 It's actually broadcasting the name of the room. Is it not? Yeah. I'm over right here. Well, you know all about this. I think I know all about this. Anyway, we have a little piece of business to do first, and that is an annual meeting. We just kind of have to do it. So I would like to start off by suggesting that we reorganize for a little over a year. And that board of directors was elected a year ago. And that consisted of Thumper Colombo, Corrine Cooper, Danny Cone, Paul Cunningham, Jackie Denison, Mike Doyle, Eric Gilbertson, Steve Ritalini, Katharine Grair was elected Treasurer, Beverly Hills Secretary, Jennifer Boyer, Vice Chair, and Penalty for Me Staring the Pops as they elected the Chairman. So that is the board that this organization is being run on right now. Over the last year, we had several activities. We started with our first annual show and tell last year about this time. We did a Common Cracker exhibit at the Royal History Museum at the Pavilion, an opening reception for that affair. And we had a program in the fall in history of the Statehouse News. We developed the Lane exhibit. And we're going to give a little bit more about Lane today at the Walgreens window. I think maybe if you saw that. Our second annual show and tell today, we're going to put a newer exhibit in the Walgreens window within a week or two. That's been a very good thing for us. Middlesex Grange Curtin has a bunch of 17 different ads for Montpelier businesses. And Paul Heller has run up the history of each of those, a very short history of each of those. We plan to exhibit that stage curtain. And this fall, we are planning a Greenmount Cemetery walking tour. So that is some of the activities that we've been engaged in. We're a full bunch. We inherited some money from the past historical society. We have managed to earn as much as we spent. So we still have about the same amount that we started with. But dues are a very important part of our income. You each found a little piece of paper on your chair. We encourage you to join our organization. We don't have a lot of sources of income. Another source of income is sponsorship of our events and the Lane exhibit, for instance, was sponsored by Heading Realtors and Cody Chevrolet. We'll be looking for additional sponsors for additional exhibits. We're also very fortunate to have space at the bridge office. We can use more space. We have a collection to catalog. And we need space to do that. So anybody that knows any free heated space, we need to be happy to listen. The last piece of business we have to do today is to re-elect or to elect four directors whose terms are expiring. And those four people would be Tupper Colombo, Danny Cohn, Corinne Cooper, and myself. So if I didn't hear any other nominations from before, I would invite somebody to make a motion that those four would be re-elected as made. Yes, it's been made and it's been seconded. Sure. And so hearing no discussion on that point, I would invite a vote. All those in favor of letting those four people say, aye. Contrary minded. Okay, it's done. And my notes say one more thing, and that is join our organization. You can do it here or you can do it online. So moving right along, that is the other way of motion to adjourn the annual meeting. It's been made and seconded again by Jennifer and made by Mike. And so the meeting is over and we can start with why we came here, which is a show and tell. Our second annual show and tell. We're going to start with the wayside restaurant, Brian and Karen and Nick Zaccinelli, who are here tonight. And we'd like to tell you a little bit about the wayside and apparently you're going to kind of have to go with the program here. Thank you very much. It's so nice to see so many familiar faces here today. Thanks for the invitation. I have a short presentation. I'd like to open things up for questions and answers and Karen can chime in on the question and answer period. But I'd like to run through a few things for you here. Karen's folks who you know ran the wayside for 30-plus years. We've run the wayside for over 25 years. That's a total of well over 50 years in the El Fede and Zaccinelli families. Since it's show and tell, and I think the last time I did show and tell I was at Ayr Street School over in Barrie, third or fourth grade. So I brought some things along to pass around. So if you could circulate this picture of the wayside. And so in the form of a puzzle, we sell the puzzles at the wayside. A customer put the puzzle together, framed it and gave it back to us. So it's a prize possession. It looks so cool. And it's retro with the old cars and any car buffs would recognize all those different models. So enjoy looking at that. Today the wayside is 105 years old. There were two families that owned the wayside prior to the El Fede and Zaccinelli families. An amazing lady by the name of Effie Baloo opened the wayside in 1918. We call her our founding mother. There's a picture of her in 1908. And she opened the wayside 10 years after the beautiful photo was taken. The United States of America has a founding father, George Washington. The wayside has a founding mother, Effie Baloo. Effie was a pioneer in the hospitality industry. Imagine her as a woman business owner and she couldn't even vote in 1918. It wasn't until two years after opening the wayside that she was allowed to vote in 1920. Effie also had a very challenging start to her new business. Only two months after opening the wayside in July of 1918, the Spanish flu pandemic killed over 50 million people worldwide. The city of Barry was hit particularly hard since a lot of the granite workers had granite dust in their lungs. Her small roadside lunch stand not only survived, but expanded and prospered during the roaring 20s. The wayside has also prevailed through the Great Depression and World War II, many more wars and financial crises. The wayside's biggest challenge to date was navigating the extremely stormy waters of the COVID-19 pandemic. The wayside's second pandemic. Thanks to our first-hand knowledge of the Spanish flu in 1918, combined with a very dedicated staff of over 60 employees, the wayside now is stronger than ever. And I'd like Nicholas to stand up and show off his t-shirt. Show and tell. Turn around and open up your shirt. These are shirts we had printed up as we were emerging from the pandemic. They served as a source of pride and inspiration for our staff that we were wayside, 102 years strong and nothing was going to stop us from getting back on our feet. That's right. In 2004, the wayside hosted the biggest World Series party in the area for the Boston Red Sox. It had been 84 years since the Red Sox last won the World Series, again in 1918, when we opened it. Yes, that was quite a year. Shortly after we took over the wayside from Karen's parents, I decided to make a bold proclamation. If the Red Sox ever win the World Series, we will roll our prices back to 1918. It seemed like a very safe bet to me. And we got tons of publicity for years. However, in 2004, it was time for Brian in the wayside to pay out. So, we'll circulate this menu that we had for the day. Cup of coffee was five cents, gentlemen five cents, soup ten cents, grilled hot dog ten cents, vanilla ice cream ten cents, and a small amount, pound of beverage five cents. Who's the gentleman that has run WDV for some time? He scored. And has a reputation for being kind of frugal. So, he was sitting at the counter. The place was packed. I'm going to finish this thing, and then I'll share that story with you. Instead of the normal 1,000 customers a day, we had over 3,000 hungry Red Sox fans converge on the wayside for the celebration of a lifetime. It was wall to wall people. The minute we opened the door, it was like the floodgates came in and people were bringing in rubbings of their deceased father from the cemetery that never enjoyed this experience or a victory like that. It was emotional. But, Ken Squire was sitting at the counter with a bunch of people, and someone yelled over to him, you know, Ken, at five cents a cup, can you buy the counter around the coffees? It's like 13 seats times a nail. He said, no. It was a great day. The only real addition we've made in the past 25 years was adding our very own creamering. So now it's wayside, restaurant, bakery, and creamering. We struggled with the fact that we served homemade soups, homemade meals, and homemade baked goods. Served with store-bought ice cream. We understood that Ben and Jerry's was in the neighboring town of Waterbury and didn't want to compete with them. Our staff wanted us to develop the best old-fashioned ice cream possible. The consistency would be creamy and smooth. No chunks. No chunky monkey-style ice creams. Yeah. Prior to launching all of our ice creams, we just had to do a taste test with our staff. In a blind taste test, 80% of our staff chose our signature vanilla ice cream over Ben and Jerry's vanilla mission accomplished. Yeah, yeah. For those of you that like happy hours, did you know that we are the only restaurant in America that starts its day with a happy hour and ends its day with a happy hour? So, the first happy hour begins at 7 and goes till 8 a.m. And that's where you get free old-fashioned buttermilk donut holes with your coffee or your breakfast. So that's a happy hour for me. I love those donut holes. Our happy hour at the end of the day is from 7.30 to 8.30. It's the after-dinner happy hour, and all desserts are half-priced. So finally, before we open it up for questions, we have want to give you our new brochure, which is connected to our new website and a postcard for everybody to take home. And I'll explain the brochure and the postcard. Let me hang on to one of those postcards. When we designed this postcard, we wanted to put ourselves in a tourist shoes and they were always asking whether it's at the gas station or anybody they come in contact with were to the locals eat. So we figured we'd make that the headline on the postcard, on the drop card. And whether the person stuffing the rack puts it in front or back, it says where the locals eat on both sides. One side focuses on being Montpelier's first green restaurant. And while the previous brochure had our solar panels on the roof for our hot water eating, this is our most recent green initiative, a community solar installation located in Perkinsville, Vermont. So we're continually