History

According to the website Fansided, Vermont’s greatest college quarterback of all time is Brattleboro’s Joe Shield. Here’s his story…

Everyone who moved to southern Vermont in the last few decades was treated to a free calendar. It was sent out each year by Vermont Yankee (and later Entergy) and featured old photos from historical societies in the area.

These calendars contained the required safety information for the nuclear plant about emergency notifications, iodine tablets, special alert radios, evacuating the area, shelters, what to do with pets, siren testing, and a message about how radiation is natural and accidents unlikely.

The final calendar (unless one shows up soon) was sent out in 2016. Sure, it contains mini-calendar in the back for 2017 and 2018, but it was the final full calendar sent.

There are murder mysteries and strange names associated with a few small hollows in our region… here are a couple of stories…

Produced by Joe Rivers and his students at the Brattleboro Area Middle School.
Released January 12, 2017

From Today in History 1894:

Many people will learn with regret that the women in charge of the “Woman’s
Educational and Industrial union” have decided to give up the work and close the room in Ryther building February 1. The union has been very useful in helping women to help themselves.

Looks like the parent organization existed until quite recently in Boston.

http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/weiu.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women’s_Educational_and_Industrial_Union

From today in history, 1885:

The Ceres club will give a “bubble party” next Thursday at Miss Minnie Pettee’s.

Apparently it was quite the fad in the 1870s-80s, among adults more than children!

From Today’s Local History, 1879:

On Tuesday night at 11 o’clock it was discovered that fire was working under the flooring of the fourth floor of the Brooks House, about midway of the house. Lines of hose were carried up to the third and fourth stories, holes cut in floors and partitions, the house thoroughly drenched, and after upward of an hour’s work the fire was soaked out.

This week BAMS students traveled to Burlington to present our podcast to the Vermont Alliance for Social Studies Conference at the Hilton. Ethan and Ira Allen were sketchy land speculators during the 1770’s, as well as, Vermont independence heroes. This is the story…

This Week in Brattleboro History – James Conland, Rudyard Kipling and Captains Courageous

Orly Munzing, Dwight Miller and the genesis of Brattleboro’s Strolling of the Heifers.

Released November 24, 2016.

Produced by BHS trustee, Joe Rivers and his students at the Brattleboro Area Middle School.

Vermont Public Radio’s Brave Little State show just published (online with audio) their latest installement, which begins in Brattleboro’s Locust Ridge Cemetery, with yours truly. Check out the episode and enjoy the story!

VPR 

From today in history 11/2/16:

1888:

The Main street canal has been dredged out this week, about six inches of deposit being scraped up and carted off. Common report has it that a charter for the “Brattleboro Canal company” is being drawn up and that its passage will be asked of the legislature permitting navigation to be opened between the Vermont National bank corner and the junction of No. Main and Asylum streets.

This article continues in the vein of my previous piece, The events described in both happen in roughly the same timespan, yet this one looks at impacts individuals can have. These articles share a common theme, that being; what are among the greatest assets of our country have come about as byproducts of our worst behavior. This is less a case of finding a silver lining, I prefer to see it as recognizing a lotus emerging from the muck. 

We know plenty about Henry David Thoreau’s famous retreat, and his legendary wanderings. However were it not for the meeting and influence of his Penobscot friends, Joe Aitteon and Joe Polis, Thoreau’s time at Walden pond might have been a singular episode rather than the start of a lifelong obsession. It was these friendships that took HDT from admirer of Nature to avid student, from a pastoral pastime to a central compulsion. 

Rich Holschuh serves on the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs and spends his nights and weekends investigating the story of Brattleboro and its peoples, dating to a time 12,000 years before William Brattle was even a twinkle…

In this podcast, Rich talks about his work uncovering the history of Brattleboro’s first peoples and reconnecting modern peoples to that heritage.

135-65 Million years ago, shallow seas covered much of what would later be constellated as the Southern States.  More specifically, the ancient North American coastline corresponded with what is now termed the Mississippi Delta. As a result, the soil there, in a fairly narrow crescent, was particularly fertile due to the deposits of chalk and other alkaline elements. So fertile, in fact, that cotton production flourished to a greater degree there than anywhere else on the planet. 

Early Vermont histories portrayed this area’s aboriginal peoples as transients who occasionally passed through southern Vermont, en route to and from Northern New York and Canada, but were ultimately not residents of the area and therefor had little claim on these lands.

In this podcast Joe Rivers and his intrepid band of middle school historians show that those early Vermont histories were very much mistaken.

The founding of a nation-state must decide where its powers belong. In a nation where the dichotomy of centralization and decentralization proponents exists it is confronted with black or white propositions that actually create shades of gray tugging on both trends.

The United States Constitution was written to be a strongly centralist document with a smattering of decentralist characteristics. Some of the founding members thought that it lacked balance until the Bill of Rights satisfied their arguments against ratification.

It’s not often that something happens that cries out to be corrected and then, in a matter of days, it is.  I’m not talking about Vermont’s GMO law either (which Congress mooted within the month) – no, I’m talking about Indigenous Peoples Day which has been proposed, here and elsewhere, as a less racist and more fair alternative to traditional Columbus Day.  Unfortunately, honoring native American people was not something the Selectboard could get its collective mind around and Indigenous Peoples Day lost here in Brattleboro by a vote of 2-3.  But just when you thought all was lost, along comes Governor Shumlin with a state-wide proclamation of Indigenous Peoples Day, signed, sealed, and delivered.  What do you know, we get to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day after

In the spring of 1909, the completion of a new hydro-electric dam in Vernon created at 28 mile long lake, from Vermont’s southern boarder with Massachusetts to Bellows Falls, as waters began to back up and subsume much of the river-adjacent countryside. On average, the water level rose 30 feet and eventually flooded more than 150 farms. Among the lands subsumed by permanent flood waters were a series of petroglyphs sites near the confluence of the West River and Connecticut River dating from a precolonial epoch, in the lands now known as Brattleboro, Vermont.

In August of 2015, after a 30-year search, underwater explorer Annette Spaulding found one of the petroglyph sites, subsumed in 1909 and unseen by persons for over a century.