WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

The first community church in America, the Vermont preface likes to recall, was built a century and a quarter ago in a small Vermont village — a fact too often lost on those who prize the State only as the very emblem of rugged individualism. Cooperation, it argues, is a valid Vermont tradition too; the Green Mountain Boys themselves attest it. A cooperative book on Vermont by Vermonters therefore offends propriety no more than a cooperative creamery or an old-time house-raising, and if New England writers could be induced to work together at all, they might bring it off with less than the usual anguish.

Dana Doten, the project’s State Director, signed that preface and set out plainly what the volume aims at and how it was put together. Its newness, he wrote, lies chiefly in its tours: some twenty-five hundred miles of road, paralleling and curling around the countless ridges of the Green Mountains, are described in a way meant not merely to direct the traveler but to tempt him. The statistical staunchness of the indispensable old blue-book — with its junctions at helpful red barns and its essential watering-troughs — was kept wherever it served, but the writers tried also to interweave the living color of the country with its mileages.

Doten was candid about Vermont’s place in the nation. No Vermonter, he allowed, would deny that the State has carried its particularism nearly to the verge of intransigence; only the motives are in dispute. He traced the pivotal decade of 1850 to 1860, when the population curve for a hundred hill towns turned downward and Vermont began for three generations to export its most promising young people to cities beyond its borders. The Guide, he added, owed an especially intimate debt to Dorothy Canfield Fisher of Arlington, whose essay “Vermonters” opens the book, and was prepared under the editorial supervision of Joseph Gaer, chief field supervisor of the New England Guides.

The volume falls into three parts. Part I, “Vermont: The General Background,” gathers a dozen essays — beginning with Mrs. Fisher’s “Vermonters” and continuing through the natural setting, flora and fauna, history, agriculture, industry, education, recreation, architecture, and literature. Part II, “Main Street and Village Green,” describes the cities and towns from Barre and Bennington to Burlington, Montpelier, Rutland, and Woodstock. Part III, “High Roads and Low Roads,” offers a mile-by-mile account of the State’s highways in seven numbered tours and their many branches, and the book closes with a chronology, bibliography, and index. Sponsored by the Vermont State Planning Board, it appeared in 1937 from Houghton Mifflin.