trying to keep up with being a green restaurant and minimizing our current footprint. On the back side, Yankee cooking at its best, just get the driveway paved and restriped. Looking pretty good. To keep up with the time, we've got the QR code to scan that and bring it to our new website. And the new website to me feels like it's a history lesson with a nice warm blanket over your shoulders. It's really designed nicely and there's a history page and green initiatives page. There's videos, I think there's eight or ten videos and we suggest that people make batch popcorn and enjoy the videos. So that's it in terms of our oh, the postcard. This one, we always wanted a greetings from the wayside postcard and we met this guy in Waterbury, Kent Gardner who brought it to life and every one of these 18 images is individually displayed in the restaurant. It looks like an art gallery. Not many people know this but it took 18 images to create this one little postcard and we will be coming out with this in a puzzle format probably this fall. We've got the Capitol Building and a kid on a road but it's a beautiful piece of art and we wanted you each to have a postcard. Mail it to someone that might remember the wayside and have a good time. Any questions for Karen and I? No. This one isn't with us. Oh, okay. Other ways. Okay, yeah. But regarding that picture I don't know if folks know that our house upon the hill was the wayside lodge before there was a wayside lunch stand and we actually have a horsehair blaster sign that we still have. The house is older and inside the house the PQ's can attest that it's a beautiful old home and the banister going upstairs is tiger maple. You can see the stripes and it's just a gorgeous home. That wonderful efficiency saying that I'll second the motion and we are blessed and that's certainly how we recovered from the pandemic. We had such a dedicated staff and folks out front know what customer service is all about and it can be contagious. So many of them have been with the wayside a long time and if we have say 60 plus employees I think we did the math for our most recent legacy awards Karen got her 45 year black but combined I think 35 employees have over 500 years of experience. So they've been there a long time and if we're not there on a busy Sunday afternoon the place has been still purr like a kitten. And it's also generational like the like Foyver mother Mark and she had her son Jen in there and then Jeff got these two sons working there so there's a lot of generational possibilities too. It's nice. What was the wayside it was the wayside a lunch initially somehow the wayside lunch ended up in Washington and we'd like to get it back something but it evolved into kind of like a diner and then a restaurant and since we do have the counter it'll always be designated as kind of a diner but I hope that we've worked hard to evolve into a menu that's pretty special with salmon and seafood steaks good stuff try it and on the menu front close down we did work hard and I think now our turkey dinner is better than ever we continue to listen to customers and try to make improvements every year before we get much more hungry maybe we should thank you very very much thank you and next for me Wehr and sons Barbara and today we have Paul Wehr and I appreciate you with this so here you go wants to do a little suntanage so what we're looking at here is called a gleason board it's another so the other thing to go is this thing another thing I have another thing I have some traction and this little tool here and Paul's not quite that I actually talked about this when I worked with him I worked with him in high school he went to college and he said he was hungry he wrote a book in one hand on this little gadget in the other it was a long body so he worked with him and so there's pressure into the bottle once that's completed then the body would be moved on to this cooling board and the energy would go away put together the funeral get a grave open and so forth the day of the funeral you would arrive back the house remains in the casket and this would come back home and the tree would go to the cooling board and then so another item we have here is buried garments so once the remains were involved the burial garments actually we might know it back in terms of the kind of tuck it in as some people presented it legend has it that when they were building the racial dam and CCCs the government contract would be the home of the headcast amongst that population and legend has it that this was part of that and we have women's versions as well and the last when I just do this I went through our I tried to grab a few things I thought would be interesting I have just a manuscript book from Barbara Lane I think there were some prices that were things cost back then I thought it was just kind of I'm going to hand it off to Paul he's going to talk about the buildings and the history of the board of sons so I want to start with my grandparents which is Thomas Jefferson Blair who was named after he was Jefferson that generation named their children after presidents so Thomas Jefferson Blair married my grandmother who was Florence Emmins and up on Main Street going up Main Street there's an Emmins street that goes on to the right and that's named after great grandparents that house on the corner that was just recently renovated was built by the great great Catherine So we have a street contaminant after our family. But anyway, my grandmother and my grandfather worked for the Bollum Furniture and Fulness Company in Montevideo after the turn of the century. And they closed, they didn't sell, they just closed. So then they went to the involving school down in Boston and my grandmother was asked to go because there was another woman that was going to go to that class. She said that she would go if another woman attended it. And that's why my grandmother went to a bombing school to be with this other woman in that school in Boston. So she was a licensed and bomber. I think she did a whole lot with it just because of that invitation to attend the school. That was in 1918. During, they mentioned it earlier about the Spanish flu in 1918, which was going strong at that point. And they actually, on a three or four months course, they actually only attended the course for six weeks. And they were called home because of all the deaths that were taking place in the area. So they were only there for a short while. I say they worked for Bollums and then my grandfather in 1921 purchased the Frank Hall funeral that was on East State Street. And started his own business in 1921. And we have a picture here of my grandfather sitting in his office. Which his first office is was, I should say, is where the mud block in was down here right at the end of Berry Street. It's an empty lot now. I think it's, help me with what's there now. The Frank leader? No, the very, very cross street. Just a bar? It's an empty, it's an empty lot. Tomassi block. Tomassi block, that's it. It was the Tomassi block that my grandfather had in an office on one side. He had a two caskets over the wall. Tomassi's block, but also it's where Paul Bedman's bakery was. That's where, that was his first block. And then in 1926, 27, they needed more room and they actually bought a funeral home directly across the street here where my Aunt Claire and my cousin Catherine lived directly across the street. And they stayed there until 1954. 1954, 55 when my father needed more room and moved it over on the school street. In that building, just for historical purposes, that was built in 18, that week in 1892 by the Putnam family from Putnamville. It was built for their, I can't think of the husband's name, but the daughter says she was a Putnam, but it was that wedding present that was built. And then the people owned that until he died in 1923. And then another sister moved into it. And then George McIntyre, Dr. McIntyre, probably people know him. Dr. McIntyre owned that. And my father bought it from him in 1955. And we've been there ever since. So it's, the business is hundred and, I don't know. Yeah, Barbara Landinger started in 1918 and my grandfather went on his own in 1921. So it's been in the same family that I could talk in the, so I'm going to end with a quick story, quick story. 1984, I was, I went up to Mrs. Leighy's house. Mr. Leighy had just passed that morning and I went up to see Mrs. Leighy to make arrangements. And I say, I was pretty, I was kind of new to this business. And I'm kind of nervous, but I wanted to see Mrs. Leighy. And so I was met at the front door and by this nice lady and son, she says, you'll have to come in and sit in the parlor. Okay. So I went in and sat down and she goes, Mrs. Leighy is talking to President Reagan on the phone and you'll have to wait. So that's a two-story. So I think that's, we've got some other pictures. I do want to mention though my uncle Paul, who was actually in the business with my father, great after World War II, and my other uncle, Tom. And then my father was the only one that stayed with the business. Uncle Paul moved on to being more of a writer. Other things. The judge. The judge. Yeah, he was a judge. So that just, any, I wanted to open it up for any questions. So you had some memorabilia from the Bristol Manufacturing? These are the, those are the garments. Oh. These garments, these are old. I'm guessing these go back into the CCC times when my grandfather had that contract. They used to be, when they built the dam in the State Parks, there was, you know, two or three thousand people on those work sites in the, obviously they needed that service area from time to time. My grandfather had that service, but these garments would be used to ship body that, you know, they put out on the train and ship bodies all over. Bristol was the Vermont manufacturer of the primary product, the casket. Yes. In fact, there's still a casket that's made and sold in this area. They call it the Bristol, but it's made by Florence Casket Company, out of Florence Packs. They name it the Bristol because it's a copy of the upgrade of the casket. Yeah. Which house on East State Street was a funeral home at one time? Is it still there? You know, I don't know which one it was. It was behind your father's place, up the street. And again, I'm not sure exactly which one it was. I don't think it was part of the fire. I