 Hello everyone, welcome. I would like to introduce Angie. She started serving as the Executive Director of the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum in Burlington in March 2022. The Ethan Allen Homestead is one of the oldest sites of both Native American and European occupation known in Vermont, but what makes it truly special is how the site is still being used as a center of community today. Angie will explore the history of the homestead and its current offerings for the community today, including community gardens, school programming, walking and cycling trails, living history, events, lifelong learning workshops, volunteer opportunities, and more. She grew up in Washington State, completed her undergraduate degree in philosophy at Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and her master's in history at UVM, where she focused on the Revolutionary War era in Vermont. In addition to her experience in history museums, Angie has taught history in public schools, led wilderness expeditions with Outward Bound, and recently spent two summers in archeological digs in Europe. Angie lives in the new north end of Burlington with her spouse and two dogs with whom she spends most weekends in the Green Mountains attempting to complete the long trail through section fights. Wow. Without further ado, please welcome Angie Grove. Testing, testing, one, two, three. Okay, great, thanks. Well, thank you, everyone, and thank you for inviting me here, and thank you for coming inside on such a beautiful day. I know that it's tempting to get out and do some yard work at this time of day with this kind of weather, but sometimes it's nice to come inside and take a break from the sun for an hour also, so I won't blame you if you run out the door right after this to go back outside, though. So, my name is Angie Grove, and I am the executive director of the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum, and I'm going to, let's see if I can press start here. I'm gonna start with a little introduction about myself. You already heard a little bit, so I'll just highlight a few things. So, as a professional, I call myself a historian and adventurer. I like the intersection of the two, and I really want to make history more accessible to people, especially hands-on and outdoor historical adventures as well, and one of the reasons I love working at the Homestead Museum is we're located in a public park that's about 300 acres of beautiful outdoor space as well, and I'll show you some photos of those spaces as we go. On the left, you can see a photo of me in an archeological dig. I'm holding up a piece of medieval pottery I just dug up, and on the right is a photo of me hiking the Long Trail about 10 years ago. The Long Trail is a big hiking trail in Vermont that goes from the north to the south and cuts down the middle of Vermont, and my husband and I have been working on it for about 12 years now, doing section hikes just on the weekend, so that was our very first hike on the Long Trail about 12 years ago. We're still working on it to this day. So, today I'm gonna talk about these four things. I'm gonna start with a history lesson, so for those of you who weren't paying attention in fourth grade state history class, you're gonna get another overview, and then I'm gonna talk about how that history was refound during the Bicentennial movement at the Ethan Allen Homestead, and then I'm gonna talk about the Homestead today and the offerings we have and all the partnerships we have with other community groups, and lastly, I'm gonna try to persuade you to think about getting involved in some way as well at the Homestead. And I think at the very end, we're gonna have a Q and A. That's correct, yeah. Okay, so I'm gonna start with your history lesson, so this is gonna be a brief history of early Vermont and Ethan Allen, and by extension, early United States as well. We're gonna start before the United States, going back about 10,000 years, so the first human settlement in North America was approximately 10,000 years ago, depending on what historian you talk to. They might give you another 5,000 years here or there, but we'll say approximately 10,000 years ago, and the first farming, known farming site in Vermont is along the Winooski River in the Burlington Interveil right next to the Homestead Park, so that, and that goes back about 2,000 years ago, so the Ethan Allen Homestead is first occupied by these indigenous peoples, and by the time they were farming, they had formed themselves into the Algonquin different branches, and in Vermont, the subgroup within the larger Algonquin group were called the Abonacci people, so those are the Abonaccis of Vermont, and you can see a map there that kind of shows there's even more subgroups within the Abonaccis, like the Cisboy and Kawasaki and the Koki, and there's others as well, and you can see that they go up into Canada and into New Hampshire, and all the way out to Maine as well there. So the earliest evidence of human occupation at the Homestead is from these people, but then the British and the French, but mostly the British came in to start occupying this area. The French occupation really stayed up in the Canadian, what we call Canada in that area. There were military forts that were along Lake Champlain, but they didn't really come inland from the lake, and they stayed kind of like just as military forts. They weren't homes where wives and children were raised as well, and so the British started settling wives and children