 Steve Perkins, I'm the Executive Director of the Vermont Historical Society, and I want to thank you all so much for coming out tonight. I can't tell you how excited I am about this room. We live with this room all the time, and to see the transformation in here over the course of a few short weeks is really quite amazing, and of course all of this transformation is spurred along by this lady here. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. As you saw in the press release or on the invitations, it said Lady of the Hills, so we're trying to think, what do we call this little installation here that talks about the three different embodiments of agriculture that we've had on the state house, or have on the state house, and landed on Lady of the Hills, because I was thinking back to that apocryphal statement that Ethan Allen made, and he said that the Lords of the Hills are not the Lords of the Valleys, so why can't we have a Lady of the Hills as well, and let's talk about our Lady of the Hills, and so hence our theme of our small exhibit here is Lady of the Hills. I certainly want to start out by thanking our members, our donors, our supporters, and tonight we want to recognize those members of our new 1838 Society. We have a brand new wall, it's directly through that door, you can go take a look at it, but it's a way of recognizing all of you that have supported the Historical Society over time, so that cumulative gift of being involved, of taking care of us, of giving us your time and your resources for years, some people 50, 16 years, that's what we're recognizing with this society, so please look for your name out on the wall, and for those of us who are in your nation, out on the wall is something to aspire to. To help fund and make this particular exhibit a possibility, possible, first I want to thank the State of Vermont, a huge resource committed by the State to help bring this room to the level that you see it now. The Pizzagalli Family Foundation has helped with this as well, and the Farm Families of Cabot Creamy Cooperative, I hope you have tried some great product out here, and their financial support has also been very welcome, and I believe we have a member of the Farm Families of Cabot, Jenny Nelson, who's going to come say a few words. Thank you. It's really an honor and a privilege to be here this afternoon to represent the 800 farms, farm families around the state and in New England, who are now Cabot, and have been for just 100 years. We've been celebrating all year long, and it's great to have this opportunity to be in this room, the smelling room, and to see our Dear Friends series. Number two. I couldn't help but want to spend just a tiny bit of time talking to you about our farm. My husband's a 7th generation farm. We have two sons who are 8th generation. We do have the 9th generation living on the farm. It's called Home Acres Farm. It's located in Rygate Corner. My husband has a brother on a fryer near and a cousin on another fryer very near, and so we call ourselves a real dairy community. When I got married to my husband on a short 47 years ago, he would go on to these meetings, and he told me I couldn't go until I was initiated and brought into the organization correctly. And he really bugged me. They wouldn't let me come into the middle of the union to look at. It was called Blue Mountain Grange. Well, I soon learned that women are held in really high esteem in the agricultural community through the Grange organization. Do you know that the first time I walked in there, there was a table at the head of the room with three what they called races. One was Pomona to represent the goddess of fruits. One was Flora to represent the Roman goddess of flowers. And in the middle was Cirrus. The goddess of greens is what they said. The goddess of all foods. But anyway, I was really kind of glad that I married a farmer. Life's never been in all sense. And I always thought, well, I'll just get everybody to drink one more glass of milk every day, and then we'll be gone. I didn't quite work that way. And farmers through the years have found that if they can't promote their dairy products, it's to all of our benefits. And we appreciate the fact that you have allowed us the opportunity to sponsor in part this celebration today. I will tell you that I was here in Montpelier in the late 60s, and Ceres was up there. Had no clue what that meant. And when I finally found out Ceres was up there, and I was married to a farmer, I can't tell you how much that meant to me that the state of her mind cared enough to put the goddess of agriculture at the top of its capitol. And I thank you for everything you have done to preserve her, to build her new again, and to keep her coming along with a new generation of farmers. Thank you very much. David, we have to follow that. So my next step here is easy in that I want to just thank a number of people who made the installation of this room possible. I'm going to start on the state of Vermont side, and I'll start with Commissioner Chris Cole. He was here earlier, had to step out for saying, yes, this is a great project. You need to move ahead with this. And absolutely, David Sheetz, the state curator, Jack Linga, who is around here somewhere, as well in David's office, both advocating for the statue needed to come here, and that the work on this room was important to the state of Vermont. Kevin Henderson, who oversees maintenance of facilities, who worked on getting the resources for this space. Gene Crockett, is Gene still here? Gene and her crew, she is a trainer for a lot of the facilities folks. They did this floor. And I was lovingly spent a full week on this floor. It was yellow. You could barely see what was in here. They took all the wax off. They polished it all down. They put new protector on it. Really made it shine. I know Gene is very proud of this floor. State of Vermont electricians who helped out. Joe Asia, Kevin White, who are still working on getting series fully installed here. And then outside of state government, Sally Fishburne, who I know is feared in the