think it was beyond, it was beyond that. I'm not sure. I'll forget it when I get to my own stuff. Say it now. Your grandfather and my grandfather owned the land that these two, that the convent and these two buildings here are on now. And it was, I don't know whether it was sold or it don't need it or whatever it was, but at one point it was, they owned it and then they built the convent and the school was on that land. And the land, the building that used to be on the corner here was my grandfather's and that got moved across the street where the sign shop is now. All right. That used to be part of this land. Can I add one little thing to get your brother in trouble going on about it? When I was in high school, I was good friends with his older brother and he used to answer the phone at the house saying, where's Eusthab and Wieslabel? Hi! I used to sit there and cringe and think, God, I hope his father isn't home now. He's dead. One more question. I just wanted to take this opportunity to share my appreciation for the both of you and for the work that your families have done. I know a lot of people in this room probably have experienced a really hard time with these two guys standing in the back and I just think it's wonderful and we appreciate it as we do that work. Thank you. You're on. He told his story, I tell mine, and we try to keep this completely non-partisan. But the goers have always been the gracious ones who helped us at times of sadness. And so he told you about when my father died in about 1984 and that my mother was talking to Ronald Reagan. So I told him about when my mother died in 1996 in May. We were my brothers and I were at St. Augustine's trying to make arrangements for the funeral and we were picking out music. And someone came in with a phone and said to my brother, the president is on the phone since 1996 in May. And Pat handed the phone to me and he said the president would like to express his condolences. I mean we all know these people, they don't believe it, but this is the kind of courtesy that goes on in Washington. So in those days anyway. And so I'm like, you know, and I hear this very, very southern accent saying, I'd like to express my condolences for the loss of your mother. And I realized of course it was President Clinton and I said, oh Mr. President, if she had known she was going to check out this early, the election was in November, she would have requested an absentee bill. A complete silence. A whole nation marked the other end of the phone. Well, thank you very much. So on our end of it, we were pretty convinced that President Clinton was going to call the funeral that day. We were pretty certain that was happening. So when the phone rang, we were all running for it. So that's putting that you brought that out. So this is wedding history. So I don't have, I really hoped I wouldn't be next to a display like this because I have very little. But one thing I'll pass around, one of my all-time favorite, I mean really it's my favorite possession, the wedding ties that I think my father purchased a few letters from, so his shop began around 1936. So I think he went to the Montlior Museum of Argus or it might have been called something else at that time, but pulled out a few of the letters from a farm that they weren't using anymore and I'm quite certain it was from what they had used as a major headline when the Civil War started. So these three letters, I, C, E, was my father's bread and butter item when he started the shop on State Street. And these letters spelled I. He would print them on a little placard that people would put in their windows when the quartz-drawn ice wagon would come clomping down the street. And if this household wanted ice, the horse and driver would stop, the driver would chunk out some ice and it would go into that house's on a little ice chest. And so getting that, I just love that. I thought of just a few items and I really want to thank the Montlior Historical Society for giving me this opportunity to get the letter out and kind of clear the cobwebs from my memory and thank you especially to George for encouraging me to do it. I'm just, if you'll bear with me, my eyes don't permit a lot. Just to keep from rambling, I put down some plots where I revolve around the sights and sounds and smells of the letter crest, just the kitchen door away from my growing-up years at 136th Street in Montlior, that the building part of the building is now where the Vermont Arts Council is headquartered. All that in these memories has always been my father, Howard Lay, who founded the press in the Great Depression and grew it into the successful business it became. At the time he sold the Lay Press in the mid-1970s, it was one of the last two letter press businesses remaining in the state apart from a very few, very small specialty presses scattered here and there around New England. The other job, Letter Press, was Edson's on Langdon Street, which continued for several war years after my father sold his business and retired. It was there in the Edson Press that a very young Howard Lay worked as a printer's devil and learned the trade. When Georgia Edson, and I don't think that's any relation to the printing Edson's, when Georgia invited me to be part of today's program, I was delighted to participate. But then, as I searched through the scamp bits of information related to the Lay Press that I actually possessed, I was aghast at this extreme sparsely of the material collection, as well as red-faced over my own lack of technical information specific to the operation. I've brought printing books along really old, old 1930s editions with little images of the presses that my father had, but even though I worked out in a shop with my father proofreading the whole time, did I know how those presses work? I did not. Artifacts from the press are minimal, but the ones I have are precious to me, and I've brought them to show you today. They tell a story about this small, vibrant press in a way that substantiates my memory and furthers my appreciation for my father. In fact, as I collected these few things together and took a closer look at my mother's hodgepodge of a scrap block, the story emerging from me becomes one of my father himself. It's no no accident that so little in the way of relics and testaments to the history and success of his business survive, such spareness defines this modest man completely. Even though he had a lifelong love of history, my father never, never saw himself as worthy of being singled out as a feature in local history. He never took himself that seriously. He took work seriously. He took his family seriously. He took his community seriously, but himself, I can see his quiet smile kind of widening on his face at the absolute absurdity of the notion. Still, I believe he does factor into the story of Montpelier, the country's smallest capital, the depression in our business he created with his wife, my mother. The rich web work of connections, the two of them forged as the business expanded contributed greatly to the city's positive temperament during his lifetime and beyond. So with apologies now for my lack of technical skills, to produce something more professional, more alluring and visual for presentation than this table, I have instead assembled a slender old-fashioned scrapbook holding a very, very few photos I have relative to the Lehi press. And for the scrapbooks organized in center, I'm using a quote from Mark Twain, which I found several years ago in a biography of this man who is arguably America's greatest writer. Mark Twain, like Howard Laney, worked as a printer's devil during his young years. He learned the printing trade and subsequently worked in the publishing house that printed the many volumes of Ulysses Grant's autobiography, F at Mark Twain's urging for printing. These books, without which much of the detail of the Civil War would have been lost to history. Mark Twain was forced to quit school at the age of 12 due to the early death of his father. Howard Laney was forced to quit school at age 10. And respecting his father's deathbed request that he never, no matter what, work in the grant industry, he did whatever else he could do in order to work full-time for the support of his sister whose lives were upended due to the debilitating sickness and death from silicosis of their husband and father at age 32. So when I met with Mark Twain's words, the printing press is a poor man's university. It was a eureka moment for me. It was a clarist explanation of how it was that my father was so little formal school-y was the educated person with wide knowledge and understanding of the world which I knew him to be. So thank you, Mark Twain. I've used that quotation to headline the learning curriculum I've described in the scrapbook I've brought today. Pursuing such a broad curriculum of lifelong learning and skill-building was the daily reality of the lay he pressed for its founder and somewhat similarly for his family. Our lives were shaped by the constant activity of those pounding presses as well as by the constant string of community members stopping into the shop to talk with my father. It all unfolded just a single door away from our kitchen. I remember well when a printer, a contemporary of my father's toll bay, Howard Lay is the fastest type setter in Vermont, pronounced fawn. And, well, he was that, but he was also so much more. Though, I can pass some things around. I found this, I don't think you can really see it, but it's a cut that he used. My father printed the yearbook and the literary magazines for both Montpelier High School and St. Michael's High School. And I was telling someone earlier that the contract for the job that had always gone to him to print Montpelier High School was ended when the editor of that yearbook who was dating my brother, my brother started dating someone else and my father lost the that's what happens this fall. But anyway, in this little cut, which I'm sorry, Montpelier may be able to see it, I really can't. But anyway, it's the junior class of St. Michael's High School and we all graduated from this building. So we're standing, this is 1962, we're standing by the front door and it was the officers of that year's class. It's kind of, you know, it brought it, this is the building. Well, 136 State Street, right down next to the Visitor's Center, the State Visitor's