families in these lands to claim them against the French, and eventually they had the French and Indian War, and the British won that, and that's how the British got Canada as well, and so that allowed British European families to start settling these lands more safely and in larger numbers. So this is going on in the 1760s for the most part, and you can see in this map here, there's Vermont outlined in blue, and on either side is New Hampshire and New York, and then below it in green is Massachusetts. Now, Vermont was not Vermont back then in the 1760s. They didn't have very accurate maps back then, so they each colony didn't have a very accurate map of its borders. So New Hampshire believed their border extended all the way to Lake Champlain, and New York believed their border extended all the way to the Connecticut River. So what is now Vermont was claimed by both New Hampshire and New York, and Massachusetts got in there a little bit too and claimed a little bit of Southern Vermont, mostly just to strengthen the New Hampshire, New England claim just to not be bullied by New York so much, but it was mostly New Hampshire and New York claiming these lands, and both royal governments started issuing land titles to people to move to this land. So it was just like the British and the French kind of vying over this land, whoever can settle the most families was gonna win, and so the British won. New Hampshire and New York started doing the same thing, and New Hampshire was beating New York at this game. So New Hampshire was writing out these land grants, and this area came to be known commonly as the New Hampshire grants, and most of the settlers in Vermont were from New England state. They were from New Hampshire or Massachusetts or Connecticut, such as the Allen family with Ethan Allen, and New England at this time was a completely different world than New York at this time, some still say it is, but New England had, there wasn't really a lot of separation between church and state, and New England had a different religion than New York did. New England was Puritans, you're familiar with the Pilgrims, right? If you think of the Pilgrims, that's New England, and New York was Anglican, which was the Church of England, and so they not only had different religions, they had a different structure of government. The New England colonies believed the way that they did land titlements is pretty much every male over the age of 21 would own his own piece of land, and you had to own land in order to vote, so in the New England colonies, it was much more democratic than any of the other colonies because land ownership was much more common among white males. In New York, you also had to own land in order to vote, but they structured their land ownership very similarly to old Europe, and so aristocrats owned huge parcels of land, and they hired farmers to rent the land from them and work the land and farm the land. So most people living in the New York colony didn't own their own land, which meant that they couldn't vote. So when settlers were moving into Vermont, they really didn't want New York authority over them because it was a different religion and a different government structure, and they feared that they could even possibly lose their right to vote if New York took over. Well, unfortunately for them, the King of England granted New York's petition to settle this argument in New York's favor, and so New York won this land and all of those settlements and what is now Vermont, Vermont was officially part of New York according to the British Royal government in the 1760s. So that is why the Green Mountain Boys formed. So a lot of people are familiar with the Green Mountain Boys militia unit and think of it as a Revolutionary War unit, and we're gonna talk about how they did fight in the Revolutionary War, but they originally started as a unit forming against New York, and so they were fighting against the New York authority over the New Hampshire grants or what came to be known as Vermont. One of their leaders was Ethan Allen, so that's his statue in the middle there, that is the statue of him that's at the Vermont Capitol. No one actually knows what Ethan Allen looked like, so that's just an artist's rendition. The Green Mountain Boys flag is to the left there, I bet you're familiar with that flag as well, possibly, and to the right is a woodcut image that was published in 1842 that depicts the types of tactics the Green Mountain Boys used against the Yorkers. So that is a man tied to a chair and strung up high, almost as tall as that building. And so the New Yorkers considered the Green Mountain Boys a terrorist organization. Of course, the Green Mountain Boys thought of themselves as like Robin Hood and his merry men, right? They were just protecting their own land, but they did use physical force and scare tactics to fight off the Yorker authorities and agents and even some families who purchased land titles from New York would move here and find that there were New England settlers already on the land sitting here. So it was quite a chaotic time. It was kind of like the Wild West where might is right and whoever is the strongest, that's the right way. So this is the context in which Ethan Allen first becomes famous. He wrote a lot of newspaper articles against New York during this time. He was one of the military leaders within the Green Mountain Boys unit. And then the Green Mountain Boys joined the American Revolution because it happened to start right at that