In the small towns and villages of Vermont, cracked asphalt roads cut by farmhouses more than a hundred years old, their white siding and black shingles unchanged, and the barns behind them—many red, some turquoise, some blue. Beyond the barns, hay fields swell and dip before meeting a forested horizon. Out on pastures, dairy cows pull at the grass until their noses brush against the earth come autumn.
There is a humming nostalgia written in these rolling hills: a nostalgia for community, for a simpler and more earth-bound past. In the late 60s and early 70s, young people came to the state in droves, trundling up narrow valley roads in secondhand trucks and settling in forgotten farmhouses. This back-to-the-land movement grew out of a growing discontentment with postindustrial life—the smog of the city, the disconnect with food at the dinner table. Vermont, for them, symbolized a pastoral ideal. It was an antidote to the woes of capitalism.
But these ribbons of farmland are anything but a static past. Over the past four centuries, the threads of trade and conflict have tugged at this landscape, making and remaking these hills into an illusion of pastoral escape—an illusion entwined in, and not at remove from urban life.
For millennia, these forests have rarely been left undisturbed. This is the heartland of the Western Abenaki people. Under towering American beeches and red maples, they beat back brush and carved silent hunting paths across the forest floor. Hillside pockets were burned to make clearings for settlement, or to lure deer to new tree lines. Beginning in 1000 A.D., squash, corn, and beans were planted in fields rotated every season. By the time of European invasion, extensive networks of trails had already been long established.
But it wasn’t until the mass migration of White settlers in the late 18th century that the forest was almost altogether excavated to form the sweeping vistas that we are more familiar with today. In the decade following Vermont’s admission to the Union in 1791, nearly 70,000 settlers flocked to the region and doubled the state’s population. Much of the land, granted to land speculators in colonial agreements, was carved up into property lots. The soils here are rocky, if anything else, but the settlers had been sold an idea of agricultural paradise by the landowners, who were eager to seek return on these newly established parcels. Some settlers moved into clearings left by Western Abenaki families after European invasion displaced them to the North. Others set to clearing the forest for farmland.