Center now, but that had been a private home. And so in that building, it's in some of the photos, but my father's shop was literally out the kitchen door. So it was in the back and at some point in the early 1950s, my father expanded it. So it took up, that's all been torn down now. We were so proud of the addition. First business car was made by Howard Leahy and I remember it as if it was yesterday driving in this driveway and he came out and it was for wholesome bread and the color scheme was yellow, orange, and blue. And you can just picture his own letterpress, printing presses that can, the lines were distinct and they were kind of raised and he just had the picture banged out on something. So I go way back with a Leahy press and I'll have to tell a Leahy story too. Oh, absolutely. My parents and Mary and Patrick's parents were the closest of lifelong friends and the family story is that my father was the first non-family member to hold Patrick when he came back home from the hospital and the story is that Mary's mother, Alba, said to my father, Mandel, she said, Mandel, would you like to hold the senator? That's a joke. Anyways, it's an old family joke. Howard says, I remember so well and I don't, maybe this is again mid 50s but a group of men from Stowe came down to the shop and ordered what was for us just this almost impossible thing. It was a poster or a brochure or something that had at least three colors on it and these guys and my father and plus a couple of the printers who worked with my father for years and years and decades were actually members of the family. I'm just adopted it but they worked day and night Saturdays and Sundays my mother would cook all this stuff to keep them going and when that they finally figured out how to produce this thing with the colors and it rolled off the little giant press that we had. I mean there was a big, if my parents drank champagne in those days which they did not they would have uncorked a bottle of bubbly because it was such an achievement and they were hooting and hollering and slapping each other in the back and it was a great achievement. That was the old letter press now it's obviously no problem at all. Very thank you very much and we would like to welcome to the I brought more than 10 items so if I'm doing show and tell and holding all these things up I've got less than a minute of peace. So the Gallup Covered Library has a time more than 125 year old history at this point but it is the fifth library or version of the lending library to exist in the city of Montpelier. So there are lending libraries from the Department of Agriculture but one of the things that I brought today there was a rival library so I apologize because when I was thinking about this I had a very busy weekend I got married yesterday I know it's cold but I usually when I'm thinking of a presentation on the history of the library I'm usually in the library so I am walking through the building and pointing things out so I have to do a version of that in my head while I show you all these items. So I don't know how many of you know the history of the library but it's just history of it but it started in 1889 when Martin and Fanny Kellogg they were they had grown up in this area and they had made a fortune in real estate in New York City they died within a couple months of each other in the winter of that year and Fanny on her duck bed left 300 $300,000 to the city of Montpelier to build an archway at the Greenham Cemetery and to build a library for the citizens of Montpelier and she had a nephew John Hubbard who was right here and John he contested their will he said that the people that were the people that had signed the will that had witnessed the will didn't know what kind of document they were signing and so this bitter three year court battle ensued that went to the Vermont Supreme Court over this inheritance and I have all of the documentation on all of that actually in the archives of the library I know the public speaker I don't he wins this court battle it goes all the way to the Vermont Supreme Court and he says okay I will build a library in the city of Montpelier but I'm going to spend $30,000 on this library and that was the settlement that was agreed to and so he did not agree to staff the library and he did not agree to five books for the library he built a wonderful bread of building he did by the time the library opened in 1895 it had a soft opening in 1895 an official opening in 1896 he ended up spending $60,000 so he was a little bit better than his word but nowhere near the $300,000 which would be about $9 million in today's funds so in the meantime T.W. Wood of the T.W. Wood Art Gallery and John Burgess who was a professor from Columbia who summered at what is now Redstone what's called Redstone they were his they were John Herbert's biggest detractors through all of this and they villainized him publicly and often and in the newspapers it is something to read so one of the things I have in my office if anybody ever is really interested if interested as I am in all of this I have the statement from the opening of the T.W. Wood Art Gallery and it's partially celebrating their gallery but an awful lot of it is like boy isn't this guy a bad dude he spends a lot of time and a lot of a lot of venom so T.W. Wood and John Burgess to protest this library that was being built they asked the citizens of Montpelier to boycott it and they found an arrival public library called the Montpelier Public Library Association so now I'm actually going to get to the items I brought today I have a photograph here this is the interior of the Montpelier Public Library Association which was in the opera house at the time so often we have a smaller version of this that is in the library above our locked case collection and people often look at it and they say is that in here? is that in this building? I can't even believe this is in this building quite frankly because these guys would not have come into this building so I've got that there but Montpelier Public Library Association while they were in existence for six or so years they didn't last very long before they actually ended up merging with the Kellar Hubbard but they sold shares and that was how he became a member of the library so shares were $5 a year in 1895 funds and so I have a few of these in plastic that you guys can look at and handle afterwards if you want to take a closer look at this beautiful copper plate handwriting on there and then I have a book of shares with all of these historical names from figures from people in Montpelier it's very fascinating to look through another thing from before the Kellar Hubbard was built that I have that doesn't come out very often is this photograph and so this is what is I believe somebody in here can correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that this is right here that says it's the library reading room is now what is making his bakery right next door to the library so to build the Kellar Hubbard and you can see you can see the Trinity Church right next to it here that's still there because that creates the library building so this was the site of what is now the library before the library was built now in the library was built I'll talk about the building a little bit I've got a couple of pictures of it I have this lovely picture of it on Dewey Day so this is a Dewey Day parade day out in front of the library so the library was designed by an architect called Amos Keycutting who's from Worcester, Massachusetts and Amos Cutting builds the library out of two-foot thick Dumberson granite so it's not very granite which I would have expected when I started working there seven years ago but I think maybe because of his ties to Worcester and maybe the southern part of the state I honestly don't really know but it's Dumberson granite and the interiors are corpuson over and the Collins out front are North Conway granite which is why they are pink and I think the furthest away that any of the materials for the original building came from is Tennessee so the facade on the inside of the porch is called Tennessee Marble but it's really a kind of limestone and in the right conditions in the right conditions if there's enough humidity it turns long and it's lovely with pink and gray it's very, it's quite exciting to see I've only ever seen it happen once so I have some pictures in here also of the original interior of the library and these are in my office and I love them and nobody has ever really gets as excited about these as I do but when you look at these interiors if you go in the library today I should have brought like today photos because this is exactly still in this one it's exactly right like you can stand there and look at this image and go I'm standing in the exact spot this photographer was standing in in 1895 and hasn't changed and that's one of the things I love about the library so we still have the curved glass of the desk there and then this one is in the reading room and this is still our front reading room and it still looks like that and the tables that you see in this image not the chair so the tables themselves are the tables that are still in the building they're original to the building and we still use them every day they have lots of graffiti names but don't go in and do that or I'll have to kick you out in the area of the library you can see in this one you can see the original width of the mezzanine area that opens up to our beautiful skylight so the skylight has been at points covered up and then uncovered again about 20 years ago and the mezzanine area with the balcony originally in the library it went right out to the width of the skylight and then in the 1970s I believe it was the library was modernized there was an elevator put in in 1974 for the first time and a lot of that skylight was closed off and a lot of that was built in the ceiling to the second story was built in so the opening was very, very narrow and I still have people that come in the library that remember it then and they come in and they're like oh this is beautiful because when we built the addition that was opened back up again so you get this sort of more original soaring upwards towards the skylight if you know when you come in this beautiful building alright so Martin and Fanny come along John Howard we got there I heard somebody else earlier talking