Diversion: In the New England Narrative Tradition, TREES OF NEW ENGLAND by Charles Fergus

This year's two directions for this set of essays relate to what I write: poems, and fiction set in 1850s Vermont. But sometimes I like to chat about other authors' work.

Charles Fergus first came to my attention (and that of my late husband Dave) for his book BEARS in the Wild Guide Series. Later, as we began to share research on America's 1800s for the historical fiction we both craft, we also exchanged book recommendations, especially for crime fiction and some literary work, too. 

Last year, Charles mentioned that he'd been asked by publisher Globe Pequot to prepare a new edition of his 2005 book TREES OF NEW ENGLAND: A NATURAL HISTORY. As the publication date neared, I ordered a copy so I could read it right away.

But this isn't a book to be devoured with speed. Instead, it offers a slow, comprehensive, and highly personal ramble (alphabetically) through the trees that surround and often support New England residents. There are no color images -- the book is not a field guide, this author warns at the outset -- but instead delicate and detailed black-and-white drawings from the pen of Amelia Hansen. Though I missed the familiar bright field-guide images at first, I soon discovered that between Hansen's unusual details of bark growth and leaf individuality, and Charles Fergus's meditative reflections on each tree's structure and growth, I felt more capable of identifying the trees around me, including my beloved maple sapling rescued from a backhoe and beginning to show serious growth in the front garden.

This year I've become a daily reader of excerpts from the classic American philosopher of outdoor New England, Henry David Thoreau. And that's one voice I hear in the writing in this new book -- along with others like Aldo Leopold and Louise Dickinson Rich.

Here is a sample from this Charles Fergus book: 

"I have watched ruffed grouse eating aspen buds. In the last day's light, the birds alight in a winter-bare tree. Their feathers fluffed against the cold, they clamber about on the swaying branches, using their beaks to wrench off the energy-packed buds. ... Aspen buds and catkins are favorite foods of the ruffed grouse throughout the bird's range, which largely coincides with the range of bigtooth and quaking aspen in North America."

Or in the section on yellow birch:

"Fence-row trees cast sharp shadows in the moonlight. Beneath my snowshoes the snow groaned, and when I kicked a ball of ice, it made a hollow tinkling as it rolled along the top of the crust. I crossed our hay field to where a logging road led into the woods. Trunks of maple and ash etched dark vertical lines against the snow. I was brought to a halt by another tree that presented a different aspect. Its bark was pale and burnished. Thin, ragged strips of bark curled away from the trunk, catching the moon's glow."

Will you be within driving distance of Lyndonville, Vermont, on October 2? As the poster here shows, there's a great opportunity to meet this thoughtful and knowledgeable author at the Cobleigh Public Library there, and to hear more about his observations of the trees that surround us. 

The Covered Bridges of Lyndonville, Vermont

Lyndonville, a few miles north of where I live, is having a renaissance of sorts. As usual, this one grows from the energy and determination of a few individuals able to light up more -- "Revamp the Ville" is the new slogan. I like it!

So it's a pleasure to see this article in the Caledonian-Record this week describing the planned Sanborn Covered Bridge Riverfront Park (tap images to see larger versions):

 

And with that, here are three covered bridge images from Dave Kanell's postcard and photo collection of the Northeast Kingdom. (There are five covered bridges still standing in the town.)

DK's research notes on this first image say Sanborn Covered Bridge (the one that the park will feature), Lyndon Center, photograph circa 1940s.

The second image, wrote DK, is the Burrington or Randall Covered Bridge (it's had both names), and the postcard was mailed in 1957.

The third is marked "Lyndon Center, Vt" on the back, and DK's notes say the photo is circa 1950s of the Miller's Run Covered Bridge.

Covered bridges have been essential for farmers in our area, as they enabled horses to pull loads safely across rivers. (In my book THE BITTER AND THE SWEET, July 2023, they enter the story often.) It takes a lot of determination to keep them standing after the horse era, so kudos to Lyndonville for this important effort.

A Photo of Gracie's Hotel, Lyndonville: As Promised!

Last month I was honored to present a talk on writing historical fiction for the DKG VT (active and retired teachers), Northeast Kingdom section, meeting in Lyndonville. I promised to try to locate an image of Gracie's Hotel for one of the people at the meeting.

