 Montpelier was a good town to be brought up in. You know everybody in town. Montpelier was an interesting place because I think people were quite friendly. A lot of continuity of families. People, I guess, are a place where you knew everybody. You get out of town and you knew everybody, either by name or reputation. I like the stores. I like the way they took care of you, you know. Montpelier has always been one of the country's smallest capital cities. As the government center of Vermont in the early 1900s, it was a town where everyone knew everybody and everything. Aside from being the home to Vermont politics, Montpelier had several well-established businesses including banking and insurance companies. Along the Wynuski River, other industries like tanneries and granite works were established to refine stone from the famous quarries in nearby Barry. The history of this dynamic little city has been well-documented over the years, but for many people it's the simple pleasures of growing up that made their memories of Montpelier so special. Back in those days you didn't have recreation departments, so you lived more on imagination and on your own. Young people were all downtown. You would go with friends to prowl the streets because nobody had cars and people just roamed the streets. And there weren't really any places to go except to walk around and meet boys. Well, when we were kids, everybody stopped across his bakery and bought the candy for a penny. Barquins. That's where we lived after school. We all went down. We would come in and have Coca-Cola. We played out in the street and a bunch of kids together. We played kick the can. Well, we had an old can and we used to have sides and kick. I remember that. We didn't go two by two. We were always in crowds with kids growing up. And we made our own entertainment, you might say. We used to call the big trees up on the corner of Felt Street and Berlin Street. And we'd go out and sit in the trees and talk. Things like that. Well, you didn't have a lot of things because you didn't have the money to buy things and there weren't as many things to buy. But, you know, you read library books and went to the movies because there wasn't any black box in your house to watch. And you played outside because, well, you did play games inside. I mean, that's, you know, board games, that sort of thing. But it seemed like we spent a lot more time out, you know, skiing and skating in the winter and ball games. And, you know, kick the can and all that sort of thing out in the neighborhoods in the evening. There was always something to do and plenty of people to see downtown. But with a lack of transportation, kids often stayed close to home and had to depend on their own creativity to help pass the time. Most of our activities in the neighborhood were confined to a relatively small little nucleus of neighborhood children. We had neighborhoods where kids would gather, you know, and play. And they'd send to College Street these kids and the other end of College Street and the other sections of town. But we'd get together and do things. Our little, this end of College Street, we used to have a circus. And I guess it was July every summer and we had a little circus and we'd have a parade. And there was a circus that the kids put on. It would be pretty, pretty corny. Neighborhood gangs were common as well as plenty of friendly competition. Bragging rights were at stake at every summer afternoon baseball game. For example, we used to have a baseball team here called the Barry Street Clippers. And the metal always had their baseball team. And there used to be great rivalry between those two. The Bailey Avenue Braves. And we would schedule games with them. It was very informal. We'd play on the Seminary Campus, Harry Seivright, Ed Robey, and the Lions. That was a big family. We'd play ball right where the present school is now. That was a big campus, a baseball field. And we used to play baseball in that field. And it was understood that home plate was always near the school. We were always hitting foul balls and going through a window. And so we just automatically, we had to go into the principal and say, we broke a window. Yeah, I know. And it would cost you 75 cents or something like that. And so everybody had a chip and a nickel or a dime, pay for the window, and then we'd go back playing baseball. Kids would come from around and we'd pick up games and play. We were playing there one Sunday afternoon and a man came by and he said, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave. It turned out the field was owned by Montpijer Seminary. And they did not allow entertainment activities on Sundays. So we left. But they didn't mind other days. We played, believe it or not, up on Savings Passage. They let us use that for a ball field. If you hit a ball on the lower flat, you know, it rolled down almost to Paris Street. You know, you only had one ball, so you had to go get it. There were always a few events that would gather people together each year, like town meeting or the Fourth of July celebration. But for kids, nothing was as popular as when the circus came to town. Well, when the circus came to town and we were kids, they'd have a big parade, you know, down Main Street, State Street, with the elephants and all that. Oh, that was a big day when the circus came to town. And they'd come in by rail. That was another thing, come by train. So we'd go down early in the morning and watch them unload. That was really more fun than maybe the circus. See the elephants working and the horses. It's a beautiful horses. We kids would go down there and work and get a ticket to go to the circus. Whether you were attending the circus, playing baseball, or kick the can, every kid knew when it was time to head home. In the evening, we'd always play kick the can. And the mothers all had whistles that they'd blow and it was time for us to come in at night. Oh, you'd know your own whistle, yeah. About eight or eight thirty, the parents would start yelling at us, come home, come home. Oh, yes, we had a curfew. The fire alarm ran at two blasts on the hornet, ten minutes to nine. And that meant young people were supposed to scurry off the streets and go home. When that curfew rang there on top of City Hall, you knew it was time to go home. The winters of yesteryear always seemed colder and a heck of a lot snowier than today. Heavy snow accumulations and freezing temperatures were cursed by adults. But for kids, snow and ice opened the door to a slew of activities that made Vermont winters so memorable. In the wintertime, we skated all the time. And we