moment. And when Ethan Allen heard about Lexington and Concord, which is the first battle of the revolution in 1775, he took his unit of Green Mountain Boys, already formed, trained militia unit, and they ran off to Fort Ticonderoga and took that fort from the British on behalf of the American Revolution. And so you can see a famous picture of that happening. That photo or that image was drawn in 1875. So it's a fictional representation of how it happened. But this was a very important military event in the Revolutionary War because it was the first real offensive event where Lexington and Concord were defensive, where the British army were marching to try to capture the rebels' stores. So this was the first offensive event that the rebels did and it was very successful. It also gave the rebel army their first cannons, which was a big deal for them because George Washington was then able to use those cannons in Boston on Dorchester Heights and that was the first official victory of the Continental Army and George Washington's first victory as its leader, which really instilled a lot of confidence in the public about this revolution. So you may be familiar with the story of Henry Knox doing his famous engineering feat to get the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston and that's the image at the top right there in the snow. And then that is George Washington at the bottom right, standing next to one of those cannons that was captured by the Vermont Green Mountain boys as well. Okay. So now we have a, the United States has been formed, right? They're fighting for the United States and we all know that there were 13 original colonies. Yes? Well, Vermont was the 14th and tried to be a colony within the revolution but New York wouldn't have it and New York was very powerful and had a lot of money. I mean, that's why the king favored New York over New Hampshire in the original conflict. Well, the Continental Congress didn't want to upset New York either. So Vermont petitioned to become the 14th colony in the Revolutionary War to send people to the Continental Congress, to sign the Declaration of Independence, all of that stuff. And New York said no, that's not a separate colony. That's New York. So if you recognize them as a separate colony we will withdraw our support. Now additionally, the Southern states said, hold on a second, we have a really good balance between slave and non-slave states right now. And if you admit another Northern non-slave state that's gonna upset that balance. So the Southern states voted against New York as well. Or I'm sorry, against Vermont as well. So Vermont said, fine, we will be our own country then. And so they declared the Vermont Republic in 1777, which lasted until Vermont did become the 14th state in 1791. And this was the original seal of the Vermont Republic as well. So during this time, however, Ethan Allen was, was, he had some, he was a very stubborn and how do I put this nicely? Forceful man, and he was a little rash. So while Vermont declared its independence, declared itself its own country, Ethan Allen was off trying to capture Montreal unsuccessfully. And instead he spent almost three years in a British prison. And he was eventually released and he wrote about his experience in the narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen, which was published in the middle of the Revolutionary War. And became, according to a couple different sources, became the second most published book in the United States at the time. Second only to Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Both of those books, Common Sense and the narrative are propaganda pieces. You read this, you will also agree the British were horrible. And it narrates how he heroically captured Porta Conderoga and then the horrible treatment he received in the British prisons. And this is the second thing that really propelled Ethan Allen into the limelight during that time. So the first was capturing Porta Conderoga and he was commemorated by the Continental Congress for that and given a position, an officer position in the Continental Army as a reward. And then he published this book and it was so popular and so frequently read and purchased that he became a household name within the United States and internationally in Western Europe as well. So that is how Ethan Allen became such a famous name and actually it's the royalty proceeds from this publication that he mostly lived off of in his later years. There is a second book that he published that had the opposite reaction from the public and that is called Reason the Only Oracle of Man. He published this later after the Revolutionary War and it is a religious philosophy book. So I think I described Ethan Allen just a little bit ago as stubborn and forceful and rash. If you think about the time period he lived in and how intertwined religion was in every other aspect of society, then it might not surprise you that he is gonna go against the grain in that also. And Ethan Allen was not a Christian and he was, what he agreed was close enough to what people called deism, which is a religious belief that there's a supernatural being like a God who created life and created the earth but isn't paying attention to what we're doing, doesn't care, like created it and walked away. And so there's not necessarily a heaven or a hell or any commandments by which one should abide but that human reason was one of the gifts that this God gave us and reason alone is enough to dictate humanity to living a