back, worked on plaster restoration for us. I believe David Gross helped her with that. And then the crew from Meeting House Restoration. Jonathan Schechtman over here, who are there, the professionals in charge of series conservation. And so thank you for that. To the Vermont Historical Society, all of this work on the room, the painting, the plaster, the floors, all finished on Monday. So we then had Monday, and we had a board meeting today. So we had Monday until last night to get all of the paintings installed, the vanners installed, the labels of the artifacts in here. And so thank you very much to Victoria Hughes and Amanda Gustin and I mean corporate especially for making that happen many, many hours. And really her fingers were wide. We felt we couldn't just move the statue pieces in here. We also had to surround it in true late 19th century splendor. And it was a great opportunity to pull paintings from the Vermont Historical Society collection and get them on view, ideally in a long-term format here in the Snelling Room. So I know most of you are here to find out what's going on here. What are we talking about? And so I've asked David Scheetz to come and talk a bit about this whole project. So last year, 2018 was, I've been here, meaning in Montpelier, working with the state house for 40 years. And I walked into this lobby in 1979 and it didn't look like this. And VHS was crammed into just the Pavilion building at that time with all the collections that mean the most to all of us down in the basement of this building, vulnerable to flood. And I think about that year because last year was without any question the most emotional year that I have had in this state. First in April of 2018 when Ceres was lifted off the dome and brought down to earth for the first time since 1938, exactly 80 years that she was up there. And then of course we went through the big dome project all of last year, but I was not prepared for the emotion and the ways of emotion that were not just in my heart and in my being, but were shared largely with all of you and the people all across this state when the new statue carved by Chris Miller, who I believe is somewhere here, and Jerry Williams, who did the model in the corner, those two sculptors brought about the new agriculture. And we're calling her agriculture again because that's what Larkin Mead called her when she was first inaugurated on top of the state house in 1859 and his statue too lasted exactly 80 years. So we're hoping for better, for series three or whoever we call her. We're hoping in fact that Chris's design and the use of mahogany and such will ensure that the new statue on top of the dome, which does look, in my humble opinion, a little more like Larkin Mead's sculpture than the series two, but you be the judge. That statue we hope will last at least 100 years. How long, Chris? 200 years. Do I care three? And she has a hollow for one thing, right, Chris? And she's made of mahogany and she goes up off the dome for periodic maintenance. These are not concepts that the two previous statues were designed for. So we're hopeful for a really long stretch, well beyond the 80 year mark that seems to be observed at this point. And yet, as soon as the original statue came down, she went into a warehouse and she's been drying out ever since. And at a certain point we realized the statue might never dry out and that's when we decided to take her head off, knowing that Dwight Weinell himself worked on the head in a separate workshop behind the state house because at 87 years old he was still the sergeant at arms. Running the building and carving in his spare time. So the head was there, the body was elsewhere, and yes, as you can see around its copper color, it does come off. So we more aggressively conserved and dried the head in the workshop of Jonathan Schechtman and Adam Krakowski. And happily they delivered, designed this wonderful pedestal that we're going to use for the remaining months before the body is reunified with the head. Because this is not the end of this story, right Steve? We plan to bring the body into this room, possibly six months, eight months, two months. Yeah, exactly, it's excellent to have goals. It may be two months, who knows, but we're going to make it possible to bring the body in by actually cutting the statue and allowing the upper two thirds to be observed here. And that will open her up so that we can remove the rot, dry her out a little more aggressively, and then put her on an armature that will hold her in place. We will in the meantime keep the significant chunk that comes off the bottom for posterity and the possibility that modern medical miracles in the future may allow us to put the entire statue right back together again and turn back the clock of time. So it's a very exciting collaboration that we have with VHS and we are thrilled to continue that collaboration with what I would submit is one of the most important projects in Vermont. The goddess has brought us all together. She will continue to reign over us forever and ever and it is a thrill to be a part of appreciating the long history of that reign. Thank you. So we promised all of you that the remarks would be brief tonight. I just wanted to give a few of the high points of what you will see in this room and then allow you the time to explore it on your own. The paintings were all selected that have particular stories or significance to the state of Vermont. Many of them are connected to very or Montpelier and a number of them connect directly to what we're displaying here in relation to the state house. There are guides to the paintings in a pocket against the back door over there. There's only four so you're going to have to share. That's draft so we'll add more if that seems to work out well. So please explore the paintings. Definitely want to point out the Gilman, James Gilman painting here from 1891. Beautiful view of the Vermont state house and you can see the red dome on the state house. So originally the dome was red in that construction. As you move through the small exhibit up here, we were