A gentleman from Boston stopped in one day about 5 years ago saying that he had come across something on-line indicating that his ancestors had settled here on Lincoln Hill. He was wonderfully charming and warm and I sent him to my friend's house on Lincoln Hill where the "black" cemetery had been located, though it had fallen into a state of disrepair and was now all but invisible. A year or so later, a woman named Elise Guyette (who was getting her PHD at UVM) came in and began researching the black settlement on Lincoln Hill. I gave her the contact info for this young man and they began keeping in touch. Elise spent many days in our vault going through old documents that we never make available to anyone as they are quite fragile. She ended up publishing a book called Discovering Black Vermont: African American Farmers in Hinesburg, 1790-1890. She has been doing book signings and talks around the State so perhaps you have read about it? Now the State has put up an historic marker at the bottom of Lincoln Hill.

Missy Ross is Town Clerk & Treasurer for the Town Of Hinesburg

A few years ago, there was a dispute between a landowner and the town on who owned a cemetery on their property. The landowner said it was theirs and did not want people going on their property to visit the cemetery.

Our town clerk at the time researched the land records and found a deed in the early years of our town that gave the town a 999 year lease to the cemetery. That was great news especially for the people whose ancestors are buried there.

Tammy Legacy is Town Clerk for the Town of Roxbury

Researching Mr. and Mrs. Prince, the story of African American Vermont settlers Lucy Terry Prince and Abijah Prince, led to a number of unexpected finds for me and my husband Anthony Gerzina. Archives formed the backbone of the research; archives that weren't always in libraries or conventional locations. One of the days that remains particularly exciting for us was when a University of Vermont special collections librarian suggested that we take a look at the uncatalogued materials in their annex. Access hours were limited, and we rushed through boxes of materials, hoping to find some information on their lives: court cases, property information, letters concerning them, perhaps town meeting notes. In the last moments, just before the annex closed, Anthony picked up a small notebook. It turned out to be the notes of the lawyer hired by Eli Bronson; Lucy's sons were suing him to regain the property acquired by their father decades before. In that moment we realized we had what people had been looking for, for over 150 years: the story of Lucy Terry Prince's taking her case all the way to a supreme court."

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina and Anthony Gerzina are the authors of Mr. and Mrs. Prince http://www.gretchengerzina.com/

In 1976 I was looking through the Special Collections Department of the University of Vermont library. Specifically, I was looking for anything that might relate to Vermont's most famous air disaster, the 1944 Army Air Force bomber crash on Camels Hump. I was pointed to the Detore Collection of photographic negatives and after hours of searching, found several excellent images which turned out to be absolutely key in my research. The photographer, James Detore of Burlington, had taken thousands of crime, insurance, and general interest photos during the 1930s and 40s - including several plane crashes.

While looking for the plane crash photos, I saw one sleeve of negatives with Detore's handwriting. It said, "Romprey murders." I had grown up in Waterbury and knew Bernard Romprey as a very quiet, kind, and successful businessman with a jewelry store on Main Street. Out of curiosity, I looked at the negatives and was amazed to learn that he had committed Vermont's first quadruple murder in 1945. I put the negatives back with the intention of researching the story - someday.

After Romprey died at age 90 in 2007, I began to research the story in detail. It seems this was the classic case of temporary insanity. Romprey snapped one day and coldly executed the Bliss Mansfield family in Essex Center. From the beginning, everyone involved realized that here was a man who had been sending loud signals for help that everyone ignored. Romprey had even told his commanders in the Army that he was becoming dangerous for reasons he didn't understand. He was never prosecuted but was instead sent to the Vermont State Hospital where he was treated and trained as a jeweler. After his release, he led a very productive and honest life with a successful business.

The chance discovery of Detore's crime scene negatives uncovered a long-forgotten story of a Vermont tragedy but it also uncovered a case where the Criminal Justice system really worked in exactly the way we would all hope it would on a routine basis.

Brian Lindner is an aviation historian

Bravo for archives. Dig, dig, dig and all of a sudden a Eureka moment occurs. The doors of Vermont History are opened a bit wider than before. Here are several such moments.

One occurred while doing research on the Black Snake Affair (1808 – 1809). More specifically while digging into the appeal of a 'death sentence' by Cyrus B. Dean before the Vermont Legislature's 1808 session convened. Dean had been found guilty by a jury of being an accessory to the murder of Asa March, a federalized Vermont militia man from Rutland, and Jonathan Ormsby, a local farmer from Burlington.

The Archives at Middlesex contain a rather substantial collection of Legislative Session records. And suddenly there they were. Eureka! The actual bills for labour and materials which were required for Dean's gallows built by Content C. Hallock and Israel Williams, both Burlington carpenters: "Timber for the Gallows frame and drawing the frame $5.00; 304 feet of planks $7.20; Boards $1.60; Nails and Spikes $3.00;Posts and Ropes for the Yard and making the Frame $10.00; to raising Gallows $4.00, total of $30.80."

