ROAD STORIES

The Maple Street entrance to the old road. Around the bend it becomes more trail than road. 

Sometimes you have to celebrate things that didn’t work out.  Or things that were left to fall apart.  This is about two of those.  

In 1979 a local guy (I’ll call him Fred) bought 28 acres of forested land, part of which is behind my field.  It’s the kind of purchase you (if you lived up here) would assume was for hunting purposes, because the piece was landlocked; no road led to it.  Logging could be problematic.  You could walk into it by way of a trail, although what begins as a road suitable for a tractor or an ATV, and has been used by a local farmer for getting feed to cows in the adjoining field, soon reverts to a trail once you pass the cow field.  

The trail heads down to the marsh.

The trail begins in Waltham, right next door in other words, and runs along the back of the field behind my house and continues through one or two other properties until it comes to a major impediment: a marsh created, and still being improved upon, by beavers. It takes up again after that gap, and just beyond is reinforced by also serving as the VAST––Vermont Association of Snow Travelers, snowmobilers to most of us––trail. Near Route 17 the VAST takes a left whereas the trail seems to come to an end with no clear route through a farm's back yard. What the “road” once connected to after that is anybody’s guess, although it probably linked up with what is now Field Days Road on the other side of Route 17.  The old road/trail hasn’t been maintained or repaired, or used, for that matter except for walkers and the occasional ATV.  In some places it has probably been misplaced.  

Fred thought maybe he could change that.  

Vermont’s mountain ranges run north-south, the spine of the Appalachians.  Almost all the early roads in Vermont ran parallel to the range.  It was always harder and trickier to build roads that ran through or over the mountains.  When Vermont became a state in 1791 this seems to have prompted some serious road building.  A case in point:  Shortly after 1791 the General Assembly voted to “view, survey, lay out, and alter or turn said road from Vergennes” south through at least nine other named towns to end at “Colonel Elisha Averill’s in Pawlet,” a town not very far north of Bennington.  It was to be called the Legislative Highway.  In 1812 New Haven (my town) laid out its portion and dubbed that segment the 1812 Highway. 

By 1995 this road had long disappeared from maps.  It had also mostly disappeared from sight.  In fact, it had disappeared so thoroughly that in 1926 the New Haven Board of Selectmen (we now call them Selectboards) voted to discontinue the road, officially closing it, thereby ending any commitment for improvements or maintenance.  And that, they thought, was that.

Fred had other ideas.  After many years rueing his inaccessable purchase, he decided to take action.  He would rue no longer.  He did some research, and in 1996 he petitioned the county court, arguing that the New Haven Board had no authority to close this segment of what was now called (laughably) the “North-South Highway” since it was, historically at least, part of the much longer road that extended clear to Bennington.  The county court ruled against Fred.  Undaunted, he appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court.  In its wisdom that court found the Board had indeed illegally closed the road in 1926 because it did not have the jurisdiction to do so; each of the eighteen towns along the Legislative Highway’s now moribund route would have had to formally agreed to the closure, since the New Haven portion was merely a segment.  Despite the thankless efforts on the part of one neighboring landowner (and owner of the swamped segment) who obtained the written approval of the governing body of each of the now eighteen towns in the road’s path and hoped to have them meet and agree to close the road officially, no such meeting ever took place. Doing New Haven a favor wasn’t high on those towns' agendas and, worse, the town of New Haven apparently didn’t give a damn. The trail/road’s status remained in technical limbo.

Until one day, when I saw someone I didn’t recognize on a tractor pulling a brush-hog at the back of my field. It wasn't clear who would choose to do this, or why.  The brush-hogger was, I learned later, a local acquaintance of Fred’s and, at the time, a New Haven Selectboard member who shared Fred’s mindset and was prepared to right perceived wrongs as he saw them.  I'll call him Donald.  After making his way cutting brush in my field Donald proceeded to my neighbor’s where he cut whatever was in his way–riding roughshod sounds like a good description–and replied in no uncertain terms to a neighbor who asked what he was doing on her property that he was operating in his official Selectboard capacity.  In reality, the Board had no idea what Donald was doing.  Donald drove on, passing closely by the next landowner who was out trimming his own brush, and letting that landowner know his was a hostile act.  Donald plowed right into the marsh for a number of yards before it became obvious he would be bogged down for good if he went an inch further. 

The "road" exits the forest at the left and (theoretically, at least) enters the marsh. A new beaver lodge can be seen at right, rear.

From another angle the beaver lodge is barely visible at far left.