about the Spanish blue at the time of the Spanish blue there was also a polio outbreak in Montpelier a terrible polio outbreak in 1917 and 1918 and for both the Spanish blue and for polio the library had to close down for a period of a few months and this was one of these things that we we thought about we remember when we had to close down for the COVID pandemic because realizing that the length of the history of the library encompassed these other epidemics, these other tragedies and that this was not the first time around for all of us but not for the building and so the library closed down for a couple of months and one thing that happened during the polio epidemic but not during the Spanish blue was that books that were returned to the library from families that were suffering from infections those books were burned because they didn't really understand how some of these infections were what else do I have here that I want to talk about I have the history of the first hundred years of the public library that will summarize this a lot more logically than what I'm doing for you right now but there are a couple of historical artists in it which are very fascinating also and at the back there's the original articles that were in the was the artist in Petria at that point or the meeting artists from when the building opened and talking about all of these beautiful elements and all of these beautiful materials in charge of the building I also have one fun thing I brought that speaks to the history of the funding of the library so the library is a 501c3 non-profit which is about one third of public libraries in Vermont but only about 15% of libraries nationwide most public libraries are municipal entities but we're a non-profit and that has to do with that very first founding with John Hubbard's agreement and what they've been wrangling that into the formation of the library and but it didn't take very long, I told you earlier so he built a building that he didn't stop it and he didn't buy a collection for it so the trustees, some of the first trustees of the library said okay City of Montpelier will you help us with this and I have this lovely protest saying absolutely not unless you turn over ownership of the library to the City of Montpelier so this is written as a protest and I have versions of this from different years and that were published in the newspaper saying we're not going to fund you at all and we still go to the City of Montpelier now every year as well as five surrounding every towns and say can we be on your town meeting can we please, will you please help fund us and happily we don't see fees anymore people are much more generous and the last really cool thing I've got is I brought John Hubbard's will so thinking about this contentious history in this court battle and all of this rhetoric that was going on around the family of the library, the formation of the building I, John Hubbard in all of this, he died like five years later, he died in his fifties, he got liver cancer he actually fell off his bicycle he was one of the early bicyclists in town, he fell off his bicycle and he got very ill, it turned out he was liver cancer and he died at a fairly young age leaving any surviving years and we have his will and in his will he left the remainder of his fortune to fund the library which is our original endowment that we still have that we built on for the last 100 years 125 years and he left the money to build our trade degree on the cemetery which is why that exists now, that was his on-syrginal vision, his on-syrginal vision that he protested against and then on his passing he lived in and of course there's a very haunted grave stone I assume you all know about so alright can I answer, does anybody have any questions yes please two questions when I was a little boy before the upper balcony was made smaller there was a large picture of Abraham Lincoln life-size standing at the end of that wall number one, does that still exist? no maybe but not the library and my other, well damn whoever I know, I want to hear more about this and the other question again when I was a child the children's library was in the basement of the rear part of the building yes it was beautifully painted with murals of children's stories who did that are there good photos and can you see any of that today? sure, so who did it was college students from what was the Vermont Teachers College and I do have some photos of them you don't have a lot of photos of them, you know the library has flooded twice including the children's libraries the children's library spaces the first time the library flooded the children's library didn't exist but in 1992 the children's library flooded again and a lot of that was lost there was a lot of lost at that time so I don't have a lot of pictures I do have some and you cannot see the basement has been painted gosh twice since I've been there so all of those beautiful children's book murals are long since made it over and I don't believe any of them still exist anybody else? Lawrence Barnard thank you George thank you all for inviting me down my pleasure first of all I would like to explain maybe a common misconception our places build even in some advertisements around having been around for eight generations and we haven't been on the same farm, the same places you all know that Morris Farm Sugar Shack stands now for that number of years but eight generations refers to as Morris has been in the maple business has been sugar makers for eight generations so it started with way back in the late 1700s with my great great great great grandfather James Morris who came up from Massachusetts and settled in Cabot, Vermont and did several things over here he was one of the first founders of Cabot and that his son ended up in Calis, Vermont just over the hill and that's where the majority of those eight generation years were spent and that's where I spent the first five years of my life upon Robinson Hill in Calis and then well my grandfather Sydney Morris came from Calis down to Montpelier I don't know how often it would have been back in his time not very often behind a team of horses and he'd come by the place where we are now Mr. Bliss owned it and he'd say to himself I love that farm it's flatter it's better drained it doesn't have so many ledges I'm going to own that farm someday and he did he was able to buy the farm where we are now and well I'm sorry Gaffa, Sydney but boy have I found a lot of rocks it won't let you go and thankfully I'm retired I won't have to look at the board but we have evolved substantial maple name on that place and I contributed my father Harry started it off with his charisma and his abilities to please the public and be a sugar maker at the same time and then my father was handsome he had charisma and then I came along and was able to follow his footsteps to a degree and expand on his his growth there so our business is the way you see it today and stands just over the line in the town of East Montpelier but I've always built it as being in Montpelier which is our mailing address for obvious reasons people are going to the capital to see the Monts State House and if you get we're so close to that we could entice some of them up to our place which has been the case we've had a lot of visitors update speaking of the Robinson Hill I didn't bring a whole lot today and I'm really impressed with the other displays of other people have brought but one thing I brought my maternal great-grandfather Irvin Robinson's sap yoke you see what a brutal thing this would have been and it's even got a lot of wear marks on it I don't know a lot of use maybe his father was behind him with a sharp stick what a brutal way to make a living carry two five-gallon probably a wood stave sat gatherin pales on each arm of this this thing over my shoulders and sometimes four feet of snow very humans I don't know if I can even replicate one of the conscious who used to wear it but yeah let's go with her hey I don't know I'm going to go back to wood when I was young we had galvanized sap buckets and we didn't use one of those sap yokes it was a matter of carrying two galvanized gatherin pales with Phyllis Lashie sap and trudging through snow often with snowshoes and I developed a bad attitude about snowshoes it seems like some of the people especially newcomers have moved into Vermont snowshoeing is a matter of recreation and no no no you don't put a pair of snowshoes on until you're absolutely desperate snows that high and I have used them for gatherin sap quite a few times and then of course it evolved into plastic tubing and vacuumizing the whole tubing system which actually tricks the trees the inner pressure of the maple trees got to be graded in the outer atmospheric pressure negative pressure outside the tree in the tubing line it's going to trick that tree into always having greater inner pressure and it's going to give out sap more at the time and so there's been some innovations like that and reverse osmosis and the things you hear about which we don't hear about at all today because this is an historical society now I'm not going to take much longer at all I did I did bring another artifact and I know I wasn't going to be outdone by anyone bringing the oldest artifact who brought an older artifact that I did so this one here is uh I don't know how many million years old is this or maybe is it a billion years you see all this one here but this was written by my grandmother told my wife my late wife Betsy the story of this rock and it is a a lap stone that an ancestor of mine Mr. Barnabas Doty used in his sleigh and you know why the church is their own box pews just parallel pews used a lap stone and under buffalo rags in their sleigh to get to church to keep warm then carry the stone into the box pew and under the same buffalo road to warm themselves at church and this was Barnabas's stone in his early 1700s 1759 I think my wife wrote that date down on the stones she wrote it for my two boys so they would have this as a memento where this stone is how many million years old was more recently used by a young guy named Barnabas Doty in the 1700s and he was a descendant of Mr. Edward Doty who came over on the memento and they were ancestors of mine now to summarize I have to tell my own president's story because Mary told hers and the boy boys told theirs and I'm not