moral life and reason alone is all you really need. You don't need prayer in church and God according to deism. So there were a lot of deists at this time period. It was kind of a popular religion right at the end of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson are often cited as deists. But neither of those men were out proselytizing deism or convincing other people to become deists. So Ethan Allen faced a lot of criticism for this. This book did not make him money and he faced well, we'll just say before he even wrote this book he was in his youth, he was kicked out of numerous towns by the church elders as well. So not that surprising that he published this book. So at the end of the Revolutionary War Vermont is the Vermont Republic and Ethan Allen has made a lot of profits from the narrative book and he is getting together the publication for the second book, Reason. And that's when he retires kind of a, the gentleman farmer retires to his farm like George Washington did right after the Revolution War. This is what gentlemen did in the late 18th century. They retired from public life and went to their farm and the farm that he retired to was the homestead in what is now known as Burlington, Vermont at the Ethan Allen homestead. And that is where he spent the last, about a year and a half of his life when he died suddenly in 1789. And this is another artist rendition of what he looked like, we don't really know. Okay, so that is a little mini history lesson about Vermont during that time period and who Ethan Allen was and why he was famous. And then you had the Bicentennial in the 1970s. And so everyone wanted to find all the founding fathers homes and anything to do with the founding fathers. So there was a man in Vermont called Ralph Nading Hill and he went out searching for Ethan Allen's last homestead where Ethan Allen died, his retirement home. And it was always known where Ethan Allen's farm was. In fact, the little blue dot right next to the red circle says Ethan Allen Tower. You're probably familiar with the Ethan Allen Park in the New North End and there's the tower, the observation tower. That was put there in the early 1900s and that used to be part of Ethan Allen's farm. But it wasn't the part of his farm that had the house in it. So Ralph Nading Hill went out looking for the house, the physical property where Ethan Allen had lived and the rooms in which he had died. And so he came across this parcel of land along the Winooski River that matched the descriptions that were written about the location of the house and he found out that that parcel of land was probably gonna be sold and probably gonna be purchased by condominium developers. So he and his, the group that was now forming to save this land and the house there partnered with the Winooski Valley Park District which is a nonprofit and municipality organization in which eight different, today eight different towns in the Burlington area all collaboratively join in and they purchase land that are within the Winooski Valley, the Winooski River Valley, which flows into Lake Champlain and they save it for environmental preservation. So Ethan Allen's homestead was within the Winooski Valley and so Ralph Nading Hill and his crew partnered with the Winooski Valley Park District and the Park District purchased the land to create a public park and environmentally preserve it and partnered then with a new organization called Ethan Allen Homestead Trust to research and find that house in that land. So they did a bunch of research. They did physical, they did document research with papers, they went in archives. They did oral research. They interviewed people who lived on the land and they also did archeological research. So that's what these images are of. So the two images on the right are people in archeological digs. In the middle, you can see there's a trench that's open that they dug into the ground and off far to the right, they're looking through the dirt with a sieve to see if they shake it, the dirt falls down and artifacts and rocks are left on top and part of the left of this image is some of what they found. These are some of the oldest artifacts that they found and they include Native American pieces like stone tools. You might recognize an arrowhead in that collection. You might recognize a scraper to scrape hides in that collection. There's also metal objects presumably by the European settlers in the area possibly owned by Ethan Allen and his family. So you can recognize possibly a belt buckle, a shoe buckle. There's even a spoon. There's also clay pipe bowls and half of a bone comb, like a hair comb made of bones but all the teeth have been broken off. So these are some of the types of artifacts they were finding. These are on display in the museum and if you join us for our tour in May, you can see these in person. I can point them out to you. And so they were finding evidence to corroborate that this possibly could have been Ethan Allen's home. And this was the house that they found in the property and this is what it looked like in 1980. And Ralph Nading Hill saw this house, looked at the foundation and he said, that looks like a really old foundation. So he basically knocked on the door and asked the people living in the house, the farmer, there are farmers living there. He asked them if they knew anything about the history of the house and they're like, yes, this is Colonel Ethan Allen's house. So it had been passed down in this oral tradition by the occupants of the home for