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| Statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture dome of the Vermont State House, Montpelier, Vermont carved by Dwight Dwinell as a copy of a wooden original by Larkin Goldsmith Mead photograph ©Kristin Lord 2014 |
Virtually since the
beginning of English settlement in the state of Vermont, Quakers have been part
of the area's religious and social fabric. In the early part of the nineteenth
century, Ferrisburgh Quarterly Meeting in western Vermont formed an active and
healthy contingent in New York Yearly Meeting. During this period the word “Quaker”
became part of street names not only in Addison County, where the town of
Ferrisburgh is located, but as far east as Quaker Road in East Montpelier in
the middle of the state.
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| Not that far from Quaker Road: Vermont State House, Montpelier, Vermont designed by Thomas Silloway, 1858 photograph ©Kristin Lord 2014 |
Ferrisburgh Quarter
was affected by the same theological divisions as the rest of New York Yearly
Meeting in the nineteenth century. These were painful to all involved. More
difficult still is the realization that those Vermont Friends who were active
Abolitionists in the period leading up to the Civil War were not supported by
either their Monthly or Yearly Meetings. This is despite the fact that slavery
was forbidden in the state from the time of Vermont's first constitution in
1777. Rowland T. Robinson and Rachel Gilpin Robinson, the Quaker couple known
for their work on the underground railroad, were effectively forced out of
their Meeting in 1845. (See Elizabeth
H. Moger, “Quakers as Abolitionists: the Robinsons of Rokeby and Charles
Marriott,” Quaker History 92.2, 2003,
52-59.) This inconsistency in Quaker belief and practice will, unfortunately, not
be unfamiliar to readers of Donna McDaniel’s and Vanessa Julye’s Fit
for Freedom, not for Friendship.)
Nevertheless, the Robinsons persevered on their work against slavery and helped
send a number of women, men, and children on their way to safety in Canada from
slavery in other US states. The Robinsons’ Ferrisburgh home, Rokeby, has been meticulously restored and is the
most significant example of Quaker history in Vermont as well as a treasure of
the Abolitionist movement.
During the second
two-thirds of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth centuries, the
number of Vermont Quakers declined precipitously. Friends increasingly moved to
states further west, while those remaining often married neighbors who were not
Quakers. By the time Quakers stopped “disowning” members for marrying people of
other faiths —not to mention such
“offenses”
as owning musical
instruments— the damage was done. Eventually, only two historic Friends Meeting
Houses, both owned by New York Yearly Meeting, remained. They were from the
Gurneyite tradition of Friends and had long since adopted a pastoral manner of
worship. One of these two Meetings, Monkton Ridge, amalgamated with the local
Methodist church several generations ago and was officially laid down in
1996. A Methodist minister serves the congregation, although Friends
still own the building.
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| Friends Meeting House, South Starksboro, Vermont photograph ©Kristin Lord 2007 |
The other historic
Meeting, South Starksboro, underwent a different trajectory. Perhaps the
best-known product of this Meeting is Joseph C. Greene, a physician from
Buffalo, New York, who grew up in South Starksboro and who had the
Lord's Prayer inscribed on a large rock in Bristol one town over as a
warning to ox cart drivers who were cursing the muddy roads. (Modern motorists,
who spent several years waiting for the replacement of the nearby bridge after
severe flooding, will comment that neither the circumstances nor the language
has changed much.) The last member of the original community, Elizabeth
Birdsall Young, died in the Middlebury area in 1976. No doubt, as she watched
the congregation dwindle around her, she began to wonder what would become of
Vermont Quakerism. But change was afoot, and toward the end of her life,
Elizabeth Birdsall Young was able to get a glimpse of it. (Note: I am perhaps
the youngest Friend to have been introduced to Elizabeth Birdsall Young. It was
she who confirmed that Joseph C. Greene had come from her Meeting.)
The change came from
unprogrammed Friends. By the 1950’s there were small Meetings in Burlington,
Vermont and Hanover, New Hampshire, one of the towns on the eastern side of the
Connecticut River that was added to the latter state as a condition of Vermont
becoming the fourteenth US state in 1791. As befits its location, a reasonable
percentage of the participants in Hanover hail from Vermont. These Meetings,
affiliated with New England Yearly Meeting, became the Northwest Quarterly
Meeting in 1958. (This latter date should be readily accessible in the
Yearly Meeting archives, although I do not have the source at hand.)
These unprogrammed Meetings
were filled with some Friends who had grown up in Vermont or New Hampshire and
had returned home after studying or living elsewhere, where they had
encountered Quakerism. Susan
Webb (née Howard) who had grown up in Burlington and with her husband,
Kenneth Webb, founded the Farm and Wilderness Camps on Quaker principles in
1939, was an example of this post-war contingent. Thomas Day Seymour
Bassett, another Burlington native, was an archivist and authority on Vermont
history; he came to Friends as a conscientious objector during World War II. (See
Samuel B. Hand’s obituary
for Friend Tom in Vermont History,
winter/spring 2001, 141-2.) Most of the “new” Quaker contingent, however, were
among the plethora of newcomers who were attracted to the natural beauty of the
Green Mountain State and who found the area increasingly accessible to the
cities in the Northeast, especially once the Interstates were completed. This
larger body of newcomers, regardless of background or political or religious
tradition, had a chance to start over and, in the parlance of a later
generation, to “reinvent themselves.” The earlier arrivals found a lower cost
of housing, assuming that they were selling an existing residence and were not
entirely dependent on the commensurately lower salaries; that was, of course, a
big assumption. They found the local inhabitants welcoming...
up to a point. The
white clapboard houses snow-girt at Christmas were not so beckoning when most
people in the neighborhood had a choice of relatives three generations deep
with whom to spend the holidays. More prosperous suburban communities with less
ice on the roads began to look attractive to some of the new arrivals.
