'm a middle class guy. That doesn't deepen the class divide because those things cost so much more at the farmer's market than they do on a grocery store shelf. That's why Vermont's so messed up. Yes, the 1912. Declining of the farm to what was really the soil. Stretching the analogy too far would be easy but the eugenics section, and Henry Perkins' part of the Vermont Country Life Commissions Report is the famous part, which I really didn't need to do with in the book, it's been dealt with Nancy Gallagher's book, deals with it beautifully. But what really struck me was the extent to which it seemed like the Bureau of Publicity, the publicity service by that point, they were doing the work of the eugenics movement not by sterilizing people but by making it so that they couldn't, their town wasn't fit for them, they had to go somewhere else. And this was the story of the Swedes, who by the time you get to the third, fourth generation, Brattleboro was a big destination. I often wonder how much, having grown up together in Landgrove and London Dairy, they recognize each other on the streets. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it's done right, maybe it won't deepen the class divide but that small time economy now seems to be something very different from what it was like in the 1880s. Yeah. Thank you for your presentation, it's been very interesting and I appreciate the time for the engagement here now. Something that really struck me about what you said in the division between the physical and the human landscapes and talking about the people who say they couldn't be failures because they didn't migrate to the urban centers or out west for the opportunities out there but then the people who were brought in. I deal a lot of economic data and you see a lot of economic data presented today in terms of rural, urban versus rural but in touting the urban successes but when you redefine rural consistently over time, you actually see that these rural areas are now just defined as urban because they've grown up so much, right? So that if you used to be rural and now you've had a population small, they got moved in the urban growth. So I was just wondering if you could comment about your thoughts on today and the similarities you see between those who potentially stay in Vermont and kind of have to face similar labels as like, oh, why didn't you go to Boston or New York City for the opportunities and the rural nature of the opportunities going forward? Again, you're asking me about today. Okay, I mean historians are always kind of like. Just your thoughts. But my thoughts, well, so yeah, I mean it's kind of like if you want to have a model like I was saying about my first book, right? And it was like, there's the people on the Hill Farms and there's people in Burlington and Rutland and Montpelier and they disliked each other. And then somewhere around the 1940s or 50s, the people in the countryside moved to the population centers and the people in the population centers moved to the countryside and they sort of passed each other in 1951 or something like that on their way to replacing living in the opposite places. And so I think that to a great extent what you're talking about is how do you provide working class jobs for people in places like White River Junction and Brattleboro and things like that? I mean, your question was about going forward. I was just thinking more about the similarities you see today about community and how if you have a certain population that are staying, the ones that are leaving, the ones that are coming in, so the balance of immigration, down migration and how community can continue in their month. I think to a much greater extent it's not like the people who, there's not a public narrative that the people who are intelligent, college graduates educated in a formal sense or whatever, if they say there's something wrong with them. Which used to be the case. I mean, how do you keep boys in the farm with the big challenge of the 19th century? And that was thought by both the urban people and the rural people and they've had very different solutions for how you accomplish that. But to some extent, metaphorically, how do you keep the kids in the farm remains a really big challenge. And I mean, I don't have, there's a much better educated people on this issue than me. But I mean, I think it is, we all know there's a lot of kids who would love to stay in Fremont-Pouquette. Yeah. I'm one of those kids that grew up in Fremont and left and came back and maybe it's heresy to say it, but I feel like sometimes we worry too much about that about keeping the kids in the farm. That there's this kind of, it strikes me this pervasive valuing of Fremonters by chance as opposed to Fremonters by choice. And I think if you all, if you put us all in a room and force us to say, well, what are the qualities that makes a Fremont or other than just being born here or living here, you could come up with those qualities. And it strikes me that, and a lot of it is about what you talked about today, like the relationship to the working landscape and things like that and the valuing of the environment and different ideas like that. And I feel like our economic development strategies that focus on really just ensuring that people, the boys stay on the farm, as opposed to attracting the type of workforce or folks to live in Fremont that have a common sense of focus about what it means to be a Fremont or not a choice, I think. Yeah, I agree. I think there's a much broader recognition of that. I mean, it was state policy that what kind of people do we want here? That kind. They're not a spectrum of people we want that kind. White middle class heterosexuals. I think we're in a much better place than we were then. You know, you know. And that was, it was public policy. It was, you know, comprehensively, that's how they felt. What we want to attract is a small number of well-to-do elitist people. People who make their living with their brains, not their hands. I think we're in a different place now than we were then. At least I hope we are. Yeah, please, yeah. Question of scale seems to really be the thrust as much as cultural appropriation. I feel like the scale is where cultural appropriation becomes possible in a community with a certain size. It's really exciting to see so many people from the Department of Lightways here, because as a small town librarian, what we're facing is that scale. What we love about the scale is the intimacy and the way that the social rules are sort of carved around the relationships that people have with each other. But then there's not enough diversity and there's not enough money. And so I'm not quite sure the diversity issue is something that policy