going to be outdone but I put this story in the books I wrote a letter written by President Eisenhower to my grandfather Sidney Morse who had sent him a gallon of syrup and it was a personal letter and I should have brought the book I could read the letter but it was something like Mr. Morse a group of fine Vermont students recently brought to me a gallon of your maple syrup and Mrs. Eisenhower and I wish to extend our sincere thanks for the gift of your maple syrup and they gave him a home gallon and the night I haven't seen a president in my whole life I'd give more than a half a pint so I'm out of time questions maybe to a little louder not with all so I gotta tell you when I was a kid I need to add some more to the family your family history to a lot of families among players you used to be an Olympic skier you were quite the skier and your father and my father had an East Montpelier Catalyst Speed Association and in your field across from the Byron used to be a Rokto the first ones around all of the neighborhood kids every weekend would flock to that field but we used to be remember you skiing down the steep tires would slow and everybody got down again he's so good we have to be like her well thank you Paul yes I know your sister Peggy went through one of the pulleys thank god there weren't quite so many lawyers back Peggy's alive and well and that wonderful member from Washington thank you Paul thank you everyone for coming it's been a great event and Christine will tell us about J.V.O. Johnson hey I've seen Murphy until recently was the attorney here now about every 30 years ago I'm sorry so my grandfather J.V.O. Johnson grew up was born in Craftsbury and he was the son of Martin Johnson who was an Irish immigrant and Mary Gallagher from Craftsbury graduated from Craftsbury Academy in 1908 and in 1910 two years out of high school started selling insurance and Indian motorcycles in Hardwick in 1913 we started selling cars in Hardwick sold his first car to Reverend William B. Crosby who was then the pastor who later moved here and was here pastor at St. Augustine for 40 years so he sold his first car to him and then in 1913 he started selling cars regularly in Hardwick he joined forces with a pierce Mr. Pierce it was called Pearson Johnson selling Maxwell cars in Hardwick in 1915 he bought Pierce out and was on his own we then bought a building on Wolcott Street in Hardwick for sales and in 1920 he purchased a Hardwick Inn and the buildings that were joining it and he turned part of the Hardwick Inn into a sales shop I had a picture here that I just got actually I think this might be one of the ones that served the shoe in the back gave me this picture but it's a picture of the Hardwick Inn with all of the cars for sale out in front he married Margaret Stevens who was an heir to the international silver company and they met in Hardwick because her family who was from Maryland, Connecticut used to come up like a lot of people did in Greensboro and Craftsbury for the summer and there are fancy houses up there and they met and fell in love and when they fell in love my great grandparents decided they would move Marguerite to Seattle, Washington because they didn't think you ought to be marrying some farmer from Vermont so they moved her out there and he shortly thereafter drove across country and picked her up they got married in Seattle and moved back here and settled here and as a result of that she was disinherited by her family because she married this Catholic farmer from Hardwick anyway in 1919 he started a Chrysler corporation started by Walter P. Chrysler who was previously the president of General Motors Corporation and he wanted to start his own business so he started selling Chryslers my grandfather, J. L. Monson cut in on the ground floor he was selling Maxwell's he was selling Chryslers and in 1921 he opened a dealership here in Montpelier at 102 State Street which is where the Colton garage used to be he also in 1922 opened a second place in Barton and in 1926 he moved his dealership to a new building that he bought for Stage 3 this is the original building this is the building which was the Bishop's Hotel and this was the the village village hall Montpelier Village Hall he bought these two buildings and he also bought what used to be the T. W. Wood T. W. Wood Art Gallery next building up he bought all three buildings and he renovated and I have a picture here of the building after it was a redone in 1926 and at that time Goodridge furniture was in the one of the buildings that he had bought and there was a dry cleaning company in the back of the T. Wood Art Gallery building but you notice the two buildings you can see that this back village in building right here they actually added left that building as it was and they added Montpelier 15th edition on the front of it to bring it out to the good level of the Bishop's Hotel so it looked like a new building but it was just a false front put on in 1926 he also opened a dealership at 86 to 88 St. Paul's Street in Burlington and that then moved to 11 North Avenue in Burlington a little later where the Burlington Police Station is now next to Battery Park so between 1924 and 1928 J. L. L. Johnson was the sole business distributor of Chrysler's in New Hampshire and Vermont and I think part of the name and at that time Chrysler had dealers and had distributors rather than selling directly to dealers and so he sold he was a dealer and this is the picture from 1920 of all of the distributors in the United States and he's standing in the middle there with a lighter color suit and in 1927 he sold more cars than the other dealer in the United States and that's in Vermont and I don't have that article with me but I did read an article from the Times but the Argus in the 1920s that said that he sold $10 million worth of cars and then included carrying cars $10 million sales of 1920 it's a lot of cars so from 24 to 28 he was the sold distributor in 1926 I told you that he already owned Burlington in 1927 because he sold more cars than any other dealer in the United States he won from Chrysler a trip to Paris so in the fall of 1927 he took off to Europe with his wife and they toured Europe and while he was in Paris he ran into a priest from Vermont who was there visiting and asked him did he hear about the flood in Vermont and my sister told me today a story that I have to tell you too my mother was here because if they were in Europe and he and my uncle and my mother were here in Montpelier she was a young kid and she was waiting for one of the people from my father's dealership to pick her up to bring her back home because they lived down Liberty Street where I now live but up the street they lived on Liberty Street and it started raining and kept raining and she ended up picking her up and bringing her home and then the flood hit and that was the only she was hiding under the steps of the pavilion when we were kids the pavilion was on a raised porch there was no enclosure at the bottom she was sitting under there dry waiting for this guy to pick her up when he picked her up and took her home that was the only car that was saved out of the dealership he lost 350 cars and besides that because of the flood the whole dealership was under 11 feet of water so he basically had to pick up and start over after the 27 flood because nobody had flood insurance back then nobody even thought of flood insurance back then so it according to the newspaper out of what I read there was $120,000 in damages done to his business which in 1927 was a lot of money so I'll talk a little bit about when I was a kid the reason I have the work effort that I had was from my grandfather my mother went to law school because my grandfather told her if you know what you want to do with your life if you go to law school you can always get a job somewhere go to law school so she went to law school and she met my father and they got married they got out of law school and they moved back here and my father decided that he would this is after the war he was going to start working with my grandfather and he would take over the business when my grandfather was going to retire in 15 years and unfortunately my father died when he was 43 and left him with nobody to take over the business so he continued on when I was a kid he thought I needed to learn to work so when I was 10 years old every Saturday I had to go down to the shop and I would clean out the all the rooms and the offices and whatever I would pump gas and I would wash cars and then I would go back in the shop and I would change oil with dodgy who used to work at the store and change the oil in the cars and whatever and that's how I learned my ethic and I even got my first firing experience from him I was doing so well with cleaning the garages that I ought to be able to clean those front buildings too every week and he would pay me $10 a week which I thought was great but he expected that I would come back two or three days after school and clean I thought well, okay, they're on Saturday morning anyways I'll just sweep out on Saturdays so finally he got the point he said I was expecting a little more work out of you for ten bucks I ended up going back to just sweeping out an office I also used to clean out Senator Proudy's office which was in the Woodart Gallery building and just some of the names are mentioned before some of the other presentations Doc McIntyre's office was in this building Abear's Hardware was in one of the buildings the floor shop there was a floor shop in there and there was a address shop I don't remember the name but anyways in addition to after the Second World War he had a real tough time at the time of the Second World War he had a real tough time finding cars because you couldn't get cars because they were setting everything to the war effort so he couldn't get cars he couldn't get tires so he was buying used cars to try to sell them because they didn't have new cars to sell I think Bob Doyle who's used to Doyle over here his father were good friends and the two of them used to dream up ways to try to make extra money because things were so tight because of the war effort so they would one time they drove to Boston to pick up used tires because you couldn't buy new tires so they would buy a truck full of used tires and bring it back up here and then they invented a way to make sandpaper tread and