Newly elected Governor Tichenor and the Council along with the House members knew when they began their deliberations on Dean's appeal that the sentence of death would take place on October 28. For a host of reasons the legislature took until October 27th to reach a decision: Dean received a two week reprieve, from Friday, October 28 to Friday, November 11. When the Legislature was almost finished with Dean's appeal it was mid-afternoon of the 27th. - Eureka - the House passed a resolution "that the Secretary of State [Thomas Leverett, Esq.] be, and he is hereby directed to transmit by express to the Sheriff [Daniel Stanford] of the County of Chittenden without delay the Act granting a reprieve to Cyrus B. Dean."

A horse rider was found to carry the message from Montpelier to Burlington, about two and a half to three hours away in the crisp dark October night. A large crowd had already accumulated the night before the 28th to watch the first and last public hanging ever performed in Chittenden County. It was to be a public spectacle of incredible proportions. On the morning of the 28th even more folks came to Burlington from farms throughout the County and beyond to join the event and to view Dean swing off about three o'clock in the afternoon from the newly constructed gallows. The tiny Burlington with it's narrow paths overrun, few buildings of any kind in which to rest, and at bottom no place to sit. The crowd was crammed, overflowing, truly bursting.

Cyrus B. Dean in his own way may well have been appreciative of a two week reprieve, though it was hardly what he had hoped for in his appeal. A young man, recently married with a small child, fairly well 'oiled' on the day of the incident on August 3rd. The two week reprieve the Legislature granted would give him a bit more time "to contemplate upon the realities of a future world and prepare for his exit to the world of spirits." The gathering crowd however was furious on the 28th: deprived of their anticipated viewing of a public hanging; being given virtually no notice of the delayed event; it rekindled their mixed feelings about the conduct of the trial and it's lopsided results, the questionable politics involving the Jeffersonian Embargo tangled up in the heated Republican versus Federalist quarrels.

Another Eureka moment, Sherriff Stanard's final bill against the State for the amount for hanging Cyrus. B. Dean: "For Hanging Cyrus B. Dean $300.00; 4 Deputies 6 days, @ 2 per day $40.00; Hallock and Williams Bill $63.53; Blacksmith Bill $2.00; Guard to Guard the Prison and Second Gallows after the first being torn down $20.00; Burial Clothes $4.25; total $438.78"

A short, revealing memo accompanies the Sheriff's accounting of costs shedding light on what really occurred between October 28 and November 11, 1808. "I do hereby certify and declare that after the Legislature refused to reprieve Dean the second time I was obliged to augment the guard in order to prevent the destruction of the jail and the escape of Dean and found it necessary to personally attend as well as my Deputies the whole time night and day. Attest Dan Stanford".

These four valuable archival documents shed much light on the overall story of the Black Snake Affair. In a very real sense they are there at Middlesex for the digging as are many, many other documents.

John Lovejoy is a historian who has researched and written on various Vermont
topics, including the Black Snake Affair and Alexander Twilight

Years ago, before I became Town Clerk and before we put the big addition on our building, Harold Makepeace found a box in the damp crawl space under the building with some very old papers folded up inside. They turned out to be the original charters for the town: the first, from King George II, dated 1751, which was forfeited because Indian fighting prevented settlers from meeting its provisions and the second, from George III, dated 1761; and the original right map with a grid layout of roads that might have worked in Kansas but did not take into account the steep ridges that run through town. Harold had these documents preserved by Brown's River. I now keep the originals in Mylar sleeves in the plat cabinet. I had copies made and plan to have the copies framed for hanging in the office.

Nora Wilson is the Town Clerk for the Town of Marlboro

My family had a visit a couple of weeks ago from a man who lives in Maine. He works for some outdoor education center. The founder of the organization was the school master of the New Discovery School when he was 17, in 1904. He boarded at my house, and he kept a very detailed journal, including a hand-drawn sketch of his room. From the windows we can tell that his room was what is now our dining room. The journal describes what school was like every day, and he also describes a hike that he took up Burnt Mountain. The gentleman that stopped by asked permission to park in our driveway so he could take the same hike and write about it in his company's newsletter.

Bobbi Brimblecombe is the Town Clerk for the Town of Marshfield

One of our frequent flyers is a lady who does genealogy research for herself and others. She was having a difficult time finding the lineage for James Little, a Revolutionary War soldier. She searched every record possible – vitals, cemeteries, town history, old newspapers, etc. to no avail. Exasperated, she began to look through land records for any clues. Lo and behold, she found his last will and testament in Volume #2, dated 1809, listing all of his heirs. Her eureka moment and discovery of a will in the land records taught her the importance and value of the land records archives.

