 Okay, my name is George Edson. I'm chairman of the Montenegro Historical Society. And I'm going to start by letting Eileen Corcoran from the Vermont Historical Society invite you to the facility. Eileen. Great, thank you, George. Thank you everyone for coming. My name is Eileen Corcoran. I'm the director of service and outreach here at the Vermont Historical Society. And we're really pleased to welcome such a wonderful crowd of folks here today for the reception. We always love to see people in the exhibit. And we're happy that we have Eric Ennishting today as well. So thank you for coming in on a beautiful day with us. But one of the duties that I get to do at the Vermont Historical Society is work with the Local History Gallery, which is where the Common Cracker exhibit is installed. The Local History Gallery is something that we created about five years ago within our Freedom and Unity exhibit. As a way to showcase local history, local stories, and some of the wonderful and magical events, people, and topics that we don't get to do ourselves. And so it's really become this wonderful ability for us to have everything from exhibits on agriculture to women's history to fine art to now crackers. And so I think that really showcases the amazing breadth and depth of history in Vermont. And we really love being able to work with places like the Montpelier Historical Society and people like George to bring those stories to light. And to give these small organizations a chance to showcase the amazing work that they do to a whole bunch of visitors, both from out of state and in state as well. So again, welcome. Thank you very much for coming. I do have to let you know if you're not already a member of the Vermont Historical Society, we would love to have you as one. You can have information on joining on our website, vermonthistory.org. We also do have social media and an e-newsletter for folks who want to know everything about what we're doing and what's happening at the Vermont Historical Society. So thanks again for coming. Welcome and enjoy. We're here to celebrate the opening and as such we have a lot of friends and a lot of people that helped us put this together. And there's going to be a number of introductions, but I'm doing these things a little bit out of order because one of my stories is a little time sensitive and I'd like to start with that. So I'd like to suggest that on a brisk October day in 2001, my father went to the front porch at 47 Liberty Street to get his Sunday Times Argus and brought in and took apart the various sections of the Sunday Times Argus and went to the Vermont Sunday Magazine and found an article, a cover article on Holy Smoke, Jeff Danziger's Warm Memories of Wood Stoves. And on this cover story is an old Vermont parlor with a wingback chair and a potbellied stove and a wood box. And the wood box says Montpelier Cross Crackers. And so my father fired off a letter to Jeff and I have a copy of that letter not here. And Jeff fired back a reply and it was all very friendly exchange. I entered the subject then and I wrote Mr. Danziger and I said, wouldn't it be nice if we could have the cover art, the original art for that cover? And he said yes and he sent it to us and signed it and addressed it to my father. Both articles of which are in the museum and we think that's kind of nice. This was not Jeffery's first exposure to the Common Cracker in 1980 when my family business Cross Baking closed their doors. Mr. Danziger did the art for an article in the Rutland parlor and it shows an old Vermonter and he's sitting in front of a bowl of soup and in the soup is floating some common crackers and the old Vermonter has a hammer in his left hand. I've never quite understood the significance of the hammer. But anyway, we have today with us, we're very lucky that Jeff Danziger with us and I'd like him to comment on everything I've said and swap lives with him and Mr. Danziger take it away. I really haven't anything any remarks to parents about crackers. I'm happy to be part of the history of Vermont drawing for the Rutland Herald and the Times-Argus for almost 45 years now. So if you go back into the archives of those newspaper, you'll find various drawings, some good, some bad, some in between and I guess I will just continue to keep on doing it. That's very nice that the estate has some good papers. It also has the Burlington Free Press. Absorbent, I can say that for it. I don't have any other comments. I'm happy to be here and if there's any questions I would happy to answer it. I really appreciate it coming. This has been important. These two pieces hang in my house and have for 10 years, I guess the math would be on that. So I thank you very much for taking the time to come up here today. Let's start with thanking our underwriters. We wouldn't be able to do this without them and they would include Ben