can address quite the same way as resources. And I know that you don't have very many taxpayers in the state, but one of the things that came up in the conversation recently talking about how schools are consolidating and maybe libraries and small towns need to be thinking about doing that too. And I, as a small town librarian, don't want to be part of the consolidation, but I would love a model where the state provided shared expertise. We have, for example, a bookkeeper that the state gave us access to. So we didn't have to come up with the resources to pay for a bookkeeper because of the scale. And I'm just wondering if you know of any examples of that having worked and I've definitely talked about that, about the state serving a role of sort of bringing in some of the resources that could be shared that need to be facilitated. Consolidating the back of the house stuff? Yeah, like town planning, for example. Well, at least as far as libraries go and Joy would know more about this than me, but the closing of the regional libraries was a tragedy. I mean, in St. John's Bay, we had that regional library. You know what I'm talking about? And it over to be in a closed. And that was consolidation. And if it was necessary, it was necessary. I mean, I can understand it in that way. That's different. I think that someone in the audience here would want to speak to something. You're talking about town planning. Well, I'm just talking about there being a pool of municipal resources, right? Expertise that a larger town can have, for example, a development department. And on that staff, there's someone whose job is to grant grants. But in the small town of Frankfield, we had to hire a grant consultant to help us bear a grant. But it actually cost us more because of scale. So that's what I'm talking about is if you can perceive of or compare of any models where some of those resources, human resources, are small towns have access to human resources through the state. Yeah. I'll tell you this, right? So Vermont's full of paradoxes and dilemmas. And one of the most eloquent statements of this was there was this series on Vermont Public Television called The Governors. And Chris Graff was interviewing people. He was interviewing Phil Hoff. And Chris Graff said, it seems like after your administration there was much more of a sense of regional thinking, much more of a sense of statewide thinking. And Phil said, I am a total believer in local control. It's just that in order to make a little control viable, you need to think on a regional and a statewide basis, which is a paradox, but makes a lot of sense. And so people have been thinking that way in order to make communities independent and viable and decision-making on a local scale, you need to have big structures in order to serve as the foundation for them. Not in libraries, but the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, to some degree, does what you're talking about. And I'm so glad you brought up libraries because I think about that all the time when you're talking about preserving the things that are really great and local and those personal relationships like you mentioned. I mean, I think that's very important to preserve, but at the same time, I've tried to run a small library. You don't have a lot of money, you don't have a lot of time. Most of the people are not, don't have the skills, not most of the people, but there's, you know, people don't necessarily have the skills that they need or the time to use the skills. And it's sort of a microcosm of what's happening on a larger scale that desire to preserve the things that are great about the small town library versus the struggles of it and the unsustainability of many parts of it. So, yeah, we're thinking about that all the time. It's like, you know, over the course of the 20th century, like I say about the complex within us, I think that there is, to a great extent, Vermont is generally speaking, all want the same thing, but they can't decide how to get there and they can't agree what to sacrifice, you know, because sacrifices do need to be made. They've been being made for a long time. I think about it, in this town planning, actually, every small town has a volunteer plan and commission, you know, seven, 15 people depending on the town. And they're volunteers. Most of them don't know a thing about planning, but there's a regional planning commission in every county. Well, no, multiple counties. We have central Vermont regional planning commission and they are the experts. So our town planning commission, we don't know what they're involved in planning. We can go to the regional planning commission for all that advice. And they are there for that specifically. So, it seems like the libraries could do that. Can I do some things? Yeah, I mean, there is a lot of resource sharing and we're always working for more and we have like four of us of the five that are here from the department and our title is consulting them. So the idea is that, you know, that's one of the models that we're working toward. But yeah, definitely more. You want to say? Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the regional libraries. The decision-making of mine creating the regional library system is so prolonged. It is to address the problem of local planning libraries, local planning libraries, in many cases, not being able to provide the resources that the state felt was necessary. But instead of doing a lot of remuneration or some other plan of consolidating building a county-wide system or something like that, the state created those regional libraries which actually helped back the development of the small library that they were in here. We'll talk about it some more. Sure. Okay, I think people are going back to their jobs. There was one more. Oh, please, yeah! I just wanted to point out the interesting point that you made about the SWIM program. Yeah. It reminded me of the recent state program, the state-of-state program, that actually affects relatively few individuals, but the notoriety in the national media attention that was given sort of echoes what you described. Yeah, was it $10,000? Was that the number? Yeah, I know, yeah. I wrote an article for Vermont Magazine, I think, and with the Swedes, and I use that as my entree to it. It's $10,000, yeah, it's a $10,000 grant. Is that as sinister as the idea that there's too many French Canadians and Irish people, so we need to replace them with Protestants? I mean... I don't think so, so I'm too many old people. Yeah. It is what we do. Yeah. But I guess we are still sort of engineering the human landscape. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you everybody for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.