Mary Ann Wilson is the Town Clerk and Treasurer for the Town of Morristown

As a graduate of Windham College, it was nice to learn that the State held all the college transcripts. Students could obtain proper documentation in order to comply with "No Child Left Behind" and also go on to Graduate School or new work situations. It was sad to have the school close but we never realized that it had also been a link to continuing our careers. The Archives filled that need.

Barbara Taylor is Assistant Town Clerk for the Town of Putney

I had an ah-ha moment when looking through duplicate copies of old town reports to pass along to our Historical Society. I inadvertently found where my great, great grandfather used to clean the very building that I now work in for $3 per week in 1908! Kinda cool!

Allison Kaiser is the Town Clerk for the Town of Stowe

Historical documents are indispensable in reconstructing the weather history of Vermont in the pre-1890 period. Such documents include weather entries in the personal diaries of farmers, ministers and homemakers; a book written by Frank E. Hartwell of the Weather Bureau in 1958; a text about Burlington published in 1905; the writings of Dr. Hiram A. Cutting, the Lunenburgh observer; theses and other papers of the Historic Preservation Department of the University of Vermont; historical postcards, sketches, photographs, maps and topographic surveys housed in the Special Collections of the Bailey/Howe Library of the University of Vermont; and holdings at the Vermont Historical Society and the Lunenburg Historical Society.

While these accounts and the pictorial evidence are fascinating in their own right, together they paint a picture of what Vermont's weather was like in the pre-1948 era – not only in the towns of Burlington and Lunenburg, but across the entire state as well. For example, Hartwell's 1958 book reveals the intricacies of the relationship among the Weather Bureau, Canadian Colonial Airways and the airport, Burlington's economy and the University of Vermont. Similarly, a thorough analysis of Dr. Cutting records would allow for the identification of cold or frost hollows which are common in Vermont, as cold air drainage and differential heating of the slopes cause significant variations from one part of the landscape to the next. Finally, such long-term weather data are a critical input to analysis of how climate has changed in Vermont, not only in the past but also in recent times.

Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at UVM and the State Climatologist

We had a woman come into the office saying that her father and uncle used to say that their family had donated the local baseball field to the Town to be used for sports for the children of Williamstown. It had been named after a different family for many years so even she was doubting her dad's memory. When she came in to research the land we did indeed find that it was donated by her grandfather. She was so happy to have that deed to show her Dad she stood here with tears in her eyes and was so very thankful. The Town is going to make a plaque stating that the field was donated by her Grandfather.

Deborah Palmer is the Town Clerk for the Town of Williamstown.

We have an unusual case in Wilmington presently being discussed between the Selectboard, Deerfield Valley Farmers' Day Association President and the elected CC Haynes Trustee. It concerns the will of CC Haynes. Although it is unusual for a will to be recorded in the Town's land records, this one can be found in Book 27, Page 56. The will directs the Town to elect a Trustee for the funds left to the Town by the deceased. The Town elects this Trustee each year at Town Meeting.

At some point not too long after 1918 the Trustee authorized (with permission of the Town) construction of an exhibition hall on town property abutting property owned by the fair association. The Hall continues to be used to house Youth Exhibits. Over the years the CC Haynes Fund also has been used to offer scholarships to young people heading into agricultural careers, even veterinarian careers. As there is no transfer document of record concerning the actual building, we are depending on the reading of the recorded will to guide us in answering modern day questions related to this fund and subsequent building.

We have another building in town, Memorial Hall, which also was donated. The deed to the Town for that building includes the following restrictions: "This conveyance is made subject to this condition – that no games of chance, wrestling matches, boxing matches, cock fights or entertainments at all repugnant to morality or public sentiment, shall be allowed in said Memorial Hall – that the pictures and portraits upon the walls and additions etc unto shall be allowed to remain and that one day in each and every year its free use of said Memorial Hall shall be devoted to a memorial service."

In looking up the deed to Memorial Hall, I recently noted that a clerk made index notes referring to two Town Meeting record books. When I looked those up there were two town meetings in 1947 and in 1953 where the town voted to allow the free use of Memorial Hall to the schools. At a recent Selectboard meeting we approved a new fee schedule for the Hall including a $200 fee for the schools. I called the Town Manager and asked if he was aware of the Town votes allowing the free use – he was not. We will now be amending the fee schedule in the near future and the Town Manager is calling the principal today to tell him that we will not be charging the school $200 after all.

Susie Haughwout is Town Clerk for the Town of Wilmington.

I am sitting in a cold vault, in bad light, the calf-bound book open before me, staring at the page. I have been here, alone, for four hours. The metal chair scrapes on the floor as I lean back to grab another volume, twisting to reach it, feeling its weight as it leaves the shelf, dropping to reach the table. I flail the pages and move my head closer to the open page. Suddenly, there it is, at long last, the road survey that has cost me three days of reading and reasoning, headaches and sneezes, false starts and dead ends, all the necessary discomforts of research finally justified. There should be a flourish of trumpets, a flash of lights, at least the ringing of a small bell, to signal the discovery. But all is quiet. I have to stand up. I want to shout, or do a jig. But there is no one there to appreciate it but me.