and Jerry's Foundation, Cabot Cheese, Community National Bank, Doodles Prince Serve, Frederick and Mary Fashera, Lake Champlain Chocolates, and we have Allison Ains Meyers here from Lake Champlain Chocolates, a nice local girl born and brought up in Central Vermont. Lyman Orton and the Vermont Country Store Lyman right here. Mrs. A.C. Sprague, who is the daughter of Louise Andrews Kent, National Life Group, the Preservation Trust of Vermont, Union Mutual Insurance, and Vermont Mutual Insurance Group, and we thank them all for their contributions to this project. We're family members here, luckily, I'm only gonna introduce the immediate family starting with my wonderful wife. We've been married 38 wonderful years, 55 total, and they introduce us, they say this is Georgian Jill, you'll like Jill, so anyway, my wife Jill put your hand up, Elizabeth and the doorway, where is Emily? Emily is back here, not yet, but you're coming up. And Emily has two sons, Emily's all the way here from Austin, Texas, Emily has a son, Max, who is somewhere. Raise your hand. And Oliver, Oliver, a year a little shorter, would you stand up please? Oliver, I think, has some prepared remarks, Oliver. Okay. I also have, oh by the way, I meant to say Jill, Carnahan Edson. So those of you that have been around long enough in Central Vermont would remember her father, Dr. Ansel Carnahan Veterinarian who practiced veterinary medicine on this street as far as you can go, the last property on State Street in Montpelier for 40 years, along with his trusty sidekick, wife and partner, Annie, and we have another Carnahan girl here who would be Connie, Connie, right back there, raise your hand. Connie brought along her husband, Paul, and Paul, Paul is my favorite brother-in-law, my only brother-in-law, and Paul we employed as our grammarian here. So everything in the other room was checked by Paul for grammar punctuation and spelling. So before you leave, if you'd please check carefully and let me know. So that's the family. Now, I would be very proud to introduce the members of the board of the Montpelier Historical Society studying with Jennifer Boyer, Vice Chairman, Bill's Secretary, our Treasurer, recently retired librarian at the E Library, Corinne Cooper. Annie has a gig in Marshfield at four o'clock and Danny was here but left. Mike Doyle, Steve Ribolini, Eric is Thumper Colombo who had a previous engagement and I call that a pretty darn good board of directors so we'll accept accolades for that group. Oh, Eric Gilbertson, did I, who did I forget? Eric Gilbertson, I have a list here, I don't really know. Eric has been associated with the Preservation Trust of Vermont for ages and was a Historic Preservation Officer in the state of Vermont. Very lucky to have Eric on our board. Now, David Sheece, I didn't see David. David was to be here. David is the State Curator of Vermont and is a great friend of the Montpelier Historical Society and I would like to thank David for all he does for us. Okay, we're gonna go next to sort of the end of the story and that is when my family business closed their doors in 1980, there was an auction and Lyman Orton came to that auction and Lyman Orton bought some equipment at that auction. I'm gonna invite Lyman to tell us what he did. Okay, may I? Vermont Country Store, Lyman Orton was with relatives, huh? But we've been buying common crackers at the Vermont Country Store from Cross over the river and for a number of years but we never could quite get enough and some of their other business was declining. Did you make white bread for private label grocery stores or something? Lost two cents of both on that. Yeah, I think three. Three, yeah. That wasn't a very good answer. Anyways, sadly, they said they were gonna have to close the cracker business and my dad and I talked about it for about 20 seconds and said, well, why don't you go and buy that equipment and maybe we can make them and we can sort of think about who the hell's gonna know how to make them but we went over, I went over with one of my guys and put a bit in and buy in and stuff like that and bought enough of them and presses and the presses that make the crackers and cut them out and so forth and so I thought I'd done a pretty good job and then a guy comes up to me and said, I'm glad you bought all that. I said, who are you? He said, I'm Bob Mills. Where are you, Bob? Right here. Oh, there you are. So I said, what do you do, Bob? He said, I make the crackers. I'm the cracker baker and I said, this is pretty good. He said, do you think about getting a job? I said, I'm looking for a job. Anyway, long story short, about before we was done there, we had a deal where he was gonna come over and make the crackers and we didn't exactly know where so we first started making them on an L we had out back of a country store in Rockingham in 103, set that up as a cracker maker