The Story of Vermont: A Natural and Cultural History, Second Edition

2013

Introduction

We begin this story from the top of Mount Abraham, the fifth tallest mountain in Vermont, on a clear June day. At an elevation of just over four thousand feet and with a small alpine meadow at its summit, this vantage point offers us a fine view. We see four different mountain ranges: the Greens extending to the north and south, the Adirondacks to the west, the Taconics to the southwest, and the Whites to the northeast. We see Lake Champlain and the Champlain Valley to the west and the Mad River Valley to the east. We also get a clear view of the vegetation patterns of Vermont. To the south, the spine of the Green Mountains appears to be cloaked in green velvet. Much of the Mad River Valley and the ridge to the east are also forested. In the Champlain Valley, though, we see a more significant overlay of cultural, or human, forces at work; superimposed on the geological and ecological layers are the most obvious works of humans: cropland, pastures, roads, villages, and houses.

A closer look brings other cultural influences into clearer focus. We have arrived at the summit by way of the Long Trail, which follows the spine of the Green Mountains from Quebec to Massachusetts. The forests we see in three of the mountain ranges have been partially protected by conservation: the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont, the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire, and the Adirondack Park in New York. A bit of extra walking to the north would bring us to a chairlift and the Sugarbush ski area. This resort has influenced the landscape of the Mad River Valley, as similar resorts have influenced similar valleys elsewhere in the state. Land trusts have helped to protect farms and forests within our view.

Our goal in this book is to explain what it is we—and you—are seeing from the summit of Mount Abraham, or from any other place in Vermont, and to see it in such a way as to understand how patterns in both nature and culture here have been shaped over time. Fundamentally, the landscape we see is the result of three primary forces: geological, ecological, and cultural. The geological forces of mountain building, glaciation, and erosion are responsible for many of the principal topographic features found here. Ecological forces, on the other hand, are responsible for the region’s ecosystems, which are the myriad combinations of plant and animal species that inhabit the landscape, and changes in climate—caused by both natural and cultural forces—have led to changes in how these ecosystems are distributed across the landscape. Finally, but by no means least important, cultural factors have played a significant role in shaping this landscape, especially in the years since large-scale European settlement began in the region. Perhaps most illustrative of these effects is the change in forest cover in Vermont during this period. The percentage of Vermont that is forested went from an estimated 95 percent in 1620, to 25 to 35 percent around 1850 to 1870, to more than 75 percent at the end of the twentieth century.

Our story of the Vermont landscape is based on three major themes. First, landscape history or natural history without consideration of the actions of humans is incomplete history. Humans have played a major role in shaping the Vermont landscape; indeed, they have been the dominant force here over the last 250 years. A key to understanding any landscape is to recognize that natural history and human history are not different subjects but, rather, fundamentally related parts of a single, more comprehensive history. Nature and culture have a dynamic relationship in which each continually influences the other. For example, one basic change in human technology—the arrival of the railroad in Vermont—had far-reaching effects on the landscape. The value of land near the tracks and stations increased; hill farms removed from the tracks declined in value and were often abandoned; the number of forest fires increased on account of sparks from the trains; demand for wood for railroad ties and fuel for the trains increased tremendously; plants colonized new locations within the landscape via the rail corridors; and dairy farming surged in Vermont because liquid milk could now be sold in Boston.

Our second theme is that the landscape histories of any particular place need to be embedded within the context of the larger regions of which it is a part. Because the natural forces that shape a landscape do not recognize political boundaries, looking at the natural history of an area in the context of its surrounding landscapes gives us greater insight into how an area came to be the way it is and what ongoing processes continue to shape it. In order to help us achieve this goal, almost all of the maps in this book will cover one of three broad regions: (1) the Greater Laurentian Region (GLR), which includes southern Quebec, eastern Ontario, parts of the Maritime Provinces, New England, New York, and northern New Jersey and Pennsylvania (this region is more useful for context than New England alone, since Vermont borders Quebec and New York); (2) the portion of the GLR centered on Vermont; and (3) Greater Vermont, which encompasses those portions of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Quebec that adjoin Vermont.