Because my work demands it, I am privileged to spend part of my time in town vaults. Behind those massive doors, the heart of civilized life in that distinct political subdivision is preserved in books -- records of town meetings, land transfers, and official action involving roads and bridges. These records were well kept by generations of town clerks, whose days were spent writing and copying deeds, minutes, and other official actions into the books.

The quiet victories of research are usually unheralded.

*

Merrill Perley, State Representative from Enosburg, stuck his head in the door. He had heard there was land adjacent to his town that belonged to no town. It was a story told by many of the old-timers over the years, but nobody got around to doing anything about it. Would I check?

I looked the charters and early surveys. I put maps together, and connected the lines. Between the early surveyors' practice of using town lines as monuments for other towns, the lotting plans, and the tax maps from each of the towns, there appeared a 300-acre parcel of land never conveyed in any town charter to a set of proprietors, in a valley called the Gibou, between Montgomery, Bakersfield, and Enosburg. Tracing the titles back to the beginning led to a British land-jobber who had no claim to the land.

The charters referred to a cross on a rock, as a corner of the land that was named "Perley's Gore" in the legislative act. One cold winter's day, Secretary of State James H. Douglas led a party of officials into the Gibou, starting at the cross, which had been chipped into the rock to mark the corner.

Titles were unsound. The landowners paid no taxes on much of the land in the Gibou. The real title remained in the people of Vermont. Thence followed a special meeting of the select boards of the three towns, with Montgomery taking the land, as it was solely accessible from that town. The legislature confirmed the plan, and new deeds were issued to the landowners by the State. The hole in the map was filled.

*

During the time Gregory Sanford and I were working on the Records of the Council of Censors, I was let into the Vermont Room at the State Law Library, and the glass-fronted cabinets were unlocked so that I could see what was there. These are the oldest books owned by the State, and include the rarest of early publications.

The State had published the Journals and Addresses of the thirteen Councils that had met to recommend amendments to the Vermont Constitution, and repeal of acts deemed contrary to the constitution. The documents were so frail that even photocopying was now too risky. So it was deemed prudent to publish them. We edited the text, wrote introductions and comments on the Councils, and the volume was finally printed in time for the Statehood Bicentennial.

In the Vermont Room, in the cabinet, I found the original draft of the 1786 Address of the Council. Unindexed and unknown to any scholar working in the field of Vermont constitutional law, it had survived all those years--including the 1857 fire that destroyed the State House. We published the changes at the end of the volume, including this criticism of an act for settling disputes about real property, which the Council's first draft described as resolving conflicts "in the same manner as a Giant would settle a Combat between two school boys by felling the strongest to the Ground with his Cudgel."

The opportunity to see drafts of early documents is rare. There are wonderful discoveries yet to be made in our archives.

Paul Gillies is a partner in the law firm of Tarrant, Gillies, Merriman & Richardson.
He served as Deputy Secretary of State from 1980 to 1992.

During a job transition period in my career, I have begun researching old 16mm films at the Vermont Historical Society collections. An AV geek in my high school days, I am somehow drawn to learning more about the films, as few are cataloged; the titles/subjects are resident in the VHS librarian's memories though they deal with the sheer load of papers they deal with daily.

The society's films are a mix of films stretching from 1910's to the 1980's. The collection includes commercially produced films such as State of Vermont development films and EPA-funded environmental films, some home movies, as well as some Vermont based films, typically shot at parades and other important events of the day.

One film, in particular, has attracted interest by local societies; a 1940's film which documents the activities of the newly formed Vermont State Guard, a state-based militia charged with protecting Vermont while World War II was fought overseas. I initially spotted it in the vault by the titling on the side of the film can 'Montpelier - Silent', further investigation revealed it included scenes all around the state, telling the story of Company B of the VSG which while based in Montpelier area, participated in state-wide meetings.

While Vermont State Guard, 1941-1944 is a silent film, the color is vibrant and features title shots that provide extensive details to the location, participant names, dates and military activity.

But for all the information provided in the film, nothing indicates who the filmmaker was, or at least the cameraman.

That's when the chase (research) really began on the film. After a visit to the Vermont Militia Museum at Camp Johnson, we stopped by the new Vermont State Archives in Middlesex, finding another copy of the film complete with a one-page detailed description of the making of the film. This provided the filmmaker's name, H.L. Bailey. A Vermont government directory of the time revealed the full name, Harold L. Bailey, an entomologist with the state agriculture department.

Now, on to locate living relatives, as the directory mentioned three children - I figured if I was lucky, maybe one might still be alive. Ancestry.com found the Baileys in Bradford (VT) at the 1930 census, indicating the first-born was named Brickett. That led nowhere - as later I learned that Brickett was a nickname. Researching the girls led me some way, but a brief marriage and subsequent divorce left me without more tracks on one and the other no luck at all.