and that's Bob, that's where you and the crew set up these contraption stuff with what, 1890 Bob or so in the late 1800s, you said it was... It was probably around 1850. That early, okay. All right, yeah. And it was a group Goldberg kind of affair, very not terribly efficient but when you're the only one gonna do it it seems like a pretty good thing. So we went into that business and still making them. Some years later I kept looking at it and I go, you know, I wonder what else we could make on that and that's when we come up with these cookie buttons that I brought some boxes of those back there on the same cutter, made them what size are they gonna be? I said, whatever the size of that cutter is. So like a good Vermonter, just use that and turn those things out as well. So the people who make this all happen are standing over here and on my right is Julie Lanford who's in charge of all the cracker business and the bacon of them and to her right on the left is Cara Suia. And her job is the director of the entire Vermont Country Store distribution center of in North Clarendon, Vermont. And that's a one-armed paper hanger in itself. And I think we said, well, if you can't do that you're gonna have to take on the cracker business too. So she did, but that's a heck of a job. So these ladies put them out and it's great and I love to go there. Bob Mills told me that every once in a while you get three crackers stuck together and they throw them away. I said, don't throw them away, I could sell them. And he said, well, they're rechecks. He's like, he said, you can eat them, right? What are they, what did you call them in the bakery, Bob? We used to call them in the fridge. You can't use that word anymore, but stuck together, that's very unusual. So I think you could probably get a dollar for each one. We always threw them away so you'd never sell them. Yeah, yeah, well, that's why you went out of business. So it's been such a joy to have rescued the Vermont, what we call Vermont Common Cracker. St. John's Berry crackers, the loyal crackers up in Morrisville reaches Burlington crackers. And there was crackers in White River Junction that were made, they were called Hanover Crackers, came from the first Hanover in Hampshire. And then down in Brattleboro, there was a baker down there, Joel Cutler, who started about the same time that Timothy Cross started here in Montpelio. But his baker got sold like 15 different times in a matter of 50 years. I don't know what their problem was, but they kept passing it on to somebody else. But no, they were still making them until about 1920. But I miss anybody, oh yes, there's two cracker bakers in Rutland. There was the Rutland Cracker Company and another private company guy started in 1853 by the name of Verder. And he and his son ran it and then they sold it to around 1879. In 1879, they sold it to a gentleman by the name of, I think it was Lyon, something Lyon, I don't remember his, was it, I don't remember the first name. Then Lyon sold it after to a guy by the name of Hope. And Hope ran it for a few years and then he sold out in the Visco in 1897 and the Visco shut it down. So that was in 1892, the Rutland Cracker Company closed up after 10 years. So they went away. There was also somebody at Middlebury and somebody at local. So there were 10 cracker bakers in Vermont between 1850 and 1890. Well, look, there wasn't transportation. The old saying, you can't get there from here was really true back then. I mean, you had to have them spread out that. Crackers were one of the great local products that covered this whole state of Vermont population. Guys know that. That's what they were, they were local. Yeah, yeah. So that's why there were so many different babies because you didn't have trucks to transport the crackers. You didn't have electricity. These were all by steam engines or a horse walking on a treadmill. It's a different time. And the crackers themselves were, today we all look at these things and we talk about hammers for the crackers, but my wife and I told her, we were doing this because she's not here today. She said, you're crazy. You've got to be crazy. She said, you do it on the hot dog road, not the cracker, she didn't hear it. But nobody in my generation, or for all of you on my generation, not too many of us know what a common cracker is. And I found that my kids, they don't know what it is, well, of course my kids do because I was involved in what I mean. Dead friends, they have no clue what it is. And so when I was telling the two people I was involved in this exhibit, the same thing came up, what's a common cracker? And then they try to be nice and say, well, I guess you can eat them if you want. Just explain them how you do this and do that. They didn't really, and I tried to explain them that they were a food stuff, but. Yeah. Well, I gathered there's nobody in this room