hundreds of years. Now this house had been occupied for hundreds of years. So what it looks like in this photo is not what it would have looked like at the time Ethan Allen lived there. So for example, here's a photo of the same house from 50 years earlier than that. This is the 1930s and you can see there's a lot of outbuildings including barns and people on horses. This was a working farm for the entire time since before Ethan Allen moved there. He actually rented the farm for a couple years to two other men who lived there before he did. And then of course I mentioned to you earlier the indigenous peoples of this area were farming this land 2,000 years before that. So this land where my museum is has been continuously farmed as far as we can tell for over 2,000 years. And for over 200 years in the European American tradition of farming. So Ralph Nadinghill and his team started deconstructing the house to find the original pieces and try to do a speculative restoration. So a restoration is when you restore something to its original state. Speculative means you have to do some guesswork to what that looks like. Some people call that a reconstruction. Sometimes it's semantics and sometimes when it comes to federal funding it's not semantics. We need to know. And this is what they ended up with. So this is what the house looked like when they were done with their reconstruction in the late 1980s and when it first opened as a museum. And this is what it looks like today. We've painted it since then. And you can see in the bottom right there's that photo of what it looked like in 1981 Ralph Nadinghill found the house. Now when you visit the house on our tour in May we'll go inside the house and I can point out some of the different features that they found during their research. The beams that they believed were original and the different 18th century features that are still there. They also used a lot of salvaged items from other 18th century buildings that were being demolished at the time. So there's like the entire floor in the kitchen is from an 18th century barn elsewhere not from that property. So it's original from the time but not from the building. So there's kind of a mixture in that house as well as a more modern chimney around the fireplace for fire safety when you visit it today. Okay. So we give tours of the house at my museum six months of the year, seven days a week so quite a lot which leads me into what else is going on at the homestead today. So they found the house, they made a museum. What else? Well, today the museum preserves a lot of different types of community heritage including indigenous heritage, the heritage of early Vermont the founding of Vermont, early American founding of the United States heritage. We focus a lot on homesteading artisan crafts as well as on like farming and gardening and that sort of heritage as well. And also environmental preservation with our partnership with the park district who owns the land. So we have partnerships with lots of different organizations that help us do all of this. One of our main partners is an organization called Alnobaiwi which is Abenaki for in the Abenaki way or like Abenaki culture. And they have a couple of different things they're helping us do at the homestead. One of the things that they've done to help our interpretation of this Abenaki heritage is they've created this recreated like hunting Abenaki village that is based on historical evidence of Abenaki traditional ways from around the 1840s or so which is about as far back as you can find documented evidence for this. So there's a wigwam, they have a ceremonial cooking fire, they have crafting tents and they also have next to the village a ceremonial dance grounds where they hold ceremonies to this day and some of those ceremonies are open to the public to participate in or to observe. Some of the ceremonies are private for Abenaki community members only. They do have an upcoming ceremony. The next one that I know of is on the first weekend in June and it is the Strawberry Moon Celebration and that is open to the public if you're interested in attending that. They also have these Abenaki demonstration or traditional gardens where they're growing different crops that they know based on historical research Abenaki people were growing. Again, historical evidence traditionally requires something to be written down and that didn't happen until the Europeans arrived. So most of this evidence is what they were growing in the 1800s and a lot of people want to know, what were they doing before that? And there's just not as much evidence to that so it's a little harder to dig down that deep. But you will see here like the three sisters crops they're familiar with the corn, beans and squash being grown together. That's one of the things that they grow in this garden. And they also in 2019, they installed an exhibit about Abenaki culture within the museum building. And these are photos from the exhibit that came in in 2019 and was expanded in 2020. But as I speak, they're in the museum putting in a brand new exhibit today. In fact, this morning, their graphic artists came in with some big fancy panels to put onto the walls. So when you come in May for your visit, there'll be a brand new exhibit on Abenaki culture for you to view as well. Then on the exhibit side of the things that my museum puts together, we have a recreated 18th century tavern and we have exhibits about early Vermont, about the history of the Green Mountain Boys military