The traditional views
of many Vermonters, initially endearing to outsiders, became annoying at town
meeting and election time. Even through the 1970's most of the so-called “real”
Vermonters voted Republican —unless they lived in Burlington or suburban
Chittenden County, both of which were already suspect. Susan Webb, representing
a rural district in southwestern Vermont in the 1970’s, served as a moderate
Republican. (See the obituary of Susan Webb linked above.) The newcomers, on
the other hand, were politically varied, and a reasonable number were what a
later governor and Presidential candidate, Howard Dean (himself a
native of the New York City area), called “the
Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” Only in the last generation or so
has Vermont become the bluest of blue states and the home of “the People's
Republic of Burlington” of Doonesbury fame, where the independent Socialist
politician Bernie Sanders made his political breakthrough. (For those who might
wonder, I come from an “old” Vermont family, but one that is politically and
spiritually diverse; one of my mother’s favorite memories was running across
Bernie Sanders on Church Street in Burlington shortly after he was first
elected to Congress.)
Yet many of the new
arrivals stayed. The Quaker community blossomed. Once again, many Friends were
from out of state (disproportionately convinced Friends) or newcomers seeking a
fresh faith community in their new home, although others were long-time
inhabitants. Monthly Meetings were established in Putney, Bennington,
Plainfield, Middlebury, Wilderness (near the Farm and Wilderness Camps), and
Barton in Vermont and in the western New Hampshire community of Keene. A few
years after Elizabeth Birdsall Young passed away, the ownership of her old
Meeting House, which had been opened once or twice during the summer and on
Christmas Day, was turned over to New England Yearly Meeting. There were enough
Friends between Burlington and Middlebury to keep it viable year round. The
property was renovated in 1985, and before too long South Starksboro once again
had a Monthly Meeting. This time, however, it was an unprogrammed Meeting
in New England Yearly Meeting.
There are now several
hundred Friends in Vermont, of a wide range of interests and from many walks of
life. Quakers have made particular contributions to education, social services,
small and medium-sized businesses, and the arts. Regrettably, Quakers have not
added appreciably to the ethnic diversity of the state, but neither have most
other people. This problem, along with the increasingly precarious social and
economic footing of many Americans, is among the principal moral issues
affecting Vermonters both inside and outside our Religious Society.
If I, as an expat
Vermonter who votes by absentee ballot, might comment on some of the challenges
facing Friends there, I might look at two other areas: outreach and the peace
testimony. Neither is is unique to Vermont, but both have factors germane to
it. Quaker Meetings have done well in Vermont since the 1960's thanks to
population growth and increasing political and religious diversity —not to
mention the foresight of Friends who established a Kendal retirement community in nearby
Hanover, New Hampshire— but further growth may require more effort. The
unprogrammed Quaker reluctance to “proselytize” has left Friends unable to
capitalize effectively on the growth of secularism and the increase in the
number of people seeking spiritual alternatives. This is a real shame in
Vermont, which is now ostensibly the state in the country with the
highest percentage of people without religious affiliation. I hope that
Friends in the Northwest Quarter will be able to take advantage of the new
outreach initiatives of Friends General Conference.
In terms of the peace
testimony, many Americans believe that we Vermonters have it lucky. Classmates,
colleagues, and “capital and small f” friends from out of state post quotations
from Vermont politicians on their Facebook pages and are overtly envious that I
am privileged to vote for them. By and large, they are right, but we as Friends
have to reckon with the fact that our Congressional delegation and our governor
have all supported posting a squadron of F-35
fighter jets in the Burlington area. Burlington Friends Meeting
is one of a number of organizations and individuals attempting to stop this
plan.
There is also the
matter of military recruitment. Because of its solid high school completion
rates and academic standards, Vermont is a prime target of recruiters. The high
cost of in-state college and university tuition does not help matters. Add to
that a tradition of military service that in some cases goes back generations,
as is true in other parts of the U.S. Vermont had one of the highest number of
Union fatalities per capita in the Civil War (see especially the information
from civilwar.org
and the
Vermont Historical Society). Although the percentage of Vermonters who died
in Vietnam was lower than many states, it was still significant. It had the
highest per capita casualty rate in the Iraq conflict, which makes it at
outlier among relatively prosperous states. (See the study by Charles Maynard in
Population
Health Metrics, January 6, 2009). Thus, for cultural reasons and
several other factors, there is sometimes pressure on young people to enlist.
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| door of state office building, Montpelier, Vermont, 1949 across the street from the State House building designed by William Freeman of Burlington (VT) architectural firm Freeman, French, and Freeman photograph ©Kristin Lord 2014 |
Finally, Vermont’s
rural hunting culture, which is often different from political affiliation, makes gun control a
difficult sell, although there are some signs of progress. For instance,
Governor Peter Shumlin, a liberal Democrat, posed on his FaceBook page last
fall with the carcass of a deer he had
shot and wished all of his supporters a safe and happy hunting season. (As a
vegetarian, I admit that I was not amused.) Shumlin’s
views are complex, as are those of Senators Patrick
Leahy and Bernie
Sanders and Representative Peter
Welch.
As Friends, we have a
distinctive peace testimony and social witness. How can we best bear witness to
Vermont's motto, “Freedom and Unity?”
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| close-up of door of state office building, Montpelier, Vermont, 1949 photograph ©Kristin Lord 2014 |
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