Like many Vermonters, you may have driven down Route 7 near Ferrisburg — perhaps hundreds of times — and wondered about the road that leads to the Rokeby Museum. If you read Danvis Tales, next time you may decide to turn in. Rokeby is the homestead where Rowland E. Robinson — perhaps the state’s greatest storyteller and abolitionist — lived and died. And it was at Rokeby that Robinson wrote and illustrated seven poignant and highly entertaining books about the lives and times of 19th-century Vermonters in the Champlain Valley.

The original books are composed of short sketches depicting various aspects of rural life. Robinson sold these pieces to magazines like Scribner’s, Forest and Stream and The Atlantic from around 1875 until his death in 1900. 

Using the imaginary town of Danvis — based roughly on West Lincoln, Vermont — Robinson, a successful farmer from Quaker stock, turned out 950 pages of his delightful, historically rich Danvis Tales. His syntax, though florid, gorgeously renders the natural world and its regrettable decline from rapacious logging and overhunting. By 1877, for instance, Vermont’s white-tailed deer was declared extinct — our modern deer are imports from New York state — and the great forests gone. Robinson witnesses this, and portrays some of his Danvis characters as complicit in the destruction.

He also documents, with keenness, subtlety and compassion, the lifestyles and people who lived and worked in Vermont. His evocative descriptions of nature are balanced by a rollicking, heavily apostrophized dialect that captures the quirky nature of New England speech and the characters who mouth it.

In every tale, abundantly descriptive passages are followed by ones where Robinson finds neighborly warmth, great joy and dry humor in the interactions of Danvis residents and their speech, especially the hilarious butchery of English from the buoyant French-Canadian character, Antoine. “Dat mek me tink,” Antoine says, recalling a hunting trip, “one tam me ma brudder-law keel one dat panter in Canada.” [Translation: That makes me think of the one time me and my brother-in-law killed a panther in Canada.] Or the curt, laconic Vermont speech of Uncle Lisha, as he describes why he and his wife are moving to “Hio” [Ohio]: “I’m a-goin’ tu turn myself aou’door. The fact o’ the business is, Jerushy ‘n’ I has baout made up aour minds to go aout West an’ live long wi’ George.” 

In this tale, Lisha’s departure is terrible news because the men of Danvis, all hearty friends, regularly gather at his boot shop to whittle, smoke and talk about the glories of hunting and fishing. In subsequent episodes that chronicle those trips — along with domestic troubles, love lost and found, and the weather — Robinson describes Lisha’s move to Ohio and his subsequent pining for the splendors of Vermont. “We are lonesum for the mowntins whicht this country is flattern a pancake. Nor no woods to call woods…,” Lisha writes his friends. He returns by book’s end, devoutly thankful to be back in New England.

Robinson’s dialect writing is difficult to decipher. It’s unfortunate that the book doesn’t include a glossary-style preface to help readers get started. Once you catch on, though, the dialect passages are some of the most enjoyable.

Robinson’s descriptions of late 19th-century life — by all accounts highly accurate — are all the more remarkable for being written after he was completely blind. Through Uncle Lisha’s recounting of a friend’s thoughts on blindness, Robinson reveals his sorrow about his own condition:

“I been the same as dead this ten year…the world a-rattlin’ raound me’ thaout no more ‘caount on me ‘an [as] if I wa’nt in it. My own flesh an’ blood grown up ‘thaout my knowin’ haow they look…A blind man’s uselesser ‘n a dead man, ‘an you can’t bury him aout’n the way an’ be perlite.”

Robinson’s blindness closed his eyes, though not his heart, to issues that concerned him — primarily the wanton destruction of the countryside and wildlife, often for no other reason than sport and greed. His distrust is clear in many eloquent passages. But he also expounds on relationships between men and women, and on Vermonters’ attitudes toward Native Americans who pass through Danvis. In some episodes his characters assist — and chide those who don’t assist — a runaway slave’s flight to Canada.

Vermont poet David Budbill edited this book, he says, because he’s long admired Robinson’s prose — the latter’s Antoine was the inspiration for Budbill’s character of the same name in his play, Judevine. Budbill has expertly assembled stories, each a few pages long, from four of Robinson’s books, and has arranged them so they read as one linear narrative. Readers follow Danvis characters from one incident to the next as though reading an episodic novel.

Budbill was alerted to the splendor of the Danvis tales 25 years ago by the Vermont poet Hayden Carruth, who has supplied an introduction (adapted from a 1973 essay) to the book. That essay alone is worth the cost of the volume — Carruth is profoundly insightful. He employs his vast knowledge of the New England character and literary history to place Robinson in the grand tradition of first-rate writers and storytellers. Carruth is equally erudite on the Yankee character, with Robinson’s prose as his knowing guide.

Sungahneetuk from Sam Lovel’s Camps by Rowland Robinson 

The day after Pelatiah left was to be their last day, for tomorrow they were to break camp and go at least as far as the Falls on their homeward way. For their credit as fishermen and for the pleasure of their friends at home, they must take with them fish enough to give each neighbor a mess. Danvis would expect every man of them to do his duty and bring it — a pickerel. 

As Sam looked eastward from the top of the bluff beyond the broad creek, a kingfisher hung steadfast for a moment on vibrant wings above the shallows, then dropping like a plummet, arose almost with the upbursting splash of his plunge, and presently proclaimed his good luck with a metallic clatter of his castanets. A fishhawk, cruising vigilantly above the channel, suddenly swooped and tore from the water a prize so heavy that, in labored retreat, he barely gained the cover of the woods in time to escape the swift onslaught of an eagle, lord paramount of all air, water, and earth hereabout.

Sam accepted these omens as auspicious of a good day’s fishing, verifying what he had already felt in his bones, and he departed in his canoe, paddling up the lower reaches of the stream, where the dipping willow tips scarcely bent to or rippled the slow current, and the reflections of trunks and leaves stood motionless on the glassy stream till the boat’s wake set them a-quiver, as its slanted bars of golden light climbed rushes, ferny shores, and gray tree trunks and then dissolved in green and gold among the sunlit leaves; or a gar-pike, watching with wicked eyes the advancing prow, stirred them with the slow ripple of his sullen retreat. Then a muskrat voyaged from one shore with a freight of weeds trailing from his jaws and undulating with his wake, then sank with it to the underwater doorway of his home and left his wake fading in slow pulsations above him. A green heron, startled from an overhanging branch, went flapping awkwardly along the narrow lane of sky while his distorted double flapped more awkwardly along the lane of water.

There was no sign nor sight of the outer world but the frayed stripe of blue sky overhead, one glimpse of Camel’s Hump set in danker blue against it, and, seen for an instant through a break in the green and gray wall of trees, Mt. Philo’s crown of pines and shorn sunlit slopes.

The solitude was very pleasant to this simple lover of nature who in certain moods was happiest when alone, yet not alone, for he felt a perfect companionship with the woods and their inhabitants close about him. There were other fishers than he but for whose busier plying of their craft he might have forgotten why he had come, so satisfied was he with the lazy voyaging. A heron stood with poised spear in an outlet of the marsh waiting for luck with an angler’s patience. An alert mink slid from the bank, cleaving the water with an almost noiseless plunge as if he were a brown arrow shot into it. Not so a kingfisher, who proclaimed from afar his coming, just swerved from his jerky course for the boat, then hung for a moment in quivering poise and dashed down so close that the spray of his noisy plunge fell in splashing drops not twice the canoe’s length from her prow, then flew to a raft of driftwood and perching upon its topmost stick bragged as loudly of his minnow as Antoine might of an eel.

This article appears in September 27 • 1995.