And here it is! By way of explanation, here's what my husband Dave (the true Lyndon expert in the family) wrote about it, on April 11, 2018:

Looking Around Lyndonville, Vermont Today: Postcard circa 1950?. The sign on the building says "HOTEL LYNDONVILLE"

To the left of the building and over the door way is another sign that says "RESTAURANT" At this point of time the hotel was owned and managed by Nap. G. Clements who was from Montreal. ( I wonder if the NAP was shortened for the name Napoleon.) The second image is an advertisement from the 1957 edition of the Vermont Year Book/Walton's Register.

The hotel had 30 bedrooms. The Sportman's Room and The Casbah Lounge (A Replica of an Egyptian Tent)

The Hotel advertised in the Lyndon Teachers Yearbooks in 1953, 1954 and 1958.

Over the years the Hotel had many names: *The Pleasant View House * Centennial House * Union House * Chase's Hotel, * and Gracie's Inn. On line someone wrote that the Hotel burned to the ground on June 3, 1969 and another person gave the year the Hotel burned down as 1967.

This is a winter scene. The hotel was located in the vicinity of where the Union Bank now stands. 

 

DKG folks, please do pass the word on this! 

 

Doing author talks often opens up fresh historical research for me. Glad we can all share this.

"Mining" a Postcard: Speedwell Farms, T. N. Vail's Model Agricultural Effort in Lyndonville, and Margaret Bean

Front of postcard

I have a lot of reasons to watch for information about Speedwell Farms. This agricultural effort of Theodore Newton Vail, whose telegraph-related enterprise skills empowered AT&T in the early 20th century, was a model of modern agriculture for its times. Through a series of local connections, T. N. Vail, a quintessential "out-of-stater," bought farmland in Lyndonville, Vermont, and developed it in both size and farming methods.

Back of postcard

Following the highest moral code of his time, Vail contributed heavily to his Vermont town, and both Lyndon Institute and Lyndon State College, now NVU Lyndon, owe their strengths to his support.

Vail's life and philanthropy were the major collecting interest for my husband Dave Kanell, enlivening his retirement years with an endless quest for related materials. Last week I noticed what's called a "real photo postcard" set at Vail's Speedwell Farms, and being sold online. The price was higher than Dave would ever, ever have paid, so with great regret, I didn't purchase the original, but the two photos here show the front and back of the card.

I have another connection to this beyond Dave's passion for it: Speedwell Farms took its name from the New Jersey ironworks that the Vail family established in the previous century, in Morristown there -- a place I often visited as a child with my mother, who loved its historic houses and battlefield. Talk about nostalgia!

Finally, this postcard was mailed to Miss Margaret (spelled Margrett) Bean in "Watterford Vermont" -- that is, my own town of Waterford. It's postmarked in both Lyndonville and Waterford -- on June 30, 1908, at 8 pm, in Lyndonville, and then the next morning (July 1) in Waterford. I transcribe the writing as follows: 

June 30 Lyndonville Speedwell Farms / Just a line I am well hope you are the same is Al at home yet good buy from EOK

[If you see it differently and have a reason to think you know the sender, let me know!]

In documents archived online, I can find  Miss Margaret Bean teaching in Waterford in 1925. She was quite young when this card was sent, though, only six years old at the time! Her parents were Ervin Lester Bean (a farmer; 1873-1957) and Orpha P. Kerwin Bean (1879-1929), both born just across the state line in New Hampshire. Margaret married Warren Weston Whitney in 1925, and lived in Littleton and then Lancaster, NH, where her burial stone stands.

Since one of my 5-great grandfathers is Jonathan Bean of Candia, NH, I'm especially curious about Margaret and may pursue this again later! 

Most important for me today, though, is the pleasure of finding a Speedwell Farms image, and enjoying the link between Lyndonville and Waterford residents in 1908.

1905 Waterford VT directory

Maternity Homes in Vermont: A Research Story (and Invitation!)

Vermont “Maternity Homes”

[originally published in Vermont Views (VV) Magazine]

by Beth Kanell

It began with a postcard. My husband Dave (who passed last April) collected them: colorful Vermont scenes, yes, but more importantly the black-and-white ones from the late 1800s and early to mid 1900s that showed actual scenes, especially in the Northeast Kingdom. There are hundreds of St. Johnsbury and Lyndonville images in his collection—but, proportional to both town size and events that seemed worth marketing as photographs, there are very few from, say, Granby or Victory in Essex County.