would skate on the river, which could have been a little hazardous at times, but put your skates on at home and go down the hill side-stepping and then jump off into the, and somebody always kept it shoveled off, so you didn't have to do that. We used to slide quite a bit. In those days, you know, I can recall sliding down Fullerton Avenue and Hubbard Street and other streets in the city were posted by the city for sliding. And in that era, there were not many cars to begin with, and a lot of people put their cars up in the wintertime on blocks so they'd preserve the tires. Didn't plow the streets much. And so they would post the streets, many of the streets, for sliding purposes. And then the city would send a truck around and spread sand at the end of the street so you wouldn't slide out into the road. A farmer would come down to town with a big team of horses to get feed. And when they'd go up the hill, sometimes they'd let us kids hook our sleds onto the back and pull us up the hill so we could slide down. You've seen pictures of snow rollers, mammoth big wooden thing, a man to sit up on the top to run the probably four horse at least in order to roll the snow down so it wouldn't be too deep for the horses to wade through. When they were short of snow, corner state and main would begin to get bare. And these teamsters would have a lot of trouble hauling their sleds across that bare surface and the farmers would bring their shovels with them. When they get to corner state and main, they'd shovel snow over the bare spots in order to get their teams to be able to pull their sleds over them. Getting around in the winter was difficult by our standards and even more of a challenge during mud season. But in the summertime, the streets of downtown Montpelier were often filled with horse and buggy traffic. Nobody had a car in those days. They couldn't afford them. People that lived in Berlin, up around Berlin corners up there and some of them worked at the old E.W. Bailey Mill where the Shaws is now. And they would come to work with the horse and buggy. They used to keep them down at Mr. Perkins livery stable down in back of City Hall, the Blanchard block. Horses came in from the country and they had a long railing down behind the fire station. Where the farmers would come and hitch their horses, deliver their buttered eggs and then go back home again. So the horses just stayed there while they made their deliveries. If they came down in a buggy or a wagon, they would always carry a weight with a chain on it and they'd put that in the horse's mouth and that would hold. But there was also a lot of places to tie the horses up. For most frugal Vermonters, purchasing an automobile just didn't make sense. In Montpelier, if you couldn't travel by horse, there was always the trolley. The trolley system was a critical means of transportation that helped bridge the gap between the days of horse and buggy and the era of the automobile. I think people generally don't have any sense of how much transportation there was by trolley car. Nobody had cars and they rode the trolleys. It took you all the way up to Berry from Montpelier. The trolley system started at the corner of State Street and Billy Avedo. It ran up State Street, turned on to Maine, turned on to Berry Street and as I say, it was right in the middle of the road here. I had a hang of a good time because we used to raise the double with the trolleys. On top of the trolley, there was an arm that went up like this to the wire above the track which provided the electricity that moved the car. However, there was a circle like this that went over the wire and that's through which came the electricity to the trolley car. Well, if you were a kid and you wanted to have a little fun, you got behind the trolley car and reached up like this and pulled that thing down and then turned around and ran as fast as you could go. When you let it go, it went up like this right by the place it was supposed to meet so it stopped the car dead in its tracks. We used to hear from that. The trolley people didn't like that very much. And what we kids used to do, which was a naughty thing to do, we'd put little stones on the tracks and like to see the trolley come and squash them out, you know. Well, one day I guess one of our stones was a little bit too big and I wish I could remember the name of the captain. He was the nicest, jolliest man who stopped the trolley. He came over and told us we were not to do that again. It was dangerous and well, we never did that again but I can remember we kids sitting there. Many Montpelier residents outside the downtown area were self-sufficient. The era of family farms was still alive and well. Raising a dairy cow and a handful of chickens to help provide for the family was a common way of life. Where we lived we always had chickens, we had a pig and we had a big garden. You didn't have the big farms, you had what they call family farms. When we moved to Liberty Street, it was the Brian's. They had two or four cows or whatever it was so they didn't have any pasture there so they walked them all the way up North Street. The pasture and the Brian boys would herd them down Liberty and up Loomis and across Jay and up North Street and your cow flaps were all the way up the street. Most families had a milk cow they might have say five or six cows and sell the milk to bring Marvin and then they'd go to work. Marvin had a plant there on Berlin Street where farmers would bring milk and then he'd sell it, you know, house to house, bottle it and made a good living that way. See, we knew the folks on a familiar basis actually put the delivered milk right in the refrigerator for them. It was a small operation and sort of a very neighborhood-friendly atmosphere, so to speak. Home deliveries of items like milk, fresh baked bread and ice blocks for the refrigerator were common. Every house had cards about that, six or eight inches by five inches or so. Different colors, you know. The bread, I think, was a yellow card. You'd put up the yellow card in the window and the bakery man would spot the yellow card and know you wanted to stop and wanted to buy. So they didn't necessarily go to every house. They went to the house and had the card up. Everybody had a refrigerator but not electrical, so they'd go house to house and fill that refrigerator at the top with ice. They would cut the ice in the wintertime and store it. They'd have layers of sawdust to keep them into the summer. Ice would be delivered in your section of Montpelier, say, on Tuesday. Well, you put this card in your window. But they would have these big cakes of ice on