they would spread tire on the ground and you would roll the tires through the tire and then you'd come up to a pile of sand and you'd roll it through the sand and that was sandpaper tread tires that's how sandpaper tread started anyways going on in 1964 I'm sorry I missed one thing during the time he owned the state street property he also owned a used car lot so it was next to where Harry's used to be and where the Burger King is now in Midtown Chrysler and so in the late sixties early sixties he was going to be retiring soon so he took the first part of the lot and he built a building for Earl Wood I don't know if any of our members know but Earl Wood's country store it was one in Newsy now there was one in Berlin Earl Wood's country store was built here he also built the first automatic car wash in the state of Vermont which is still standing there now but it's only used by Midtown Chrysler I used to work in that one when I was a kid and he also owned the place that is now in Midtown Chrysler later so in 1964 he decided he was about my age 73 74 and he decided maybe I should retire and he sold the Chrysler dealership to Don Coby who is Bob Coby who runs the Chrysler Theater on the Chevrolet dealership he sold that to the dealership and part of the Harry Monclerone property to Don Coby for the Chrysler dealership and they started Midtown Chrysler there and he spent 6 months helping them out to set up the business and then because he was contracted to do so then he decided he was going to retire so he took a 5 week vacation in Florida and he got back here and he decided I can't take the car this is not good for me so he went back to the state street property and he sold used cars out of the state street property until he died in 1967 and in 1967 he died during a trip to Maryland, Connecticut where he was re-establishing a relationship with the Stevens family and he saw because he married Don Coby so he went down there and he had an aneurysm while he was there and died the the buildings, all three buildings were sold to I might look right when I take these names of the the Avery's who owned the Montpeteer Tavern and that was to build once now the Capital Plaza Tower at the higher part of the building so that sits, these three buildings are all on the site with the Capital Plaza Tower see I do have pictures of well I wanted to mention one other thing that I didn't mention I have pictures of this is the inside of the village in the back part of it there was a showroom I have a picture of my grandfather and grandmother I have a picture of Jaleo Johnson as Pearson Johnson in Target whatever that was in 1918 something like that and we have two pictures of the several workers that worked at my grandparents my grandfather's place and I'm always amazed that this is a group that was there when I was here from work there and everywhere I go I meet people that used to work for Jaleo Johnson and I never met anybody who fought for Jaleo he was always a nice guy I'm not saying he was an easy guy to deal with apparently he could have sold a water bottle to somebody who didn't need to be drinking whatever he was quite a salesman but all of these guys I knew all the way through it even when I was in college and came home to work some of these guys were working I was here I thought he was to work for my father I'm not going to work for him I thought he would work for him originally and a lot of these people when he came back after retiring for five weeks he had the garage and he sold used cars and Wendell Lamel who was in one of these pictures at the time of garage I think at one time and then he built had a garage in Middlesex where they now is a hamburger shop they decided to go across from the filling station the filling station he owned that filling station there later on he was the only employee at one time there were seven or eight employees and he died when there was one employee that was the mechanic I think that's all I have any questions at all yes what was your first name was Joseph Leo Johnson apparently it's funny because why you never call yourself Joseph I don't know but the same thing his son was David Paul Johnson he was called I was called a pop very curious what was the village hall to the on the right side there and had that been built as the short lived second congregational church I don't know it looks like it looks at the top but I don't know I thought the village hall was a meeting hall for people in my employer that doesn't mean it was in the church previous I think it was it has the right shape windows and it has a kind of a steep one but that at the time he bought it that was a big open hall and I remember when I was a kid if you walked from the back where all the repair shops were and all that stuff and the sales rooms you could walk up the back of this ramp and that big open space was up there a great store next to the cars okay thank you let me just say Mr. Morris that I think I have a better president I'm not better but I have another president story that may top yours only because well it was not as old as yours you definitely have the oldest one but when we were teenagers we went to Washington DC to visit our cousins we had six kids in our family and they had nine kids in their family and my uncle was a general so he knew exactly where the Kennedys would be going to church so there was this hall and it was an empty hall except for our families and Steve remembers this too yeah so we got to the church before the Kennedys did but we all went up to the front of the church thinking of of course he's going to be in the front so we filled the whole hall all the way across with all that many kids and we're all waiting and waiting for them to show up and I remember somebody the whisper started to cross between us and eventually somebody said you know he's here, he's here so I turned around to look and there was the most they were just so beautiful it's all like it says they were just beautiful Jackie had a behind us well they were a few back because it was a ways away I remember but yeah we had to turn around and actually the first thing I needed to take was when I turned he waited for me so that just so this day I will always I was I don't know we were 11 I think maybe it's a good thing it wasn't Clinton right yeah so that was just special because I have to tell you what she was wearing because it was just exquisite it was a baby powdery blue you know this was a cat mask by the way so you had to wear the veil at that time you were covering your face down over your face a lot of the time but definitely something on your head but this was a veil covering her face and coming around to about here and it was sky blue to match her dress and it was just breathtaking and he had a blue suit on and there was John John in low Caroline and John John had the shorts you know the suit with the shorts and the tie I got the funeral so it was just priceless and that was an August and he was assassinated a little bit he was assassinated a few months later so that was really heartbreaking for us also we also got to meet Bobby and I remember he was coming out of the senate and they turned to somebody and said oh there's Bobby and I didn't know who he was but they said who shake his hand at night and I did and you just remember their piercing blue eyes they were just so charismatic I'll never forget that and of course I was pretty excited to have to tell you okay I am next to the last so I'm going to make it short for many maybe a little bit so I am going to talk about lane manufacturing what happened most of the story I'm going to tell you is why are we talking about lane manufacturing and so the story kind of goes along like this about five years ago I was with a local gentleman and he said that he had some artifacts from the lane after the fire when they were cleaning up and he had some, didn't even know what they were but some day he liked to put them on exhibit somewhere that was the first clue that I had that maybe that was something we do someday and then the next event happened last July when a hippie mushroom farmer hippie is a good thing wrote this email hello I live in northern New Hampshire near Colbert I've uncovered a seemingly very old sawmill buried in the ground the sawmill was produced by lane manufacturing my player it is stamp Sawyer's favorite anyway the quick story was that I got in my vehicle and drove to Columbia New Hampshire and looked at these pieces of this lane sawmill one of them is sitting right there I made a later trip and he loaded that in my truck alone and that says Lane Montpelier and that was kind of the piece I wanted because of its identification and so the next thing that happened was that we determined there was a mill there is a mill the Garland mill in Lancaster, New Hampshire and they are actively using a lane mill regularly to do post and beam construction for post and beam home so this is our next exposure to lane the next thing was a Robinson sawmill and many many of you know about this already but in Calis there is an antique lane sawmill that is being reconstructed and I made connection with Chuck Storo, Larry Gilbert and others on that so that was the next lane connection we had and then Brook Page who is here with his wife Donna an inveterate collector lent us some papers from Lane manufacturer that he had purchased from a picker and so now we had even more materials we had been planning to produce an exhibit at the Walgreens window which we did do last November and I am thinking that many many of you have seen it because we got tremendous feedback on that so that is kind of the follow up here these banners are part of what was in that display let me just talk quickly about the timeline of the of the lane manufacturing and I want to make before I forget we have a lane with us Priscilla Lane Alexander is sitting right over here so Dennis Lane the founder of the company we still have 5 generations later in Montpelier so Dennis Lane was born in 1818 on East Hill in Berry moved to Plainfield at age 26 and in the 1850s he was logging with his brother in Marshfield in an area that became known as Lanesboro because they were so active in that area and in 1850s he invented the lane lever set sawmill and he founded the inconvenience in accuracy and imperfections of the machinery for setting the log forward led him to investigate what that means is in order to