            Or from Concord.

            Dave plunged me into a new research project when he found a card labeled “Quimby Maternity Home, Concord, Vt.” His knowledge of postcard publishers and some quick investigation prompted him to added the information “1949–1953.”

            As we, and then I, probed further, we found more than 50 documented births that took place, not just in the Quimby (also called Graves, for nurse Ardella “Nana” Graves) Maternity home, but also in the Austin Maternity Home in the same small town (this one, run by Leah Virginia Austin). And both were clearly “supervised” by the local doctor, Frederick Russell Dickson, M.D.

            “Maternity homes” in the rest of America seem to have often been places for unwed mothers to give birth and send their babies out for adoption. Dave and I found a single request from an adoptee born in 1946 at a Concord maternity home for clues to his parentage. But that turned out to be the exception. Online access led us to birth certificates of many babies simply born in these more supportive, medically encouraged “homes.” Mothers could arrive a day early, stay a few days afterward, have a break from parenting and get a good start with the new arrival.

            But such maternity homes were not well documented. In the case of the ones in Concord, Dr. Dickson worked under contract for the local paper mill, which provided him space for a “dispensary,” and cared for many more illnesses, injuries, and preventive cases than the babies being born—and no records from the two maternity homes have been located.

            So Dave and I went to local Facebook “pages” and “groups,” where residents current and past share their memories. To our astonishment, we discovered another maternity home that took patients at the same time period, the early 1900s, and it was about 20 miles from Concord, in Lyndonville, Vermont. Then word of a second Lyndonville maternity home came, with oral confirmation that it had started in Burke and relocated.

            This is how a small postcard research project begins to spin outward!

            The community of local history researchers is compact and supportive. This summer and fall, I began writing to others in other towns, to see whether the maternity homes of this part of the Northeast Kingdom were an isolated phenomenon or part of something wider.

            After several negatives, I heard from local historian Joan Alexander of Glover, who passed along work by Darlene Young in her “A History of Barton, Vermont” (1998). Young outlined Barton’s medical providers in the late 1800s and mentioned Dr. Percy Buck, born in Charleston, Vermont. Dr. Buck arrived in Glover in 1914, and in 1935 moved to Barton. Young wrote, “During his career, he delivered over 2,000 babies, many of them at the Cottage Hospital.”

            I hope your reading “ears” just perked up the way mine did. Eagerly, I discovered from Young’s account that the double factors of the 1918 “Spanish” influenza outbreak and the changes in World War I era medicine resulted in nurse Harriet Austin in 1913 working in Baron at the “Sunshine Sanitorium,” which Young said “served a number of functions, providing both professional nursing care as well as a suitable place to handle surgical procedures. Increasingly, the sanitorium attracted maternity patients as well.”

            Then in 1923 a new medical graduate in Barton, Dr. Elwin M. Nichols, purchase a large home “with plans to establish his own hospital,” Young wrote. “He hoped to provide patients with both a comfortable, homey atmosphere and state-of-the-art medical equipment.” Soon the Nichols Hospital took over for the late 1920s.

            When Dr. Nichols yielded to his own medical problems, nurse Bernice Atwell opened the Cottage Hospital in Barton. Her particular focus was on maternity patients. Young noted its advantages over home delivery, including sanitary conditions, modern equipment, and rest for the patients. The percent of births held there increased steadily, drawing from as far away at Coventry and Craftsbury. Around 1950, however, trends shifted, and in 1954 Atwell, then aged 65 herself, closed her little hospital.

            Cottage Hospital! I darted to records of the historic Cottage Hospital in Woodsville, New Hampshire, across the river from Wells River, Vermont. It began in 1903, in a building that dated back to 1795, when it was the Cobleigh Tavern. Then it yielded to a “modern” and larger hospital opened in 1960.

            Now the tiny maternity home trend of the Northeast Kingdom had merged into a statewide trend, for I found another Cottage Hospital at the opposite end of the state, Grace Cottage Hospital in Townshend, Vermont. Its timeline differed a bit, but it clearly belonged.