The rest of the story can be told quickly.  Donald continued to carry on in many, mostly unpleasant, ways about this “illegality” (i.e., the wrongful methodology of road-closure in 1926). While he envisioned a paved road of county highway dimensions with cars and trucks driving back and forth, it seems no one (except possibly Fred) shared this vision.  Fred wanted access for himself, not necessarily for the rest of the world.  As Donald had essentially shoved this issue in the faces of the Selectboard members, the Board felt it had to do something, so it voted to spend $5,000 to survey the old road and at least establish where the darned thing actually was. That completed, and Donald by then no longer a Selectperson, the Board members seemed happy to have the issue behind them.  They made no commitment, nor is it likely they ever will, to maintain, repair or much less improve the road/trail.  I don’t know if Fred has other ideas.  Donald seems to have other fish to fry and has been busy opposing solar projects.

The "road" roughly followed the line of trees at the edge of my field.
A tiny red marker (at the end of a pole, middle left third of the photo) is a leftover survey marker.

Carly stands next to a new impediment on the "road."  The tree fell partially in late winter and an April storm brought it down significantly lower. 

And once upon a time there was (almost) another road: What the Legislative Highway could, perhaps, have been?

The designated path of the Green Mountain Parkway.

If you’d lived in Vermont before the interstates were built, you might have wept at the isolation.  When I was about seven or eight years old and lived in New York City my family began spending summers in Vermont.  We sometimes shopped at a little store in Newfane that had a butcher.  My mother got into conversation with the butcher, and he recounted how when he and his wife first moved up from New York City his wife cried and cried for their entire first winter. This made no sense to me because I was always so happy to be in Vermont. Why would anyone cry about that?

The building of the interstates, I-89 and I-91, in the late 1950’s and 1960’s ended that isolation and changed everything. It’s no good arguing any longer whether that was for the better or the worse because the change happened, and it's hard to imagine it otherwise.  But some changes are better thwarted, or killed at birth.

Lots of ideas get proposed because they are the thing of the moment, or because some other place has something that is judged to be really cool.  North Carolina began to build the Blue Ridge Parkway in 1936.  It must have been seen as a really cool thing, a marvel, years before everyone started owning not just one, but two or three cars. The very idea of driving on a highway like this evokes a 1950’s car ad (“Let’s go for a Sunday drive!”), engine purring as you drift over mountaintops with views to both sides, no traffic lights, no distractions.  Thrilling.  But now, not so much.  Today a highway on mountaintops may be seen for what it really is, an infringement on nature, every summit conquered by cars. The mountains themselves become less alluring.  You drive around curve after endless curve–not to even contemplate driving all 400-plus miles of it–and everything begins to look the same. Nature becomes boring. 

Is this really alluring? (From the Blue Ridge Parkway website).  Maybe if it was a trail...

What a terrific idea, Vermont movers and shakers thought when they learned about the new Skyline Drive (first proposed in 1924) in Virginia and the Blue Ridge Parkway (proposed in 1935).  Imagine: driving on the mountaintops!  In 1935 Vermonters proposed the Green Mountain Parkway that would run the length of the state, a north-south road, just like the southern parkways.  The mountains of Vermont are not as gentle, however, as the mountains of Virginia or North Carolina, so it wouldn’t have traveled over, say, Camel’s Hump or Mount Mansfield summits without blasting them to pieces, but it might have come close.

The plan was defeated, though not exactly handily, in a state-wide referendum.  The issue was complicated, the forces for building were powerful, and it tore the populace apart.  It wasn't a question of good conservationists versus bad developers.  On the pro side were the progressives, those with "modern" views, who wanted Vermont to be more like the rest of the country, a view held by important people and entities, including the leading newspapers as well as the federal government. The prospect of jobs, 16,000 of them, so soon after the Great Depression, was not negligible.  On the other side was fear, fear of a road opening the state to "outsiders," fear of involvement of the federal government through its land-taking alongside the road, and a concern that the road would literally divide the state in two. The fear of outsiders was itself complicated, as "outsider" incorporated notions of difference and unsavory associations that linked to the prejudices of the day (and surely this day as well).  An article in Vermont Digger of March 2012 suggested there was more than a whiff of anti-Semitism woven through the opposition.  All those New York people, you know.  To assuage those who were worried about despoiling the land, and to help sell the idea, a special national park-like designation was proposed for the area where the road was to end, just below the summit of Jay Peak (and where, ironically, today we have a dramatically altered Jay Peak anyway, only for a ski resort.)

In retrospect it is pleasant to think that the conservationists won, and in hindsight I suppose one could say they did. 

And there is still only a trail at the back of the field.