unit. And we have exhibits on what everyday life was like during that time period. So we have 18th century toys that you can play with. We have a costume corner so you can dress up just like Fanny Allen or Ethan Allen would have been dressed and take your photo. And then we do tours of the house. So you can see at the bottom right, that is part of the kitchen. And we go through the house and talk about what everyday life was like and how people live back then before the modern amenities that we have today as well. We also have a lot of special events at the Homestead Museum and some of our most popular are living history events which are also known as reenactments. And we have two major weekends for reenactments. And Memorial Day weekend, there's a group called Whitcombs Rangers who come in a reenacting group and they're gonna actually camp out within the land and set up their 18th century tents. And so they're gonna be cooking over the open fire. They're gonna be weaving baskets. They're gonna be working on leather. They're gonna be doing all those kind of, what we think of like artisan crafts which would have just been like regular chores you had to do while you were at camp or while you're at home. And they also do militia drills. So they'll have the men get together and practice the different movements, the different orders and have firing drills as well. And then we also have stuff for you and the public to participate in such as the costume corner and things as well. Like these lovely models are showing us the bottom here. The second weekend that we do this is Ethan Allen weekend and that's when a group called Warner's Regiment comes to the Homestead and does the same thing. And that is the last week in a June and it is right after Ethan Allen day. So Vermont has a state holiday called Ethan Allen day which is on June 23rd. And so we celebrate every year by having a big reenactment weekend after that. On the actual day of Ethan Allen day we do offer free admission to the museum for Vermont residents and their guests. So if you want to come on that week, on that day which is a Friday on Ethan Allen day you just have to show your ID and then you and your party get in for free as long as your ID says Vermont. No Yorkers. We also do a lot of educational programming. We have school field trips here. We do school field trips with both elementary school as well as high schoolers. And we try to do it as hands on as possible. We put the kids to work basically. The kid on the left there is tightening the bed straps for the ropes that hold the mattress up. And the kid on the right he's hauling water of course for us. So they like to stay busy. We also have a historical garden. It's called Fanny's Garden and it's named after Fanny Allen who was the wife of Ethan Allen when he lived at the homestead. And Fanny Allen is an amazing person with an amazing story of her own but I don't have time to share today. But I do hope that you keep your ears peeled for an update from us because last summer we filmed a documentary, a short documentary film about Fanny Allen and it's in the post production stages right now. I'm not sure the timeline of when it's going to be available to see but we will have announcements on our social media pages and on our website for that but you should really keep an eye out for that because Fanny Allen was, she had a lot of drama happen in her life and still persevered. And she is historically important in her own right as Vermont's first known botanist as well. So she had an extensive garden as most women in the 18th century did to have medicine for their family as well as produce to eat. And she collected specimens from her garden as well as from the wild and dried and pressed them and cataloged them. And so you can see an image of one of those on the far right here. That's an actual plant that Fanny Allen herself plucked, dried and pressed and it's still available to view at the Pringle Urbarium at the University of Vermont in Burlington. You can see this collection there. So we grow in our 18th century recreated garden. We grow a lot of the same things that we know Fanny was growing based on that collection as well as other things as well. For example, we grow flax which most 18th century homesteaders were growing. It looks like hay when it's harvested but flax can be turned into linen and then that's how you make your clothes back then. So this is cheaper than getting wool from sheep so and also a little cooler than wearing wool in the summertime. So you can actually grow your own clothes in the 18th century. I mean, you can do it today too if you want. I just don't, I think it might be cheaper to just go buy them but so every year we have an event called Black Stravaganza. It's usually in mid-October. It's kind of like our harvest celebration and it's highlighting our flax crop. So we grow our own flax there and then we go through the entire harvesting process and then on flax Stravaganza we have a lot of different reenactors come in in their kit or their costumes and they do the whole process including spinning it to turn it into linen, turn it into cloth. And as you can see in the picture the public is invited to come up and ask questions and sometimes even participate a little bit. And I also want to give a shout out to our head gardener Tom Sharply who's the man in the 18th century clothes in this image. He's been in charge of Fanny's garden for a number of years now and just does an amazing job and this flax Stravaganza is largely in part to his