            It’s surprising to realize that even in medicine, which relies so much on records, the phenomenon of maternity and birth has been relatively unrecorded. I hope this research will trigger more—in the footsteps of midwife Lydia Baldwin of Bradford, Vermont, whose records are represented at Dartmouth College today: 926 births from 1768 to 1819, of which only 2.9 percent were stillbirths, despite the challenges of conditions and knowledge.

            Know more about maternity homes in your area? I hope you’ll share the knowledge!

CAPTIONS:

The Facebook piece that Dave Kanell posted, which launched our grass-roots research into how maternity homes functioned in the Northeast Kingdom.

Mrs. Ardella (“Nana”) Graves, who ran one of the Concord, Vermont, maternity homes. Photo from the Facebook feed of the Concord Historical Society.

New Term for the Day: "Wall Dog," and the Reason Why

Every writer's process is different -- and, making it more confusing, sometimes every book takes an author on a different kind of path. I'm crafting a mystery that is mostly set in Lyndonville, Vermont, in 1899-1900, and -- the same way I did with North Danville, when I was writing The Secret Room -- I visit the town often and take photos of places that might crop up in the book, like the railroad crossing, and a back driveway with a sign that says "Angie's Alley." But I've also become fascinated by the painted advertising signs lingering in town ... with no real expectation that they would show up in my novel.

Today I did some basic research into who painted such signs, and when, and how. I don't yet have the northern New England names of the (probably) men who did these, but I'm confident that I'll find them, eventually. And meanwhile, was excited today to learn a new term: wall dog. Apparently it wasn't entirely complimentary, but it fit the profession: painters who covered walls with signs, and "worked like a dog" for their wages, often in blistering hot summers. On the website PaintedAd.com are interviews with some wall dogs; here is a sample from site author Wm. Stage, who has a book on these (I'm ordering a copy!):

In 1983, I spoke with Art Hunn, then 82 and an administrator with the Painter’s District Council No. 2 here in St. Louis. His recollection of life as a signpainter stretched back seven decades to that day in 1916 when he signed on as an apprentice with the Thomas Cusask Co.

“Each spring as many as fifteen two-man crews would go out on the road three or four months at a time,” Art began. “We’d go into a town, and back then the Williams Company had lots of gas and oil signs leased, so we’d paint bulletins on filling station lots.” By 1924, Hunn and his partner were driving around Illinois, Missouri and Iowa in an “old broken-down Dodge,” punctuating scenic vistas with signs of the times—Bull Durham Tobacco, Pillsbury Flour, and Coca-Cola. Each crew, said Art, was expected to complete a sign a day.

Last week I showed this photo of the Gold Medal Flour painted ad in Lyndonville.

And here's one for Coca Cola, from the White Market outer wall:

Of course, wall art advertising isn't limited to the "old days" -- here are two (or more) pieces from Angie's Alley.

More to learn, every day -- and all of it keeps me writing.

Research = Stories. Which is what I love about this stage of the book.

It's pretty cold up here in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont today. Morning began around minus 24 degrees (F), full of bright sunshine, and I pulled out my "long johns" and layered up for an excursion to the nearest frozen pond -- and also to deliver a book to a neighbor, and pick up our mail. It's good to realize, after more than half my life spent here, that I really do know how to dress for comfort, even in such extremes.

Plus, of course, it puts me back into the mind of Almyra, the young woman in the book I've just started writing (no title yet, but the first chapter begins right after a snowstorm: "The silence woke her. That, and the cold."

Almyra would be outdoors on a day like this -- she had little choice! And she'd add layers the way I did, although I doubt that she would have worn the pair of brightly striped Ecuadorean knitted legwarmers that made my final-layer fashion statement of the morning. But she would have loved my fuzz-trimmed hood! I already know that she seeks comfort, at the hardest moments of her life, in going to a quiet place outdoors and letting her heart become calm. Me, too.

But other than her personality, everything else about Almyra's story, set in 1899, depends on research to frame it. So I walk a lot in the nearby towns, looking for signs of the "old days" along the way. The "Gold Medal Flour" advertisement on an upper wall of the "Brick Diamond" building in Lyndonville (better known locally as the building where Edmund's Drug Store used to be) captures a bit of that 1899 commercial feeling.