who doesn't know why the hammer was in there. Right? I mean, if you don't know, raise your hand. But being a vermonious, I'd be ashamed to fight for you, raise my hands. Of course, crackers and milk and cheese. That's what you've got to bust them up. On the agenda. And that's what we used to have for supper with a little popcorn on the side. And you have to bust them up to get them to soak up. And kind of, the only thing that made them really big was the cheese. Oh, I always say that. The cheese. So anyway, now where's Garger, my son? This is my son, my middle son, Garger Orton. And Garger's two-year-old boy, born in July, but his name is August, two years ago. And I just don't know what you're doing with this, but you know, I'm a grandfather and there's three others. So, and Garger does what every good parent of a little kid going tea then, kept feeding him crackers, right? Yeah, that's right, that. He gave him the Cheddar once. He liked those more than the plain ones. But that's, isn't that true? Everybody knows that, who has grandchildren and children back in that day that gave him common crackers because they're rock hard and absent the hammer. I'm glad you said that, too. Yeah, well, that's good. So, it's been a great thing to have revived the cracker and kept it in Vermont and keep it going and put it in the catalog and online and all that. And we don't ask what people do with them when they get them home. So, I'm glad that it's... Thank you, thank you very much. One more member of the Vermont Country Store group is Janice Brown, another baker over here. We wanna recognize, okay, I'm gonna pick up on the Bob Mills thing. Bob worked for our company until he went to work for Lyman's company. And so, I've known Bob for close to 50 years, 49 years. And we became, we didn't have much to do with each other for a number of years. And a year ago now, I looked him up, called him up and told him what I was doing and asked if he wanted to help. Well, Bob has been invaluable. Research, writing, he remembers things I don't. As you can see, and we emailed, he came to my house and sat at my kitchen table. We drove to this gallery and sat in there and planned it. We emailed hundreds of emails. One of those emails, he and his wife shared email address. And one day I emailed him and the subject line was my favorite beach. My wife and I, winter in Florida. And I sent him this email saying my favorite beach. And his wife got up in the morning before him and opened the email very anxiously to see what my favorite beach was. And it turned out it was a beach cracker box. She was some unimpressed. So anyway, I just can't say enough about Bob. Okay, one of the things we did here, or we tried to do, was to tell some side stories. So you got the common cracker, what is it, how was it made? But I was aware of the fact that the cracker was advertised on some brainge stage curtains. And I was aware of the fact that the Montpellier cracker was advertised on some stage curtains. So I turned to Chris Hadsall, who is the head of Curtains Without Borders. And Chris is with us today. And she's gonna tell us just a little. I'm sure you all went in and looked at everything in there. There is a reproduction of the middle sex brainge curtain that is now hanging in Worcester. So Chris, tell us just a little bit about that. Well, we also have Patty Wiley while we're at it. Patty is from the middle sex historical society and they actually own it or whatever. It's a long, convoluted story, but Chris, go ahead. All right, well, I'm gonna tell you even less than Jeff Danziger managed to tell you, you know? Yes, well, actually we met when I was down with a group of people restoring the Claremont Opera House Theater curtain, which is a great big opera house curtain. Bigger than a normal person would wanna take on. But we did manage to restore it and I stayed with you at that particular time because they were volunteers for that thing. And we got to talking. I think we talked about Fairbanks scales and we talked about somehow we got on to Cross Crackers. And I said, well, I have three boxes from Cross Crackers and he said, I don't have any. I said, well, we'll give you one. So I did. Is it in the exhibit? All right, good, I haven't had a chance to see it. That's because I bought a farmhouse in St. J. A. in 1970 from a long dead person named Orange Roberts who had worked for the Montpelier Cross Cracker Company but then it moved to St. Johnsbury. I think he was a trucker. I mean, I think he delivered crackers. I don't know. But we had Cross Cracker boxes galore in the shed outside. And I saved three of them before that barn, not the shed, it was in the barn, barn burned but I did save three of them. So I have one for each son and I've given one to you. And so I had this connection with Cross Crackers that I thought was really pretty interesting and Old Orange Roberts