By now my head was swirling with ancestry names & dates, but no results. I reached for Google, typing various versions of Harold L. Bailey and Vermont, inserting quotation signs around various versions of the name. Luckily, I came across a 1998 obituary that detailed the life of a favorite physician in the New Hampshire seacoast area, whose father was Harold Bailey, a state entomologist in Vermont! The search closed when I phoned a surviving son in Hyde Park (VT), Harold L. Bailey II, confirming indeed the earlier Harold L. Bailey was his grandfather.

This story closes at the recent première of the digitized film, where the grandson viewed a film he never knew his grandfather worked on; thanks to research at VSARA, the 1940's government directory, Ancestry.com, then finally Google and the old favorite, the telephone.

Summary: Film research is not insular. A variety of resources can be used to enhance, or bring a fresh or different view to the film.

Fred Pond is a moving image archivist at the Vermont Historical Society. http://www.vermonthistory.org/

While researching something entirely different a few years ago, I accidentally stumbled across the story of a wild 1931 "Bonnie and Clyde" style ambush on Route 108 in Stowe. Civilians blocked the road and when a stolen car with an escaping murderer appeared, everyone began blasting away with a variety of firearms. Over the years, the case file in the sheriff's department had vanished as had all of the subsequent trial materials. There was only one source left (besides newspaper clippings) that could provide insight and details into this story.

Thus began my search for the old Windsor State Prison records. Depending on whom one asked, the files are "some place" but not open to the public, they were destroyed at some point in the past, they are on microfilm - somewhere, they are in the Middlesex Records Center, they are at UVM, or they are still with the Department of Corrections - somewhere.

Several members of the Archives staff at the Vermont State Archives in Middlesex pitched in during both face-to- face visits and many e-mail exchanges. Everyone went the extra step to help and locate the prisoner's file. Eventually, it was found and provided an amazing insight into the story of the murder, the shootout/capture, the murderer, and even into the history of the prison itself.

But...there was still one more bonus. One document in the prisoner's file, added after he had escaped and been recaptured, contained a comment by the warden that "this was the most ingenious escape ever from this prison".......... thus begins another research project...........

Brian Lindner is an historian whose research interests range from aviation to the infamous.

I have tried to research the deeds to the old town forest, but the deed that I really needed conveyed "all the property I have left" after many, many transfers, "meaning to convey all the land towards the pond, where the timber now stands" - in 1910 or thereabouts. I'm not even sure which pond - Bailey or Turtlehead, and couldn't begin to guess where the timber stood at the time.

I think it would be fun to highlight some of the other goofy references in old deeds. I remember one where a woman leased her farm, including use of her colt, stating how much the colt was worth (which seemed like it was quite a bit for the times), with the understanding that whoever was leasing the farm would take her father to his doctors' appointments. Another deed transferred a farm and all of the tools with the exception of a hand shovel. I don't know what was so special about the shovel but the seller wanted to keep it. One of the Folsom Hill residents has a deed that guarantees water from the town springs for $10/year.

Bobbi Brimblecombe is the Town Clerk for the Town of Marshfield

I have had many “eureka!” moments in my years of doing research. These are some of the most satisfying experiences in doing historical research. The past can be so unknowable, so complex, that one can reach a point where you fear you will never remotely understand what you are researching. It can even be the case that, the more research you do, the more confused you become. So it is enormously gratifying when one suddenly hits on a primary document that brilliantly illuminates a topic.

These “eureka!” moments often come at the most unexpected times. One that comes to mind occurred when I was trying to understand how Vermont’s urban folk and its hill farmers understood differently what constituted wise use of natural resources in the Gilded Age. This was just a part of the bigger picture I was trying to understand: the ideological divisions between those who lived in Vermont’s big towns and in its small towns. But I knew that contrasting uses of the land were a very important part of that division, and I groped to come to some appreciation of those differences.

This quest led me to the Reports of the Fish and Game Commission at UVM”s Special Collections, and eventually to an address delivered in 1872 to the state legislature by Middleton Goldsmith, the head of the Commission. After reading hours of Fish and Game reports, my eyes were fairly well glazed over, but when I got to page five of the address, suddenly it all made sense. Goldsmith was attempting to persuade the legislature’s farmers that they should change how they used streams in order to encourage salmon to return to Vermont. He took a metaphorical tack that he thought his audience might appreciate. “If a man should appear before you tonight,” he said,” and he should tell you that if you would provide a pathway through the confines of the State—that if you would only bridge over the impassable streams, every calf at weaning time turned loose upon the highway would go away to the distant pastures of the western wilds, and return a full grown 3-year old, fat and ready for the butcher, I take it another spring time would hardly clothe our forests ere every stream would be bridged for this bovine migration.”