efforts with that as well. Okay. Now I want to also just mention that there are a lot of other partner organizations at the Homestead because the Ethan Allen Homestead is a public park almost 300 acres. It's owned by the Manuski Valley Park District at the top of the list. And then the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum is kind of like a founding partner to the site that came in with the purchase of the land and immediately started doing historical research and then opened a museum there. And then I've also mentioned Al Nubaiwi, the next organization on the list as one of the main partners to the Homestead Museum in the 2000 teams. But you can see there's a list of other organizations that are on that site. It's a big site and these other organizations all help make it a really thriving community space. So there is an outdoor based preschool called Burlington Forest Preschool that actually shares the building with us. So we get to see the preschoolers on a regular basis and do some fun preschool age programming with them. Burlington Wildways runs a dirt bike path through some of the forests and along the river there. It goes all the way to the Interveil Center. Actually, if you keep going, it goes all the way to the Salmon Falls over into Manuski. Well, Burlington Parks and Rec runs, they're in charge of the Route 127 paved bike path. So you can bike to the Homestead from either the Old North End or the New North End. And they also run a couple of different community garden plots on the site. And then the other three groups at the bottom run other community garden groups. So there's the Vermont Community Garden Network. The Visiting Nurses Association runs the family room plot. And then the Association of Africans Living in Vermont runs a large farm plot called New Farms for New Americans. So it's for newly arrived refugees and immigrant families and they offer free education on how to farm in Vermont. Which is very different than farming in a lot of the countries those families are coming from as well. Yeah, so here are some of those community garden groups and some of their garden plot. And this is one of the things that I really like to end a lot of the tours I give with at the Homestead that this is the coming full circle. This land is some of the oldest known farm land in all of Vermont 2,000 years ago with Abenaki farming. And then British colonial farming started in the 1780s really. And then it's still being farmed today. So this isn't just a historic relic of a site. It is still actively being used by the community members today in similar ways to how it was used 2,000 years ago as well. And these are the preschoolers. I just like to throw this in so you can see how cute they are playing in the wetlands there. Okay, so I think this is a really special place. And I hope there's a lot of other people. I know there's a lot of other people who think it's a really special place. And if you think it's really special too, there are some ways that you can get involved. So I just want to quickly go through a few things. You can attend some of our community enrichment programs. So we offer a monthly lecture series, which is free for anyone to attend. And the April, we're in April, right? Okay, I'm losing track. The April lecture is actually this Sunday at 2 p.m. And it's about the archeology that happened at the Homestead. We also have a quarterly book club that meets four times a year. It will next meet the first Sunday in May. And the book we're reading is called The Whiskey Rebels right now. And you can attend that even if you haven't read the book. If you just like to come and talk about history, talk about books, or just get free tea and cookies. We do tea and cookies. Then you're more than welcome and invited to this event as well. And we also have memberships. This is really how we sustain, financially sustain the organization. It is a nonprofit museum. So we have memberships that people purchase to really sustain us. We also have corporate sponsorships. So if you are affiliated with a local organization who might want to partner with us and get advertising like this, where I'm showing all of you, these are great organizations. And you should visit and participate with these organizations. Then yeah, you can email the Homestead Museum. I'd love to create sponsorship materials for you. And if you really, really want to get involved, we have lots of volunteer opportunities as well. Last year, not even the whole year, but by the end of the museum season in October, we had over 1,900 volunteer hours logged, including people who did reenactments, who dressed up in costume for us. This is a volunteer who showed up just to start the fire before one of the other events. He donated firewood, started the fire, waited till the reenactors came, and then he was done. We have people who help with janitorial work and clean the windows, tidy up the space, install light bulbs when there's dead light bulbs, who make it pretty by planting flowers and flower pots outside the front door. We have Boy Scouts who sometimes come and help break up the leaves. This is a gift shop managers helping me out in the gift shop. And we have volunteers who help with the field trip students, and craftsters and artisans who come to our events and their volunteers just showing up just to teach the public about, for example, this is Dan teaching people about leather crafting while he was doing it. So here are some of our upcoming programs, closest to today. So we have our lecture