Why do Vermonters live where they do? Historically, settlement patterns have been shaped by natural resources and the industries that spring up around them. Workers flocked to Barre for its granite; to Proctor for its marble; to Mount Tabor for its timber; and to St. Albans and Island Pond for the railroad lines to bigger markets.
Residents of the Vermont town of Springfield, nicknamed the Machine Tool Capital of the World, once boasted the highest per-capita income in the state.
More recently, Vermont’s rural landscape has drawn city dwellers in search of a saner life. New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren — who illustrated this week’s cover — quit Manhattan for the central Vermont town of Brookfield 31 years ago. Back then, he said, “There were people living in every house up and down the street.”
But things change for a multitude of reasons, including new technology, natural disasters, wars and consumer preferences.
The Vermont towns of Tyson Furnace, Glastenbury, Lewiston, Somerset and Ricker Basin no longer exist because the products that brought people there — old-growth forest, gold, iron ore — ran out.
In Springfield, “They kept making the same machines, and while they were great and cool and the standard-bearers, you’ve always got to innovate,” Bob Flint, executive director of the Springfield Regional Development Corporation, told Seven Days in 2015. The factories failed to keep up with changing technology and closed one by one. Now household income in the town is about $10,000 below the Vermont median.
Meanwhile, Brookfield has “become a ghost town,” said Koren, noting that only 13 structures of 22 that comprise the village are currently occupied. “The two businesses that animated it, that gave it life, have closed,” he said of the town. One of those, Ariel’s Restaurant, was auctioned off last Thursday. No serious buyers showed up, according to Koren, so the bank bought the property.
Outside of Chittenden County, many Vermont communities are struggling. When a major manufacturer shuts down, or the college in town sheds staffers, there may not be any other local employment options. The alternative — driving long distances to work — discourages participation in civic life. Commuters and second-home owners don’t tend to join the volunteer fire department.
School consolidation, or the threat of it, repels families from places on the perceived losing end of the education equation. The combination of an aging demographic and a zero birth rate also imperil some towns.
Why not boost the population with young professionals who work remotely? That requires a reliable internet connection, something much of rural Vermont still lacks.
In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation put Vermont on its “endangered list” in anticipation of the negative impact big-box stores could have on its picturesque downtowns. But while planners and preservationists were worrying about Walmart, Amazon offered an online alternative to local shopping, decimating Main Streets here and across the country. There’s no shortage of UPS and FedEx trucks delivering packages on the back roads of Vermont.
“How do we help these rural places succeed?” asked Paul Bruhn, executive director of Preservation Trust of Vermont, whose rescue efforts have taken him all over the state. “How do we make them places people want to live in?”
Bruhn’s organization aims to answer those questions —and has played a key role in almost every local preservation success story. In a brainstorming session during one of its retreats, participants compiled a list of all the things that “make a great village.” It included a school, a post office, a library and a bakery-café, as well as a fire department and a good septic system.
Rural communities across Vermont are doing their own internal assessments and, in some cases, taking action. They’re saving general stores, repurposing churches and building arts centers. In Koren’s burg, a group of citizens bought the moribund Brookfield Town Hall — at auction — and turned it into a lively, albeit seasonal, community center.
And there are other glimmers of hope: A beloved bookstore in Hardwick is celebrating three decades in business; there’s a new co-working space in Bradford; and a recruitment effort to bring young dentists to rural communities appears to be working, at least in St. Johnsbury.
Will such efforts be sufficient to save rural settlements in the Green Mountain State? We’ll find out. In this issue, Seven Days reporters explore some of the ways Vermont’s human landscape is shifting once again.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Our Towns”
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This article appears in Dec 5-11, 2018.
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This series is heroic. I hope you’ll produce it as a pamphlet or small book and make it available to every legislator in Montpelier and to policy-makers throughout ‘this brave little state’.
John Carroll
(member, State Board of Education,
former State Senator, Windsor County)
I’d like to thank Seven Days for leaving its normal comfort zone to closely examine life’s challenges in rural Vermont.
Amazon is already crumbling under it’s own weight & won’t be a factor much longer, though if it is, it is self induced by the very people that don’t support their neighbors businesses.
Vermont’s primary problem is much more with the State Capital & City Hall monarchy having a blast giving away our money to all their corporate cronies & each other. Nobody comes to this place because it’s an economic powerhouse. They come here because it’s exactly the opposite, except of course the developers that come here to rape & pillage & all the flatlanders that come from the cities and then set to work trying to turn it into exactly what they left behind.
This story could have been written about any rural area in the United States, or in Asia or Africa, for that matter, where most populations, except for the elderly or marginalized minorities, would rush to an urban area if it were possible or legal. Emptying out the countryside would actually decrease the over-exploitation of stressed ecosystems, if national laws restricting development were actually enforced.
When future American historians look back on the decline of our civilization and the currently accelerating environmental devastation, they might identify a couple of related factors: the building of the interstate highway system and the use of petroleum products to speed up every facet of our lives, from agricultural production to movement of our increasingly massive bodies at ever higher speeds. My proof? Repeated viewing of Wall-E.
This is a great report. Thank you, Paula! I live in the country, in Cabot, and see this process of attrition at work all too frequently. The local cafe in Plainfield, Maple Valley, that has struggled valiantly to stay alive, just closed its doors for good yesterday — a great loss. “The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community” by Ray Oldenburg, published in 1989, is wonderful on this topic, and still worth reading.
Although it’s true that in some ways compacting the human population in urban settings is better for the environment, country life where families grow food, respect wild flora and fauna, and connect with neighbors is the way that humans trod lightly on the land for most of human history. And most importantly from my point of view, it keeps humans in contact with the critical and disappearing natural assets of our amazing planet. That doesn’t happen in cities, where most of the land is under pavement and concrete.
Janet Van Fleet
Thanks for the series. I know how much we romanticize small towns, but I wonder about the reality. Would you ever consider going deeper on this topic? I would like to know numbers. Look at data points correlated to location (towns). The per capita data points I’m thinking of might include such things as:
* per capita education outcomes – how many go on to college? how many drop out of school? how many earn degrees or career certifications in four years?
* per capita health outcomes – rates of obesity, alcoholism, drug use, heart disease, cancers, etc.
* per capita fiscal outcomes – per capita taxes paid, per capita public expenditures received
* per capita economic data – per capita income, per capita living expenses
* per capita social outcomes – per capita divorce, per capita single parent households, per capita suicides, per capita incidences of domestic violence
* demographic data – age, diversity, incomes, education levels, etc.
* per capita carbon footprint data – miles driven or gallons of gas consumed, heat source (wood, oil, gas), acres used for lawns,
Perhaps the data could be sorted by population quintiles.
You get the picture. I think looking at such data might get us to ask some very interesting questions.
Great and valuable series . A small quibble is the title . Act 46 is not the cause but the effect of the shrinking of the school age population . A second quibble is the the limited analysis or conjecture you did on the causes of rural Vermont’s depopulation . Your reporting on the effects was superb .
Thank you for this strong series. Any update on how much the remote worker incentive has benefitted Vermont companies? No doubt getting subsidy to move to Vermont and wire ones home once you get here is a boon. How much of the subsidy circulates locally, and is there any evidence of measurable economic development impact?