I was elated (and not just because “bovine migration” is a really great name for a rock band). Nothing could have made it more clear to me that people like Goldsmith were disinterested in trying to understand why their opponents used natural resources as they did, and disinterested in concealing their contempt for them. And it was also made clear to me that the rural folk had good reason to dismiss the advice of such supposed “experts.” Because, no matter how much less schooling he may have had than Middleton Goldsmith, I can guarantee that the most remote hill farmer in Vermont knew the difference between a cow and a fish.

Paul Searls is an Assistant Professor of History at Lyndon State College

In the early 1970s when I was curator of manuscripts at the California Historical Society, I picked off the shelf a large copy book and opened the cover. The words at the top of the first page told me that I had opened the "Daily Journal of Alfred an Chastina W. Rix." Beginning on their wedding day in Peacham, Vermont, July 29, 1849, the journal continued until April 23, 1854 in San Francisco. This newly married New England couple alternated entries producing a unique diary telling how they ended up in San Francisco, more than 3,000 miles from home. Yes, "gold fever" played a role, but so did the devotion they had to each other and the politics and opinions they shared. Two generations later their granddaughter in 1949 donated the journal to CHS.

In the late 1970s I rented a car after attending archival meetings in Boston and drove to Peacham where I immediately started research on the Rixes at the town office. In 1980 I began spending summers in Peacham, and now thirty years later I live half a year in a farmhouse that my partner, Karen R. Lewis, also an archivist, and I bought in 1983. The Rix Journal brought me from San Francisco to Peacham, the reverse trip of Alfred and Chastina. Their story will be published next spring by the Arthur H. Clark Company, an imprint of the University of Oklahoma Press, under the title "New England to Gold Rush California."

Lynn Bonfield is Director Emerita of the Labor Archives and Research Center at
San Francisco State University http://www.library.sfsu.edu/about/depts/larc.php

At the Vermont Historical Society Library we help people make discoveries all the time, some are incremental and some are rather dramatic. The most dramatic experience that I remember was many years ago when we were still in the Pavilion Building in Montpelier. A man and his wife came in and asked to look at the "Strad" Gray papers, a collection from an eccentric Vermonter that we had recently processed. Strad had been married very briefly. A daughter had resulted from that union, but mother and daughter had left for California in 1919 when the daughter was very young. The man in my library was the son of that daughter. He had never known his grandfather. As he looked through the three boxes of material that Strad had accumulated over his lifetime he broke down and cried. He was connecting with his unknown grandfather in a way that he could never have imagined. He was doing more than learning the facts of his grandfather's life from a computer screen; he was holding documents that had formed his grandfather's life.

Paul Carnahan is Librarian at the Vermont Historical Society
http://www.vermonthistory.org/

As a History graduate student at UVM in the early 1980s I studied the papers of a Vermont woman, Louisa Bailey Whitney, who became a foreign missionary. After spending ten years in Micronesia in the 1870s, she returned to Vermont, and much later she wrote a novel about a Vermont woman in Atlanta during the Civil War, called Goldie's Inheritance. This fictional character was part of a circle of Union sympathizers who secretly aided northern prisoners of war, risking severe punishment from the authorities. It was an odd little book and it didn't sell very well.

Several years after finishing my master's degree, I received a phone call from History professor Tom Dyer at the University of Georgia. Professor Dyer had found half of a diary kept by a woman in Atlanta during the Civil War, and had discovered that she was from Vermont. He was very excited because it was one of very few surviving first-hand accounts of Union sympathizers in Atlanta—but the story was incomplete. I don't recall exactly how he found me, but when he described the diary I immediately realized that it paralleled Goldie's Inheritance. The novel, it turned out, was a barely fictionalized retelling of the story of Cyrena Bailey Stone, Louisa's older sister, who had spent the war in Atlanta. Although half of the diary had gone missing, Professor Dyer was confident that he could largely corroborate the events that played out in the novel. In 1999 he published his work as Secret Yankees: The Union Circle in Confederate Atlanta (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

Jeffrey Marshall is the Director of Research Collections at the Bailey/Howe Library at
the University of Vermont http://library.uvm.edu/sc/

Until 2010, when I published my research, the story of a black farming community in Hinesburg has been hidden for 215 years. But traces of their lives remained both on the landscape and in the town vault. As I wrote in my book, "Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls such artifacts history-in-waiting, history in suspended animation, waiting to tell their story." To me, the vault holding the records of early Hinesburgh was like a proverbial underground chamber full of rough-cut gold, diamonds, and rubies, waiting to be discovered. I camped out in the vault to study everything I could find, including census and court records, land transaction books, business directories, store account books, church records, accounts of school trustees, birth, death, marriage and cemetery records, town meeting reports … the list goes on and on.

The most exciting finds were discovering items that hadn't been touched by human hands for a hundred or more years. I came across an ancient map rolled up on a top shelf that had never been studied, much less published, within living memory. I also unearthed some yellowed grand lists that were rolled in animal skins and tied with antiquated ribbons. To open such items was more exciting than unwrapping birthday presents – they contained incredible gems about the lives of farmers on Lincoln Hill, which sometimes took my breath away and helped me put their stories back together.