the wagon and the fellow would take his ice pick and cut them down into smaller pieces. So he would know how big your refrigerator was and he might cut a 10-pound or 20-pound and they'd charge so much a pound for ice. All the kids would trail him along trying to get a piece of ice and all that. In the early 20th century, Montpelier was already established as a government, market, service and industrial center in the region. Several banks and insurance companies took root in the heart of the capital city. By 1925, nine granite works were established in the city to refine stone from the famous quarries in Barrie. Stonework along with tanneries and other manufacturing industries attracted talented immigrants from several European countries. The French people must have worked in the stone shed. They lived on the lower end of Barrie Street. Italians and the Spanish were on Sibley Avenue, Foster Street, part of Barrie Street and across the river. I grew up on River Street in Montpelier and the neighborhood was quite a mixed neighborhood. It was a mixture of blue and white color. However, it invariably was on the south side of the tracks and the Winooski River and quite detached from the main part of Montpelier, so to speak. We used to call ourselves the other part of town across the river. We were the more, let's say, the poor areas, what you might call the laborers. The granite community, of course, everybody in my family was employed in some way or connected in some way to the granite community. And all of the people or many of the people in our neighborhood either owned a plant or managed a plant or somehow had an occupation in that plant. So it was very much ingrained in our life. My father was a monumental draftsman for the Excelsior Granite Works and I remember going into the granite plant as a small boy and, of course, in his office they would be the distinct smell of sharpened pencils and the many of the drawings he worked on. The variety of business established in Montpelier led to a very diverse yet close-knit community. This diversity of skills and ethnic backgrounds also helped in making the city a regional center for arts and entertainment. Montpelier was a city filled with hard-working people trying to achieve their American dream. My Italian grand folks came into the state in 1888. They had their home in Montpelier. Many times the station manager from the railroad would send a horse and buggy up to the pioneer neighborhood to get one or the other of my grand folks to bring them down to the station and have them act as an interpreter for these rather bewildered new arrivals in the state. And many times these people would be taken home by my grand folks and actually furnished room and board until they were able to get established in the community, either in Barrie or Montpelier. And I as a child can say that from the early morning time, up until noon, up until 12 o'clock, there would be a hum that would start in the neighborhood and it was a very distinct hum, like nothing else. And it would be of all the machinery working in those plants and it would wind right down at 12 o'clock noon and at 1 o'clock you could set your clock by it. It would just start right up again and run until 4. But it was always that background din of noise that came from all that equipment running. We were a very close knit group. The kids all got along fine. Everybody worked hard and we played together and I was proud to be an Italian. But yet when we'd go to school I always felt sometimes that they thought we were from the wrong side of the track which that's how I felt at first. To begin with, my parents felt the United States was the most marvelous place they had ever been to. The attitude of people and more importantly the fact that my dad could have a good job at the granite shed. But my mother felt that once they were in the United States they were Americans. And she not only wanted to learn the language but both my father and mother became American citizens and voted. As my grandfather, my Italian grandfather came here in 1888 he passed away in 1911. He had 23 years of life in the industry in this country and what just comes to my mind is the significance of the health hazard that these people faced. I mean his life was so short lived and I would very much have to say that his early death at age 47 had a dramatic impact on my grandmother and her family not only to bear up against the loss of my grandfather but also to bear up economically and financially. They call this the Barry Street the street of widows because so many of their husbands succumbed to silicosis. Many of them their husband died when their families were very young. They made wine and grappa to sell. They had to do that in order to live. They didn't have enough money to support their families. So they did have some, you know, during prohibition time. And you could arrange a dinner with one of the ladies up there. Tremendous feed. That was a very, very central social location up there for all the people in Montpelier to go. They'd go there on Sunday mornings. They'd go for dinner and they would go at night to buy liquor and wine and so forth. It was a thriving business. I've heard it said that they were particularly the women just couldn't understand how it could be illegal during prohibition. How can selling wine be illegal? But many people, you know, got raided. The City Hall Tower where the City Hall clock is now they would put a red light in that tower and that meant they had to bring the cops in all two or three of them to go under these raids. Any Friday night when I was a little kid in high school I understood this. You could go up to Charlie Colombo's mother's house during prohibition and you'd get all the booze you wanted. The police never bothered her. If they'd gone up there to her house on that Friday they'd have gotten all the mayor and everybody else in town that helped run the city. My friend and I were remembering all the different ones that got raided. I don't know who it was at the house. We understood that woman went to college. She was a very smart person. My friend said she didn't go to college. She ended up going to jail because of the liquor she'd been selling. What this small capital city may have lacked in size it certainly made up for in character. Over the past century a lot has changed in Montpelier. Most of the farms have faded from the hillsides and many of the industries that once dotted the banks of the Lewinowski River have vanished. But the one thing that will never fade for the people who spent their lives in this amazing little city are the wonderful memories of Montpelier.