from St. Johnsbury Center had obviously worked for them for years. And coincidentally, I knew that there were advertisements on some of the Grange Hall curtains for Cross Crackers because we've restored every curtain in Vermont, all 193 of them. And one of them was in Middlesex. One of them in St. Johnsbury, well guess what? I mean, they were where there was at least one of your bakeries. I don't know they made crackers there or the bread but they were certainly there. And that curtain now is at the St. Johnsbury Middle School and I remembered the Cross Cracker ad because I had this personal interest in Cross Crackers. And I think there's one other but I'm blanking on where, oh bear. And the one in the Vermont Historical Society, I think the Berlin Corners Advertising Curtain also has a Cross Crackers ad and that's natural. They were near Montpelier. And so I told George about it and I'm sure you explored actually bringing the whole curtain but I sort of discouraged you. It's a big job to take down a, what, 15, 16, 18 foot curtain, 18 by say 10 foot high, get it down the stairs, get it into a truck, get it here and then you get back up the stairs. It's a big job and I had done that. I had actually brought it to the State House one year to show it off. I think before we finally installed it that's how we avoided all those up and down stairs because Dave Sheets and I used to show one curtain a year at the State House in the cafeteria and we did about 10 of them. But each time it involved getting a school bus and dealing with the fact that we had to take them down and put them up and it was real, really difficult. But that curtain did come for a month to the State House so I'm sure a lot of you saw it. Well we also had it in the theater, the, what's it called, the theater that's next to the old opera house, downtown. The actual. Lobby theater? Yes, we put it in their lobby for a while as well. So anyway, I'm very pleased that he took the initiative to make a photographic copy of the curtain but rather trying to bring the whole thing here and these curtains were in every Green Hall. They needed to have a way to roll something up to have a reveal. That it was usually a kind of a staged re-enactment of the founding of the Grange or something else to do with one of the degree ceremonies. And in order to have a reveal, you have to have something that you pull up because this is all before there were drawstring curtains. So every stage in Vermont or every Grange, certainly, and most stages in Vermont had these painted theater curtains. And you can go on our website and see them all. And I also did finally do a book which includes the Worcester curtain. And what else? Jeff, anything else? No, nothing else? It's parts. Okay, I'm going to quit. These are the quids, these are the boss. Thanks. To the staged curtain, I want to make a couple more comments. One is that David Book from Worcester Historical Society helped us out also on this project. Paul Richardson of StoryWorks did the photography and that was professional photography in order to be making the reproduction. Dan Emmons of Fast Signs of Burlington produced it. You can't get just anybody to produce something that big in the way of a banner. I'd like to see this have a life that goes on from here and I envision that being other places, it's got a national life ad on it. It might look nice in the national life lobby for a period of time. Maybe Montpellier City Hall, there's a lot of Montpellier ads on there that would mean things to people that have been around for a while. In Vermont, national, I mean, one of the insurance companies is on there too. So that's the staged curtain. Now, the next side story is about crackers and milk. And crackers and milk, we almost of us have heard about the concept of crackers and milk, whatever that is. And crackers and milk is a diet that was prevalent in the 1800s. And what happened was that mother made a meal on Sunday at one o'clock. Well, mother just wanted to make another meal at six o'clock, so Sunday night was crackers and milk. So that is a subject that we enjoyed approaching. And we got a book through Susan Cain of the Ten Bridge Fair, a box in there. And one of the boxes features a picture of a young man eating his crackers and milk. And we also found my father kept everything. And he had some old printing plates and they were corroded and they were dirty and they were bent. You couldn't even tell what they were. And so after much searching, I found Sarah Smith, Sarah Smith, who is director of the book arts workshop at Dartmouth College. And she had her students print these and those plates are in at that exhibit and not only the plate, but what they printed from the plate. And those plates have the same picture as the box that we got from the Ten Bridge Fair. So it really makes quite a neat little story. In addition, Teresa Green