One of the most exciting things to contemplate is that there are many more such stories hidden in vaults all over Vermont (and beyond) waiting to be discovered. They are waiting for a researcher to bring them to life.

Elise A. Guyette it the author of "Discovering Black Vermont: African American
Farmers in Hinesburgh, 1790-1890" (Dartmouth, VT: University Press of New England, 2010).

When it comes to historical research, nothing beats finding the perfect document to help us understand the past. But the perfect image comes close.

Paul Carnahan, librarian at the Vermont Historical Society, handed me just such an image one day while I was researching Calvin Coolidge. Specifically, I was looking for material about the July 1924 death of Coolidge's 16-year old son, Calvin Jr., and its effect on the president.

Coolidge was just completing his first year in office. He had succeeded to the presidency after the death of Warren G. Harding and would win election in his own right several months after his son's death, but to friends, he seemed to have become detached. One scholar has even ascribed the president's famously distant persona, now an archetype of Yankee dourness, to a case of depression Coolidge purportedly suffered after Calvin Jr. died. As Coolidge explained in his autobiography, "When he went, the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him."

Most accounts of the president's reactions to his son's death have him swallowing his emotions like a good Yankee. But newspaperman John Lambert, who was with Coolidge in his office shortly after young Calvin died, recorded another scene. The president turned his chair to look out the window. "His eyes were moist," Lambert wrote. "Tear filled them. They ran down his cheeks. He was not the president of the United States. He was the father, overcome by grief and love for his boy. He wept unafraid, unashamed."

The photograph that Paul Carnahan unearthed made me understand, in a way no document could have, just how severely the president felt his son's loss. The photo was pasted into a Coolidge family album that had been donated to the Vermont Historical Society by Coolidge's other son, John. The image, which was taken days before Calvin Jr.'s death, shows the boy smiling. To his right is his mother, Grace, smiling beneath the brim of an ornate hat. To his left, almost unrecognizable, is his father, the president, grinning broadly. It is as if the three were sharing a joke the moment the photographer tripped the shutter.

The joy captured on the president's face in that moment told me all I can know of the heartbreak he would suffer in the days and years ahead.

Mark Bushnell is a historian whose column, "Life in the Past Lane,
is a feature in Vermont Sunday Magazine.

One winter day at the Chimney Point State Historic Site in Addison a few years ago I was looking once again at the Web site for Library Archives Canada ( http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/) for information about the early French history of Chimney Point. The Vermont Division for Historic Preservation had received an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant with Vermont Public Television and the Bixby Memorial Free Library in Vergennes for a big project to study the time period from around the arrival of Samuel de Champlain into the lake up to the start of the American Revolution. I kept playing with various words and phrases in the advanced search section of the archives, and more and more exciting documents came up. Perhaps they had put more resources on their web site since I'd last looked, or I was doing better at finding the words. Delivered right into my lap was a 1731 map of Chimney Point and the French fort built that year; it was different than the one we had been familiar with. Wow, it looked like my desk with the image on my computer was right where the southwest bastion of the fort would have been.

Then there was the agreement with the keeper of the King's store to oversee construction of the fort, as well as a scan of the document spelling out how supplies and materials would be sent from the King's Store in Montreal for the new fort.

And then it got even better—there was the 1731 list of supplies and materials brought from the King's Store—8 pages. Wow again. One of the items was for WINDOW GLASS. That might have been the first window glass in what would become Vermont. Hmmm, hadn't I seen tiny thin fragments of window glass in our own collections, gathered in the Chimney Point cellar in the late 1980s when our site's c.1785 tavern was being restored? Could that glass be from 1731? I showed photos of the glass fragments to an archeologist who was an expert on this area and that time period. Yes, it could be glass from that time. Andre Senecal, UVM Professor emeritus, told me that the French shipped glass to Quebec in barrels of molasses to prevent breakage. Sure enough, a barrel of molasses was on the list. And there were other items on the inventory for 1731, as well as 1732 and 1733 that shed light on artifacts found on the site or nearby.

The good thing about this story is that it isn't finished yet. Archeologists from the University of Vermont Consulting Archeology Program will be using this archives as they research this history even further, in connection with their archeological work relating to the construction of the new Lake Champlain Bridge. Who knows what else will turn up and help us with our understanding of this special place?!

Elsa Gilbertson is a Regional Historic Site Administrator
for the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation

Quite a few years ago I went to the State Archives to inquire about historic lynx records in Vermont. I met Gregory Sanford and he graciously helped me look up an old record from the late 1700's. After some discussion, Greg said to me, "I think I may have something you would be interested in" and proceeded to go down some creaky stairs to the basement. He brought back up a large, leather-bound book filled with wolf bounty records from the late 1700's. Back then, there was a $20.00 bounty on wolves. Once killed, the head of the dead wolf had to be turned into the county clerk and an invoice was sent to the state treasurer, signed, and archived. The $20.00 was returned to the person who shot the wolf--a significant sum of money in those days.

