In 1960, David J. Blow was discharged from his U.S. Army post in Germany and, with no plan in mind, headed back to his hometown of Burlington. He spent days working at the University of Vermont’s library just “puttering around,” he said, and reading ancient Roman history. Eventually, he attracted the attention of Tom Bassett, then the head of Special Collections at the library.
“Why don’t you research Burlington history?” Bassett asked him. “You’re not in Rome anymore.”
“He knows more about old Burlington than any living person.”
Bob Blanchard
Indeed, books about Vermont’s largest city were not plentiful. In 1965, Blow took Bassett’s advice and accepted the challenge of correcting the Burlington deficit. That same year saw the birth of the Chittenden County Historical Society, which Blow soon joined and which would eventually publish Blow’s masterly three-volume Historic Guide to Burlington Neighborhoods.
“I think it’s safe to say that he knows more about old Burlington than any living person,” said Bob Blanchard, a local historian and administrator of the popular Burlington Area History Facebook group.
Blow, now 88, was recently honored by the historical society with the inaugural Lilian Baker Carlisle Lifetime Achievement Award. The shy, extremely modest octogenarian put the kibosh on a public ceremony and received the award from some close friends at his Burlington apartment. “I’m going to put it up on my wall,” Blow reassured his friends and colleagues. “I’ll be proud to display it.”
Blanchard noted that was about as boastful as Blow gets. Friends say he deflects praise as if it were radiation.
Blow was born in 1937 and raised in Grand Isle, which for years had been known as “Blowville” for the multiple like-named families residing there since the 19th century. Blow’s carpenter father, James, and his mother, Blanche, a homemaker and crafter, moved the family to South Burlington in 1948. After high school, Blow enlisted in the Army and was stationed in Germany. While there, he completed a degree in history from the University of Maryland.
Though Blow’s nature is mild-mannered and reserved, a love of history is the music that draws this wallflower onto the dance floor. “I was always interested in the past,” he told Seven Days. “Why this road goes there. The placement of houses. What made my world the way it is.”
Carlisle, the local historian for whom the award is named, was a kindred spirit. They met while she was doing research in the Special Collections department at the UVM library. During the 1965 celebration of the city’s centennial, Blow and Carlisle gave walking tours of the Burlington waterfront. Blow never married, but Carlisle’s daughter Diana, a Chittenden County Historical Society Advisory Council member, described her mom as “David’s special friend.” The prolific Blow collaborated with Carlisle on several of his scores of long history articles.
Bassett, a founding member of the Chittenden County Historical Society and Burlington native who had served as an archivist at the National Archives, hired and trained Blow to work in Special Collections. In 1966, Blow also took on the management of the university’s own archives, then located in the Waterman Building. He retired from UVM in 2000.
As he embarked on his archival research, Blow suddenly realized that he was overlooking a valuable but perishable resource: Burlington residents who’d lived in the 19th century. Real witnesses could provide a very clear picture of how the Queen City — or anything of that time — looked and felt.
Friends said Blow’s natural reticence serves him well as a researcher. People are eager to speak with him. His superpower is shutting up.
“David is a terrific listener, and he is really extraordinary at absorbing facts and descriptions,” said Joe Perron, the secretary and archivist of the Chittenden County Historical Society and president of the Winooski Historical Society. Perron has become a kind of acolyte to Blow, who is happy to mentor a young historian.
Perron, a Winooski resident, said there are many large reference files at UVM that relate to Vermont and particularly Burlington. “David could reach in and pull out information on the most arcane subjects,” he said.
In 1970, Connell Gallagher came to UVM as a curator of manuscripts. His department had large binders full of print editions of the Burlington Free Press from 1820 to 1940. “David loved that,” recalled Gallagher, now living in Underhill. “I think he read the whole thing.”
That research led Blow to create a city history database “before there was such a thing,” Gallagher said with a chuckle. “He was very happy being left alone in the university archives.”
Blanchard discovered on a very personal level that Blow was not your run-of-the-mill historian. In the course of some local family research, Blanchard established that his grandfather came to Vermont in 1908 and had a house built on the corner of Burlington’s Howard and Hayward streets in the 19-teens. Knowing that a much younger Blow had lived across the street from that house, Blanchard asked if he had known or met the family.
“It turned out that David used to have regular long conversations with my grandfather, which he loved and remembered in great detail,” Blanchard said. Blow told him a number of details about his family that were news to him.
“He went way beyond what I had asked about,” Blanchard said, “following up several times with me via email, adding more interesting information each time.”
For this story, Seven Days asked local authors whether Vermont was a good place to be a historian. J. Kevin Graffagnino, a veteran historian of the state, who last year published a well-received Ira Allen biography, said yes and cited David Blow as one reason why.
“Standout, respectable historians, men and women who wrote big, thick tomes on the history of Brattleboro, Barnard or Newbury — Blow is the principal representative of that tradition,” said Graffagnino, who is a member of the Chittenden County Historical Society Advisory Council. “A walking encyclopedia. Anybody who worked on Burlington subjects in the last 40 years knew: Go to David Blow for help!”
The original print version of this article was headlined “A Bard of Burlington | Local historian David Blow receives the Chittenden County Historical Society’s inaugural lifetime achievement award”
Correction, November 20, 2025 2:27 pm: This article has been updated to reflect that Bob Blanchard is the administrator of the Burlington Area History Facebook page and not the Chittenden County Historical Society Facebook page. Also, Lilian Baker Carlisle was doing research at University of Vermont's Special Collections when she met David Blow. And Tom Bassett was an archivist at the National Archives.
This article appears in Nov 19-25 2025.
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