from the Vermont Historical Society produced a faux fake crackers and milk. They wouldn't allow any real food in the display. So Teresa Green created what you see in there, which is crackers and milk, which is fake. She also created some fake crackers and they're sprinkled around that display box and they're just beautiful. They look as real as they could look. So that is one of the display pieces in there. Now I'm not sure anybody still has crackers and milk on a Sunday night or do they Steve Jocelyn? Would you tell us? Steve Jocelyn just happens to be here. Steve Jocelyn of the Watesfield Jocelyn Clan. Steve, can I talk about, do you still eat crackers and milk? I still eat crackers and milk. And you enjoy it? I have since I've consumed solid food and I have accounts for the cracker. I look the way I am and I'm 104. One year ahead of me at high school. That's right. That's right. I saw a cousin tent today. Yes, and I see the Jocelyn reunion pictures on Facebook. As a side note, Chris, you lived in the Stark District, correct? You're the Jocelyn? No, no, wait, can you please take a picture? I was Dave Clark's neighbor and we used to gather sap out by our house. Crackers and milk, I can't think of a pointer subject to talk about. I, like I said, I've been eating cross crackers since I consumed solid food. I inherited the crackers and milk from my dad who frequently on Sunday night and for lunches in the summer. And what you, what I say you need is a relatively deep bowl. And you start off with six crackers and crushed them by hand, more if you want. And then flood them with milk and let them sit a little while to take some of the crack out of them. And my dad always had cheddar cheese with the crackers and milk and he would send me over to me here in store to get a sample off from the wheel. And I'd carry it home and if it was acceptable, he'd send me back and I'd get a pound. Oh. I silly cheddar cheese but I prefer sage cheese with my crackers and milk. There used to be a number of cheese makers in Vermont that made sage cheese. The only one I'm aware of now is the Sugarbush firm in Woodstock, which I highly recommend for their sage cheese, their horseradish cheese. It's a neat place to go to. We didn't always have crackers and milk on Sunday night. Sometimes we had popcorn and milk. I don't know if any of you are familiar with popcorn and milk, but it's pluttered popcorn in a bowl of milk and you eat it like you would cereal. And it's very good but I'm probably one of the only ones that's souped. I also occasionally have crackers. I split them and put a dab of peanut butter on them. Tradition, but I tried to keep a pretty, a Vermont-y and just crackers and milk. Anybody got any questions on the exciting meal of crackers and milk? We had to prove that it's real. How many have you, how many of you have eaten crackers and milk? Wow. Good. And I thank the Orton's for continuing it because it got me this far, so. Then in Oklahoma, we had cornbread and milk. I heard of that. This is not a cornbread show. Don't forget you said that. I wanna thank a number of people who've contributed items here, most of which I don't think are here, some of which are not here. Peggy Perle and Jennifer Payne of the St. John's Very Historical Society. Pat Stark of the Hartford Historical Society. Tom Cross, who is an antique dealer in Burlington. Brooke Page is here. Brooke Page is the most prolific collector of common cracker items anywhere. Brooke, where is Brooke? Brooke, only in front of me. And Kendall Spavencure and Howe Scales, probably the biggest, most married collector of antique items in the state of Vermont. Thank you, thank you, Brooke. Okay, we have Louise Andrews Kent. I grew up at 47 Liberty Street with my mother having their cookbook called Mrs. Appleyard's Kitchen. And I was very aware of Mrs. Appleyard and Mrs. Appleyard's love of Montpelier crackers. And she has numbers of recipes in here that involved a Montpelier cracker. And there's a story in here. I, knowing of her and the background of the cracker, I included a wall hanging in there of hers. And it's a story out of there. You wanna read the story, but I can briefly tell it in about two sentences. And that is that somebody wanted to steal the idea of the common cracker out west. So they took a baker from Montpelier and they sent him out there and they gave him everything. They called it the secret rule, a rule as a recipe. So he had the secret rule and he had all the ingredients and he had the right flour. And he had everything but the crackers didn't come out right. And they made them again and they didn't come out right. And they finally figured out is because he didn't have the Montpelier water. Oh, come on, burrow the water to her. No. No? The burrowing water. Thank you, Karen. And so anyway, what we have here involved or was in touch with Mrs. A.C. Sprague daughter of