Furthermore, political boundaries are dynamic human constructs, and people living within political units are constantly affected by outside forces. Vermont, with its present legal borders, has existed for just over two hundred years, and those boundaries were very much in dispute for many years. Those living in Vermont—and the landscape itself—have been greatly affected by decisions made beyond the state’s borders and by forces beyond their control. Over time, such external cultural forces have had an increasing influence. Farmers of the early eighteenth century—the vast majority of the state’s population—were largely self-sufficient and buffered from events beyond Vermont. Today, those living in the state rely on external supplies for almost all of their food and energy and hence have little control over forces related to these necessities. Conversely, however, since Vermont now imports most of its food and energy, the state has become significantly reforested. Yet, in the fifteen years since the publication of the first edition of this book, Vermonters have sought once again to source more of their food and energy locally, a story we will feature in this edition.

The third major theme of our story of the Vermont landscape is that cultural forces have driven changes in species composition and abundance over time to shape its present-day ecological character. Species have been added to this region and species have been removed as a result of a host of human-mediated drivers, such as pollution, habitat modification, climate change, disease, overharvesting, and introduction of species from other places. The decline of white-tailed deer in the eighteenth century, the American chestnut in the twentieth century, and native pollinators in the twenty-first century are all examples of significant ecological transformations in Vermont that are rooted in human actions. The history of a place, therefore, includes the history of how these forces have altered its ecological character, which in turn alters its cultural character through the limits and challenges caused by such ecological transformations.

In order to understand the Vermont landscape, then, we must understand geological, ecological, and cultural forces; we must understand each of these forces in a historical manner; we must understand that each of these forces and the interactions among them are dynamic; and we must understand that each of these forces extends beyond Vermont’s borders and that some of each force’s greatest effects on Vermont will be due to events and processes that take place beyond the state’s borders.

Before moving on to the story of the Vermont landscape, we must pre­sent several guidelines and caveats for understanding our narrative. First, we use current political names to refer to the landscape even before those political names came into being. That is, even though Vermont as it is currently known has existed for only 225 years or so, we use Vermont to designate this geographic place when the Abenaki lived there, when it was under a sheet of ice, and when it was part of the creation of the continent more than a billion years ago. Second, we tell the story based on the best available knowledge of today, knowing full well that the understanding of the past is constantly changing. For instance, anthropologists are continually revising the date for when they believe humans first arrived in North America and the way in which these humans spread across the Americas. Third, we deliberately paint with a broad brush. We are concerned with overall temporal and spatial patterns and trends through the millions of years of geological history and the thousands of years of postglacial ecological and cultural history of Vermont and over the roughly 6 million acres that constitute Vermont.

We tell the story of Vermont in chronological order. Chapter 1 describes the creation of the landscape that constitutes the Greater Laurentian Region, with special attention to the major mountain-building episodes in the region and the last ice age. Chapter 2 traces the arrival of plants, animals, and, eventually, humans to Vermont following the recession of the last glacier roughly 13,000 years ago. Beginning with Chapter 3 and the arrival of Europeans to Vermont, the following five chapters focus on how humans affected the Vermont landscape, how the landscape affected its human occupants, and major aspects of ecological change during these periods. These chapters are divided into periods that we think make sense for the story of Vermont—from European settlement through statehood, from statehood through the Civil War, from the end of the war through 1950, from mid-twentieth century through 1995, and from 1995 through the present (2013). In Chapter 8, our concluding chapter, we offer our thoughts on the major patterns and trends that have shaped Vermont’s natural history and speculate on the future of the Vermont landscape.

The Past as Prelude

The Early Evolution of Vermont’s Landscape

The history of the place now called Vermont can be traced back thousands of millions of years. The story of how this landscape was created is not simple. It involves the repeated collision of continents, the birth and death of oceans, and the occasional burial of the land under thousands of feet of ice. Although most of the events that shaped the landscape took place in the far distant past, long before humans even evolved, their consequences are felt strongly in the region even today. Vermont’s geological history not only defines its physical landscape but also delimits its ecological and cultural possibilities. Marble quarries in the Taconic Mountains, copper mines in the Connecticut River Valley, granite quarries in the northern Piedmont, ski slopes in the Green Mountains, fertile agricultural land in the Champlain Valley, deep-water fishing for landlocked ocean species in Lake Champlain, a near-complete cover of deciduous hardwood and spruce-fir forests, and scattered sand and gravel deposits that make on-site septic disposal possible: all of these owe their existence to the region’s long and complex geological history. This history is essential to understanding the basis for the ecological and cultural events that make up much of the story of