As I went through the records, I was quite taken aback to hold receipts that had been signed by Ira Allen and Thomas Chittenden. Because the information was so valuable, I began the rather long tedious process of entering the individual receipts into a data base that included: name of the person who shot the wolf, town of kill, date of kill, and number of wolves taken. Fortuitously, a professor from Middlebury College was interested in having her students participate in a special project and several members of the class then began to work at the archives entering the receipt information into a database. The results were a series of three historic maps spanning a 15 year period in the late 1700's that essentially documented both the demise of a native Vermont predator and the settlement patterns of early Vermont. I have since incorporated the maps into my public presentations and they provide invaluable information about a species that was essentially extirpated from the state not 50 years later.

Kim Royar is a Wildlife Biologist with the Vermont Dept. of Fish and Wildlife

A few years ago, I was looking through some of the George Aiken Papers here at UVM. Aiken served on the Senate Agriculture Committee for a very long time and I was looking into some of his work on dairy issues. As you might expect, most of the material had to deal with the price of milk, but what caught my eye were a number of thick folders from 1948-1950 on the topic of oleomargarine. I was not familiar with “oleo” and certainly not familiar with the various pieces of oleomargarine legislation that had been passed in Congress and at the state level. But after discovering a similar batch of material in the Elbert Brigham Papers, and learning that the state of Vermont once had a piece of legislation that required all oleomargarine sold in Vermont to be colored pink, I became intrigued. I ended up writing a master's thesis about the 1886 Oleomargarine debates in Congress, which resulted in the first federal act taxing and regulating margarine. It wasn’t until 1950 that the act was repealed. In fact, the measures had actually been strengthened a couple of times over the ensuing years, making the sale of colored margarine prohibitively expensive. Many people still have memories of their parents or grandparents mixing the yellow color into the margarine by hand after the product was purchased at the store. Wells, Richardson, and Co. of Burlington manufactured a special yellow dye, annato, to color your margarine to make it look like butter.

It is this type of experience that I love so much about working with Archives. It’s the odd little events that happened in history that once you dig a little deeper into them end up having a far greater meaning and usually some contemporary resonance. To many, the history of oleomargarine legislation might not pass that test. However, the uproar that began shortly after the invention of oleomargarine in France in the late 19th century was due to some major concerns about issues such as the future of dairy farming, fraud in the sale and marketing of food, and the role of government in regulating the competing economic interests of different industries and different regions of the country. Many of the same questions and arguments that arose in these 1886 debates are now being echoed in the controversy about Log Cabin Natural Syrup. There are so many interesting stories waiting to be discovered in archives, stories that are of interest in and of themselves but that can also shed some light on how we got to where we are and where we might go next.

Chris Burns is Curator of Manuscripts in the Special Collections Department
of the Bailey-Howe Library at the University of Vermont

In doing research on women aviators in Vermont, I was becoming frustrated with the lack of information and leads. Not to be forgotten is the wealth of information in the state archives. I mentioned to Greg Sanford what I was searching for, and in a matter of minutes, he found a speech in one of the state records that contained Amelia Earhart's speech in the Vermont State House. Using information and dates from this record, was a key to my entire article!

Looking for information on another article I was writing, Greg Sanford recommended I check out the older books of Vermont Statutes at the Special Collections library at UVM. Not only did I find statutes regarding gypsies' legal rights and restrictions, but I accidently found a section on tintype photographers, which will be included in my next book on tintypes (W.W. Norton 2012). It's unlikely, I would have ever thought of this avenue on my own.

Nakki Goranin is the author of “American Photobooth” (W.W. Norton, 2008)

The greatest historical discoveries often turn up in unlikely places! In my research on journalist Clarina Howard Nichols, who promoted woman’s rights and anti-slavery in Brattleboro, I followed her pathway out to Kansas in the mid-1850s. As a young woman she had suffered through a shameful divorce before remarrying, but no one—neither her colleagues in the woman’s rights movement nor subsequent biographers—had discovered the real cause of her marital difficulties. Nichols successfully hid her past to establish her respectability as a woman and writer. While scrutinizing newspapers at the Kansas State Historical Society, I happened upon an anonymous account defending the lobbying efforts of “Mrs. Nichols,” who had appeared daily at the territorial legislature. In her justification, “Annie,” the author, told about the sufferings Mrs. Nichols had endured with her first husband. Eureka! There was the story, and not only that, as I continued to read the account, I realized that “Annie” was none other than Clarina Nichols. One piece of her secret past was finally put into place.

Marilyn Blackwell is the author of “Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols and
the Politics of Motherhood” (2010)