The Census from 1900 also provides details that I need -- here is one of its pages showing my "target of reseacrh," Albert Stern, still living at home with mom and dad even though he's 19 -- but then again, so is his older brother Samuel, 23, and their sister Clara, 25 ... or was it just something like a family meal that brought them together with the younger teens at home, Isabelle (17) and Benjamin (15)? Here's where the author's choices take over from the facts.

Also on target this week: the Poor Farm in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, as mentioned in an article from the Vermont Historical Society; Census pages describing the Dolgin family, which didn't arrive in the area until 10 years later; an oral history project with a couple of the Dolgin family members, giving the feel of the early century; and photos of trains in snowstorms.

What's next? Well, I know it's hard to imagine, but in the next post here, I'll show you something with shillings and pence ... from Vermont!

"The silence woke her." New Book in Progress! And a Contest!!!

It's that time of year. Snow filters onto the back field. Birds visit the feeders. Deer leave tracks at night. And I start a new book.

Except. Gulp. This time I'm starting three of them. It can't be helped. They are all whispering to me and the time to get the words into place is NOW.

The one I want to talk about today doesn't have a title yet. As I've worked on the research over the past few years, I've just called it "the Lyndonville (Vermont) mystery." But a few weeks ago the main character suddenly waltzed into my life and I had to start ... her name is Almyra, and she's 16, in November of 1899, in East St. Johnsbury, Vermont. And yes, the action up ahead will take place in Lyndonville.

People often ask about a writer's "process." Mine has less to do with what time of day I write, and more to do with how I prepare. I do literally years of historical research. Part of the background of Almyra's story is this information sifted from the 1910 version of Walton's Vermont Register:

In Lyndon, millinery, Mrs. E. M. Swett; in Lyndon Center, none; in Lyndonville, tailor, J. C. Stevens; clothing and gents' furnishings, S. Stern; millinery, Mrs. E. Bigelow, Mrs. F. J. Willey, Mrs. H. Duston, Mrs. W. Barber.

But I also prepare in "five or six senses," and this time one of the necessary elements is a necklace of amber beads. Amber isn't a stone -- it's a fossilized resin. And amber comes particularly from the Baltic (those now-reappearing nations of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia -- which have sometimes been part of Russia), but there is also a noted deposit of amber in Kansas, the state where so many pro-Abolition Vermonters made their homes in the mid 1800s to try to sway the new territory toward becoming a "free state."

So, here I am, happily at work, with an amber necklace in place. I love the variety of colors in it. Even more, I am enjoying knowing the role that amber will play in Almyra's story.

Last bit of process: I've purchased paperback copies of two books (well, one is a 10-book series, repackaged in one volume) that I enjoyed reading years ago, and in their titles is the word "Amber." 

CONTEST!! To the first person who can correctly guess BOTH the book titles (for the series, you can either name the first book OR the series, but you have to also name the other book), and place them here as a comment, I will mail a signed copy of my most recent mystery, Cold Midnight. Looking forward to your replies.

What the Young Squirrel Showed to Me

Walking uphill on our dirt road on Friday, I noticed a very large and long "pinecone" that had been run over -- still mostly attached together, but fringed and shattered along its edges. Ten minutes later, headed back down the hill, I found this very young squirrel digging into it, extracting the protein-rich seeds.

The little squirrel (a red one) stayed on task and let me get closer than most adult squirrels permit. But finally he/she grabbed the biggest chunk of the cone and bounded off into the scrub and woods next to the road.

The squirrel's attention to the cone pushed me to wonder more about it. I looked up the cone today -- and that's why I put the term "pinecone" into quotation marks, as these fibrous seed carriers come on spruces and even birches, not just pines. But it does seem from my Audubon Society Field Guide to be a cone from a white pine.

I was really surprised to see the "cones" on birch twigs in the book. All these years admiring birches, and I've never looked at them closely enough to see what carries their seeds! A few pages later are photos of acorns; why didn't I even stop to notice that different kinds of oaks present different shapes and colors of acorns? Guess I was always just pleased to be able to say "oak" and "acorn."