this Sunday at 2 p.m. Immediately following that, we do have a new volunteer orientation for anybody who thinks they might wanna become a volunteer at the homestead. That will happen immediately after the lecture. And then our book club meeting on Sunday, May 7th. Your private guided tour just for the EEE group will be Monday the 8th at one o'clock. And then we have a reenactment weekend, the Memorial Day weekend that Saturday and Sunday, so May 29th and 30th as well. And our general admission is we're open seven days a week, May 1st through October 31st from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. So you can always stop by any day during that season as well just to check out what's going on at the homestead museum. It's two. That's what I have for you today. So I think we're gonna offer questions at this point. So if you have any questions about related history to Ethan Allen or early Vermont or if you have any questions about the museum or the homestead site, I'd be happy to talk more about anything. Wonderful, wonderful. We have a question from Zoom, so let's start with that. Great. Yeah, the inside exhibit, I believe were open 92 or something, it was in the early 90s. But before that, yeah, you could go outside and visit and see the outside of the house and everything. That's before my day. But thank you, who is the, what was his name again? Ben, thank you, Ben, for everything you did to help that time period help get the homestead museum up and running. Yeah, so when the Allen house was rediscovered by the historians in the 1970s, early 1980s, it had been reconfigured into a duplex and there was an addition that was added on that was almost as large as the original property as well. So yeah, so there was two units, two different like households in the building and they had to remove the addition and they put it over elsewhere in the park and it's still there today and it's actually the caretaker's house now. So there are living caretakers on the park, living in what was originally part of the Ethan Allen house. Yeah, well, not originally, but in the 1980s, whenever it was added on. Any questions locally here? Oh boy, we're quiet today, aren't we? Anyone, anyone? Oh, wait, leave it to Kathy. I guess this is really, I've lived here for, I don't know, 50 years or something and I didn't know a lot, I've been down there. I actually, at one time I worked for Truick's Collins and at one point they were working on I think the parking area or maybe that the big building was just being developed from back in the 80s, that would be. But anyway, I did not know that the area where the tower is was part of this whole 300 acres. So that's a separate park, but at what both parks, so there's two different parks. So where the tower was is the Ethan Allen Park owned by the city of Burlington and then up against the river is the Ethan Allen Homestead Park. Okay. And the difference. But it's owned by the Winooski Valley Park District. So they're owned by different entities and there's private residences in between. But they both parks and those private residences were originally all one unit of land that was the original Ethan Allen farm in Burlington. So the way that they sold farmland back then, so everyone wanted to have some waterfront property, not just for the views, but for drinking water for access of travel. And the river was more valuable waterfront than the lake, which is the opposite to me. But because the river seasonally flooded, it would be flooded this time of year, right? With the snow melt and that flood would bring nutrients into the soil, which made it a better farming soil. So everyone purchased long, skinny plots of land that went up on one end to the river. So like where North Ave is today and it cuts the new North end East and West, basically you had a plot of land that went from the lake or the river up to North Ave and a long rectangle to that. So where the Homestead Museum is and where the tower is, where the same long, skinny plot of land that went from the Wunewski River inland. And that was the Ethan Allen farm. And how about the Intervail Association? Is that part of, that's a different property? That's a different organization. They're just a little bit, I get my upriver and downriver to use. They're a little bit inland along the river than us, about five miles. But it's the same river property, but that wasn't land owned by Ethan Allen. Okay. And I have one more question. I'm sorry, I didn't monopolize this, but. Generally, no, I don't know the specifics of it all came in one purchase at one paper signing, or if immediately there were a couple additional purchases. But basically, since the museum's been opened, it's been the same plot of land and it hasn't acquired more. Angie, I have a feeling that the Homestead Museum, the large Homestead Museum itself, which is white right now, is mainly dedicated to the Abinacchi and their artifacts and documents. Am I right on that? Not exactly. Not exactly. We have basically like three rooms of exhibits and one of those is dedicated to our partnership with Al-Nubawi, where there's an Abinacchi culture exhibit, but the other two rooms are still predominantly European white heritage, mostly do with the 18th century, with homesteading crafts, as well as Ethan Allen, the Green Mountain Boys, and like artisan farming and gardening things. Angie, thank you so much. And please note it's to be there at one, not 1.30, on May 8th. We'll see you then. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.