very excited to get out our portrait of Ami Young. I keep calling him Ami Phillips and David keeps saying nope that's the painter Ami Young, the architect. He was the architect of the second state house and there's an image of the second state house here on the wall, low saucer dome. I mentioned that second state house because it was a tragedy of that second state house that led to our embodiment of agriculture and the state house that we have now. January of 1857 that state house, everyone here knows, burned. Almost all the interior was lost, great stories of things being thrown up the windows to save them including the copy of Gilbert's storage towards Washington that now hangs in the house chamber and many of the Vermont Historical Society collections as well as our collections were stored in the dome of that state house. A group of commissioners engaged architect, Thomas Sillaway, to design the third Vermont state house and through that design process there was the decision made that statuary needed to be a part of that. Some of the letters between one of those commissioners George Perkins Marsh and the architect and later the artist survived at UVM and there are fun reads to see what that process was for the creation of this building. I was specifically interested in the letters about the statuary and one of them in particular. So Marsh really, really wanted a number of statutes because they were trying, if he was thinking the United States Capitol, he was thinking pretty big and the architect really pushed back and he said, no, in modern parlance it's going to look dumb. You can't put that many statutes around it. How about one? Why don't we just go with one? So they ended up with one and there's a lot more to the story. There's good articles out there to read that. They ultimately chose young artists from Rattleboro, Larkin, Goldbeath to design the first statue for the state house, as he called it, the embodiment of agriculture within their letters. Statue design, as David said, installed in 1858, dedicated in 1859 and stood for 80 years. Only one fragment that we know of of that statue remains and we have it. It's right here. So we are able to represent the first statue with artifact. It's fascinating to see the paint that they used, the wood that's involved there. David was just telling me about the paint color and how that changed over time. So if you don't definitely take a look at that and understand that first statue, it's very interesting and it really launched Meade's career. He ended up getting many commissions, very famous for his work on Lincoln's tomb and the Ethan Allen statue of which a copy is on the porch here and then the heroic Ethan Allen that's in the Capitol building in the United States Capitol in Washington. So that's the first statue. I have a certain affinity, David. Maybe, maybe it's my age, I didn't know Larkin being like you did. This lady here might be 20, 20 now or maybe it's just a guy, you know. Here is an 87 year old Sergeant at Arms and at the time the Sergeant at Arms, the Sergeant at Arms took care of the building. This guy was fixing stuff and cleaning things and taking care of stuff. He had his, this is his toolbox right here which was recently given to the Roman Historical Society and kept on site and we're in the depths of the Great Depression in 1838. The legislature appropriates money to hire an artist to make a new statue and he approaches the governor and says, you know what, we don't need to spend this money. I can do this. I can just imagine that conversation. You know, I've carved a decoy or two at home. I can do a statue. So, you know, 87 years old and sets up in a workshop behind the state house using these tools carved ahead of the statue. The body was made by two workmen who worked for Dwinella in the state house. And again, I wonder how that conversation went. What kind of wood are we going to use? Well, I don't know. We've got a whole bunch of these big 2x4s. Let's nail them together. It was probably a little more complex, but that's what it's made out. A whole bunch of dimensional lumber, not quite 2x4s, a little larger, but glued and nailed and lots of nails, which we found out once we got her open, it wasn't just glue. It was, it looks like an iron maiden in there. It is a lot of nails. And I think back to some of the things on my own farm and work like taking apart buildings that my grandfather built and why use one nail if you could use 50? It is held together really well. So I think there's that, that Vermont can do attitude of I can make that, I can build that. We can make do with what we have and we can put it on top of the state house and it will be beautiful and people will love it. And that's why I love this statue. And I'm really looking forward to having the rest of the body in here. It will just be beautiful to dominate the room. And I think this room where we hold all of our student programs, we have over 5,000 third and fourth graders mostly from all over the state of Vermont that visit us on an annual basis to be able to be in here to work on their understanding and their love of history, to be surrounded by these beautiful paintings and these statues. I think it's a wonderful thing that we can offer for them. So with that. Steve, could you tell them about the crown? Well the crown. Crocker was, I was so well to wrap up there Crocker. This had a crown on it. The crown which you can see in the image over here on this label was a lightning arrestor. We still have the crown. There are all individual lightning rods, numerous rods, way overkill. Lightning protectors. You need as many lightning rods as you nails the whole thing. So we kept it but we needed a curatorial decision not to include it. We liked it better visually, I think, but we now envisioned it without the crown. And also the crown had an extra foot so we really wanted to keep it. Perhaps a separate chase for the crown. So there's the crown. But with that, I will wrap it up. Please take a look. We've got some great writing. Look closely at the artifacts. Eat more food. We have lots of it. Thank you.