Louise Andrews Kent. We have two granddaughters of Louise Andrews Kent with us today. Janet Ancel, who is a high school classmate of mine and her sister, Olivia Gay. Janet Ancel and Olivia is here. So Olivia, my share of word about her grandmother, Louise Andrews Kent. Thank you, George. So George got in touch with Janet and Janet got in touch with me and our now 100-year-old aunt, Rosamund Sprague, lives in South Carolina. And I go, I, taking care of her, managing her affairs, turn me into a snowbird, I'm happy to say. And so I go down there every winter and George sent us some wonderful materials that I share with her. And it pleased her very much to have her mother remembered in this way. So our grandmother, even though she used an unconscionable amount of butter in most of her recipes, was also very interested in natural foods and simple foods. And certainly the common cracker fits into that category in a big way. And so from early on in her cookbooks, this is her first cookbook. There are other cookbooks that she wrote with our mother, Elizabeth Kempke, which are the summer kitchen and the winter kitchen. And this one has, the recipe is to soak the crackers and then bake them, which makes them fluffy. Of course, of course. Yes, and then you can do other things with them. But in one of, I don't know if it's probably in the winter kitchen, there's a recipe that I use many times as one of my party tricks, which is to cut the crackers in half and spread them with chutney, made to my grandmother's rule. And if you don't have your own chutney, then you use your sister's chutney. She usually shares it with me. And top it with some cabbage cheese and just run them into the broiler for not very long. If you leave them too long, they burn and then that's not a good thing at a party. So, but they're very tasty and it softens the cracker a little bit and the bite of the chutney and the milliness of the cheese turns out a wonderful hors d'oeuvre. A Vermont hors d'oeuvre. So, I think our grandmother would be pleased to have this recognition. She loved to write about Vermont, particularly about the Vermont landscape and this story of the efficacy of the Vermont water, the necessity of Vermont water, appealed to her sense of the pureness of the Vermont and the beauty of Vermont. So, she would be pleased to be included. Thank you. And Kent, name of course, Kent Corners. Kent's Corner. Kent's Corner. Many kents, one corner. Like I said, Kent Corner and the Kent Museum, all affiliated with, all connected with the Kent. And the Kent story itself is a wonderful story. So, unless I missed a whole section here, I think I've touched on every single thing on my list. My wife told me this should last six minutes. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's two things. Yes. Confirms. I'm assuming that everybody here has also heard of mock, mince, pie. Oh, yes. And guess what that was made with? Cracker. Crackers. Like I said, don't forget the mock, mince, made with the cross cracker. And I mean the common cracker. I would invite anybody, you know, somebody sitting here and said, oh my gosh, I'd like to say this or that or whatever. Are there any questions or any other comments? So, is there anything else to be cold? Let me say, there's stuff up back. There's some, some free stuff. There's crackers. There's some more things there that might not have made, whatever they are. And there's chocolates, late-champagne chocolates. And, and, and stuff. I, I, I agree with whatever you said. I agree, yes. And, oh yeah, any, any questions? Anybody have to say something? Yes, Elizabeth. Please take cookies, they're delicious. And you won't serve them. So, these have remind country store cookies. Right? And they have for you a bunch of cookies and little cakes on the picture on the front. One is dark on the middle. And the other is too bright. It has those ones. It has those ones. And, and my man, if somebody was telling me when I was talking about callus and all these different things, your store, your family business started in callus, right? North callus. Like I said, north callus. And you were, you were in business with the teach-outs. Well, my, my grandfather, gardener, my in the garden. It's the name of, it was married to a teacher. And her name was Lillia, teacher. And your father was Melvin teacher. And Melvin and my grandfather had a store in North Callus. 