saw a board you used to have two people they had to reset every setting on the sawmill and he invented a method by which you would pull a lever and it would automatically go to the right location so it was revolutionary in the logging in the sawmill industry worldwide in 1857 when he was still in Marshfield in East Montpelier he began making the mills but in 1863 he decided he had to get bigger and they came to Montpelier and bought the Waterman mills which is the area that the main manufacturing is at now these same mills were first settled by Jacob Davis the first settler in Montpelier Jacob was granted this land by the original proprietors under the condition that he built a sawmill and a flower mill and that is the importance of that area of the mill in 1867 a pearly Pitkin joined him he had been a quarter master general at the Civil War and James Brock James Brock was a major character in Montpelier for those of you who have not heard of him he lived in a big brick house across from the library and he was involved in everything and they started into a company known as Lane Pitkin and Brock in 1888 Dennis Lane died at their peak and it's suggested that the peak of the company was similar to about the time that he died there were 7 acres 11 buildings 100,000 square feet another family that was really big along with the lanes were the Pitkins some of you know Caleb Pitkin and Cabin and Marshfield now Caleb is in the same tree but a different branch and so there was 4 Pitkins that were in the business and a number of lanes cutting right into the quick in 1861 the company went bankrupt during World War II they had some war production but it wasn't enough after they closed down Danny Lane who was a descendant I think great grandson of Dennis ran the shop with a small crew making parts for the sawmills and it's suggested that there were 5000 so that's I love this thing here Sawyer's favorite dog a dog is a device that resets things and some of you may have a favorite dog also and one other thing was I really loved in the paperwork that we came across this piece that you're looking at right there here's a picture of it we know exactly what that is that is the Lane Suprex Compound now I because of time will not go into any more of this I have a stack of really really interesting papers and you're welcome to look at them later there's a copy here maybe one of the most interesting things the copy of the original deed when Dennis Lane bought the property at deed date in 1863 it's very clear that that's the deed for the purchase of that property so I'm done and we're going to pass this over to Manny Garcia and Manny is our last presenter Sawyer these photos here show this various in our history the south side of Montevideo was sort of known for granite dust, smoke a lot of noise I recall as a youngster he's been able to look out my window across the river and I could see a little steam engine I mean steam engine they were little saddle tanks they would go up to the quarry and bring granite down to downtown Barrie also to Montevideo it was an interesting place to go up if you like this sort of stuff but I want to start out with here two folders two boards that I have here that indicate the history of the two of the bridges that we had in Montevideo and this first one was the history of the main stream bridge can anybody hear me okay this right here shows this is an artist depiction of the first bridges that span the Wadouski from Montevideo over to Berlin and then from later on from Montevideo over to Paxa Montevideo the first bridge was a trestle type it just set that the supporting piers across the river only to be washed out many times until Sylvainus Baldwin built a timber arch bridge which was in place for 60 odd years it was built in the early 1820s and lasted until almost 1900s that bridge in 1956 was replaced by a prat steel truss bridge excuse me I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit this bridge right here was replaced in 1898 it's this one right here that replaced Sylvainus Baldwin's timber arch bridge then in 1956 the bridge that bridge of the prat truss was replaced by a modern steel beam bridge concrete deck if you're interested in bridges which I want to set aside some chronological examples there's also the history of the Grand Street Bridge and probably a lot of people don't realize this but just a rough history of that bridge it's a bridge that Montevideo wanted built and Berlin wanted no part of it so he distilled for that particular bridge a bridge coming over there was no use for them but they didn't have to wait too long because in the very early stages of this bridge which was known as the Wheelock Bridge the Martin Wheelock it was one of the first clerks from Montevideo the bridge washed out downstream and if you look at this bridge today as you drive across it the second version of that has been raised some but this bridge right here and there was a bridge there if you've got a magnifying glass in your study you can see the similarity of houses and know just about where you're standing on stone cutters way and then today as the bridge stands it's still in place now from just about 1900 to the present day the second phase of my rule of record here and of course the whole thing about this thing is bits and pieces of the south side the dirty side of Montevideo but this right here is the Sloan General Hospital and what you see here is a hospital that was built during the Civil War and it was kind of a pavilion style it was built in a circle and if you want some clarity as far as program this right here is Main Street and this is the Main Street Hill and the sharp corner so back in those days this was one of the first although not the first set of buildings that was built Montt it was a hospital for it was a hospital in Bradwellboro and the hospital in Burlington and then this one here was built in Montevideo and the injured troops would come in on the train and be taken up to this hospital which was on the campus so to speak of Vermont College so that's what you're looking at there and these are technical plans of the accurate check of the layout the insides, high ceilings meant for good airfoil and an interesting thing about this was it was ran and administrated by Dr. Henry James he was a waterberry surgeon and he came to run this hospital and later on this hospital was I'm not sure exactly just the time I was going to say probably not too much more than two years this hospital was replaced by the building on Carlin's Sheld and also some of the those buildings on the right side of the board were part of the original hospital for the Civil War vets and later all of that when I was all disbandled here were some of the remnants of the buildings that were once part of this hospital and you can see these buildings very clearly if you walk along College Street or 1st Avenue the higher part of 1st Avenue or also if you if you're over or around what was mentioned earlier Annen Street you'll see this green house right here the yellow house excuse me this right here you can distinctly find these houses that were once part of that of that Sloan Hospital and last of all here what I have here are some remnants of my family and businesses along the river of Longbillier and here again the chief thought here was focusing on granite this was my grandfather Harry Bertoldi with his wife and this is his first granite plant that he built coming over from Carrara, Italy and this granite plant inside this if you have an agri-line glass and you can look closely you'll see the statue being built the card of little Margaret famous person in the Remont Cemetery but here was little Margaret and there is a house upon Catlin Street in Longbillier now his granite plant was just below across the street from Catlin but it was known as the that whole area was known as pioneer and a lot of a lot of Italian immigrants and came there to settle my grandfather had his own business in that area and he would get a call in the night and say that there was some migrants coming into the Longbillier Station and he would take a horse and buggy and go to Longbillier from the pioneer area and bring these people home to his house and then later to surprise them with their jobs this let me see okay my grandfather ended up having a large granite plant that was built just downstream of the Lusky River there's just a few other incidences of different manufacturing that was going on in the south side of Longbillier so to speak this was on what was what today we know as Memorial Drive and looking beyond there you can see the Capitol building so this building is just off the main street bridge this hip here is where the building was developed there was a salary hardware manufactured there with door springs Colton was the manufacturer of door springs the fellow on the very left was Henry Colton he was Henry Colton and he was yet a business in there with manufacturing salary hardware and while all of this granite was coming into the area across the way here we just had more talking about the south seer granite these were all clustered somewhere around the granite street bridge along that stretch of road however no granite manufacturer would be ever taken place as strongly as it did without this was the first power plant and it was just upstream from the pioneer bridge and down below the interior of that mill so this was built for manufacturing but in 1888 it was converted over to convert electricity and there I have some pictures here of plants at the base of the Allison Hill another plant was upstream where they built a pedestrian bridge across the river but up there it was a dam for years it supplied this building right here very ornate little buildings and quarry, gettet and frost where the businessmen that perceived that so this right here was just upstream of that large dam here at the Capoeira dealer and this right here was roughly at the base of the Allison Hill so this was just all these were all businesses and manufacturing concerns that came to be on the south side of Montevideo and that's all I have as our historian extraordinaire and has done a tremendous amount of work over the years I've written articles done a lot of research and we thank many very much we're done thank you all for coming I hope we ran over a little bit but we said we would so I hope that's it now I do that and thank you all for coming