As I look at the neighboring town of Lyndonville with intent to frame a YA mystery there (probably in 1898), I'm finding the same surprise at what I've walked or driven past without questioning, noticing, or naming. Lyndonville suffered two devastating fires in the first part of the 1900s, wiping out one side of its main street, then the other. Yet there are structures that date to 1898 on most of the "town center" streets. And only recently, my husband Dave (who lived in that town for two decades and has a great collection of postcard images of it) and I realized how many portions of the massive railroad complex from, say, 1855 to 1950 linger in town, repurposed or quietly shuttered and overgrown.

Soon I'll choose names for the teen and the two older women who'll make up the main characters of this book-being-planned. While those details come together, I'll also look around the town for traces that remain of the people I'm envisioning. I've already seen evidence of their lives (the real ones, not my fictional versions) in Census documents and 1890s advertisements.  Crafting a good story from these "seeds" means paying attention to the names and existence of what's already there.

Thanks, Red Squirrel. You've got me asking questions and seeking answers. Way to go.

Falling in Love Again ... With a Covered Bridge

History may be global -- but I'm convinced the start of a love for history is almost always personal and local. In grades kindergarten through grade 4, I often look for investigation projects that connect with what kids already know: their homes, their neighborhoods.

Now and then, it's also nice to go back to that kind of moment. In the last couple of years, I've become very fond of the Sanborn covered bridge in Lyndonville. It helps, of course, to know that the original bridge owner was a very, very distant cousin of mine (my mom would have been thrilled). But also I find the construction and the bridge's long life satisfying. My next novel (the first draft will start at the end of September) is set in Lyndonville, a mystery of course, and I may have to include the bridge as a symbol of how much easier it is to get along with "things" than with people!

Floods and age have taken a toll, and the bridge is under repair. (You can help save it -- click here.) Here are a couple of recent photos of it -- as well as a postcard that includes it, found by my intrepid researcher husband Dave. Do you think he can bear to share my love with the bridge? (Smile.)

Diversion: Birch Trees and Birch Bark

I have several posts lined up for you (some Chinese-related postcard images; some announcements), but before I get down to serious work on those, I wanted to share this enchanting birchbark "greeting card" sent to a Lyndonville, Vermont, resident in the 1960s. It is part of a collection that arrived at the Lyndon Historical Society this year, shown at the end of the group's meeting on Tuesday Oct. 15.

I'm quite sure it's intended to be a scene at Lake Willoughby -- compare it to this actual postcard image dating probably to the 1930s:

A New England Town Re-Shaped by Fire

Yesterday my husband Dave and I browsed a postcard "show" -- really a marketplace, with a dozen or so dealers, and hundreds of thousands of postcards, many of them images of buildings, railroads, and people long gone. It was a historian's treasure trove, and we won't be going out to dinner again for quite a while, because we gathered so many of the 3.5 by 5.5 inch cards to bring home with us. I don't think either one of us purchased a modern "color photo" postcard; we chose the early black-and-white ones, mostly camera shots but some hand drawn or etched, and a few hand-tinted with washes of pastel color.

Probably the most compelling in Dave's batch were a pair that showed the disaster of a winter fire that wiped out half the downtown structures of Lyndonville, Vermont, in 1924. Dave will be doing his own posts about that (at the moment, he "does" Lyndonville and I "do" four other neighboring towns). But I want to share the link to a remarkable video we found that narrates the blaze and its results, as well as showing a number of the postcards that were printed at the time to show the disaster. The video is by Lindsay Marcotte, who was a student at today's Lyndon Institute when she made it. Here it is: http://youtu.be/o0JtuL5SK7Y

It's remarkable that Lyndonville looks untouched today (and there have been other fires since then, too).

In Cold Midnight, the novel I'll bring out in November of this year, Claire Benedict climbs the roofs of St. Johnsbury at night; in the first chapter, she sees a fire being "set." Most downtown structure fires in northern New England have been accidental, but St. Johnsbury and Lyndonville (neighboring large towns) have both seen terrible cases of arson. Two imposing buildings that were lost within the last couple of generations were North Hall of St. Johnsbury Academy, and the Y.M.C.A. building on Eastern Avenue. I've put the postcards showing these onto the Cold Midnight Pinterest board, and I'm placing them here, too, for easy access. North Hall (top image, with South Hall more distant) was lost in 1956, and the Y.M.C.A. building in 1984.

A peek into the possible fiction future: I've started another novel called The Fire Curse that works with all those fires. It's not the next one in my queue to complete, but ... I'll get there, one of these days.