1897 called Teach Out Portland. And looked just like the one in Weston. Burned out in years of community struggle. But that was, my father's experience in growing up in that store, stated in memory. And that's how during the Second World War he was working in the Pentagon. And he saw an ad for Chase and St. Claude Coffee that had an image of the old guys sitting on the top of the stove, snook at their pipes, dog lying on the floors, doorkeeper in the background, cutting cheese. And he said, it's kind of going back after the war to start a company store again. He was sitting in a catalog, of course, because it was in my people, you know, print, print. And then he put out the catalog. People started ordering. Started right then. And we're coming out next summer to come to the store. He said, we're not going to go to the store, I think. We didn't have that store. So he hustled around and told me, oh, behold, there's a building for sale to stop the village grain, which is where this business is now. And my mother and father bought that. And that came to the store. So it all started in North Callus, so we belong there. Teach Out is a name that was very, we had Teach Out friends, close friends, growing up in Montpey herself. So this all is, oh, everything's connected. Okay, anybody else? Yes, David. David Herron, my relative, David and I go back in Berlin until the 1700s. Go ahead, David. My mother always used to go up the road about a quarter of a mile to the grass-baking company. Corner of State and Main Street. And she would buy a bag of split crackers. Got two questions. Number one is, why did they split coming out of the oven? And number two, how much did this bag of crackers weigh? It weighed about so much. And these crackers, as opposed to most crackers, split, and you split them, and there's a picture of my father on a wall hanging in there, splitting the cracker with his thumb. So it was a hockey puck type shape and a little puffed, but it had a seam all the way around. And as these do today, and you split it open with your thumb. So the only thing I can say is, it's using this improper word of cripples, which is what we used back then, is they became cripples because somehow they became disconnected in production. So that is what they sold them as kind of like seconds. How much it weighed and how much it cost. I wasn't there then. Yes, you were there. Did you work in the bakery? I worked in the bakery for many years. And I was born in 31, right after the depression. And my dad would go down to get a barrel of crackers or whatever would happen to you in it. And we lived on that for quite a while. Then I went in the airport and came back and I worked in the bakery for 10 years. But all of us there, the crackers were in one end of the building and also bread on the other. I had to be working on them. So that's where it is in the bread department. But we worked together. The guy that was picking crackers. Do I watch him yet? He would drug it. At one time he could take 200 pound bags of flour on his shoulder there and carry it off. And then he'd fall. And then he would wash it in, make the dough. And then they rolled it out, he would reverse it, put it out, roll it out, do it again. He'd keep rolling it over and over just a certain amount of time. Then he'd cut the crackers out. That's how we would be able to go for a long time. Yeah, and that's just the way they're made today and just the way it works. And there's a video in there. And I'm sure that given the circumstances here, many of you haven't actually spent a lot of time in there. You might come back when there's nobody around and there's a video taken at the Vermont Country Store production with these people here that made them that would be kind of fun to watch. And then at another point, this guy who was so rugged, they had their oven on the first floor as a measure of the oven. And one time when there's a measure of the cracker one, he comes in and over the door with a crack smoke coming up just as a fire smoke coming up from the oven. There's a fire somewhere. He gets the jack, 20, that skid, so 25 bags of straw, he gets the earnings. The next room was probably 30 years in higher. He could get started, he'd run that whole skid up there. He'd cleaned it all up, show it on the fire department and come and get it out of it. Quick story, we're all done. I don't want to get out of it. But the bakery, I'm telling you, which is where City Center is now, and it was 101 Main Street. The bakery was owned by just Charles H. Cross and his son, L. Bar Cross, was in business with him. And what they did was they started out with a building on the front on Main Street. And whenever he wanted to add on, he would just buy another barn and he would move the barn up behind the building and then he'd move another barn up. Every one of these barns had different ceiling heights and different floor heights. So in my memory, back in the 50s, the bakery was like this. It was not even. This was very common. If you look at the old maps of Montpellier, you look at downtown, most every building downtown was built like this. So that just happens to be the way it was. Okay, I really don't want to get corrented. I think this should end with a huge thank you to you. Thank you. Thank you. Sure, I have the right image of my house. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.