Time chugs along -- I will soon mark 50 years of living in my adopted state among the Green Mountains and the many rivers. When I first arrived here, people still liked to say Vermont had more cows than people. It probably wasn't quite true then, and it's definitely not so today. But still, with about six hundred thousand people making up the entire state, there's an illusion that a person can learn and catch up with the intimate details of its history.
That's sort a a fun-house mirror effect, maybe because we don't see many people around us (not counting life in Burlington, our big city). If you know the name of each person you talk with in the grocery store, and standing in line to check out refreshes your memory of recent losses among them, well, it's easy to think you can know most of what there is to know about Vermont.
Nope.
The town where I first began delving into Vermont's history, Barnet, is a dozen miles from where I now live. I left Barnet in 2002, but I'm still learning from my explorations there. The church, the beach, the back roads I walked as I adjusted to single parenting, the school where my sons developed their determination and their desire to mingle with other cultures and travel far and wide -- all those are "mine" even though I don't live there any longer.
But it was the cemeteries that adjusted my sense of America, and of time, of history. On the hillside halfway between the church and the dairy barn where I shoveled sawdust every Sunday for more than a year, my favorite of the town's handful of burying grounds shelters the stone markers of many a Scottish settler who farmed here in the 1800s and even earlier. Although many people call it "the West Barnet cemetery," its other name is the Stuart Cemetery. Among the Scottish immigrants buried in it, there lies Claudius "Cloud" Stuart, also spelled Stewart. I am still amazed to find that Claud Stuart fought in Scotland's Battle of Culloden in 1746 with the supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Alas, not all of Vermont's history has been so proudly or clearly preserved. Its vanishing is called "historical erasure" -- and today a number of organizations and individuals work to undue that erasing. One I appreciate is called Atlantic Black Box, and features the work of both professional historians and grass-roots sorts. It asks: "Why have we been telling certain stories about New England and not others? How did we come to unknow the region’s deep complicity in the institution of slavery and systems of oppression?"
I connect with those questions because I've found details of both enslavers and enslaved in the Northeast Kingdom, yet we "don't talk about that" very much ... maybe because it embarrasses us? But Atlantic Black Box is geared mostly to the New England coast,
To counter historical erasure in our area, grass-roots historians work with the actual Census pages of the 1800s, to see who lived where and did what. My historical fiction is crammed with details gained in this way. Another resource is the Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI), which has a searchable database that includes Vermont. Nola Forbes, a retired teacher and ardent historian in our area, also recommends these: DAR has this database Patriots of Color, and this a research guide for Forgotten Patriots (Black Americans & American Indians).
Try one out. See who you find. Share your discoveries, if you like.
It takes all of us to preserve our history, and to make sure we know what is "real."
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