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American Agriculturist 
FARM—DAIRY—MARKET—GARDEN—HOME 
“Agriculture is the Most Healthful, Most Useful and Most Noble Employment of Man ”—Washington 
Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Established 1842 
Volume 111 For the Week Ending February 24, 1923 Number 8 
Yankees, Cows and Maple Sugar 
“Up Where the Mountains Meet the Sky, In Little Old Vermont” 
I AST week I went to Burlington, Ver¬ 
mont, to attend the annual meeting 
• of the State Dairymen’s Association. 
—J It was a flying trip—two nights on 
the train and one day at the Convention. 
The Vermont Dairymen’s Association may 
represent a little State, but it is nevertheless, 
a somewhat note-worthy institution. The 
Association is 53 years old and at the meet¬ 
ing there was present a man who was one of 
the charter members and who has the unique 
record of having missed only one annual 
meeting in all those years. I do not think 
that he pleads guilty of 
being a speech maker- 
being a very modest soul 
—but at the banquet the 
toast-master insisted that 
he stand up in his place 
while a great round of ap¬ 
plause swept the dining 
room. It proves that in 
our hearts we all greatly 
honor that sort of enthu¬ 
siastic loyalty. 
Two that go Together 
It happens in Vermont 
that almost every farmer 
is a maple sugar maker as 
well as a dairyman—so it 
is emminently natural and 
fitting that the Dairy¬ 
men's Association and the 
Maple Sugar-makers’ As¬ 
sociation should unite in 
a joint convention. This 
meeting is always held at 
Burlington, thus enabling 
the farmers to look over their State College 
of Agriculture which is a part of the Uni¬ 
versity of Vermont. 
Burlington is the metropolis of the State 
and styles itself the “Queen City.” I have 
seen it in summer—a city beautiful and won¬ 
derful for situation, seated on the hillside 
and lobking out over the gleaming island- 
studded waters of Lake Champlain with the 
wooded folds of the Adirondacks on the hori¬ 
zon. 
I remember a Farm Institute trip that I 
made in the State some years ago—two 
weeks in August, two meetings each day—in 
two different localities, and a swift rush be¬ 
tween, covering, I think, every county of the 
State in this very hurried fashion. ^ On sev¬ 
eral other occasions I have made brief visits 
to the State so that I have come to feel a cer¬ 
tain familiarity with the Green Mountain 
country. 
Vermont has a long and honorable history 
with her full share of the incidents which 
are the foundation of romance. Over on the 
eastern slope and perhaps half way up the 
State, I remember stopping to read a marker 
beside the road—a tablet recalling a fah-ofl' 
event that has in it all the elements of pathos 
and tragedy and heroism. It marks the spot 
which was'the birth-place of the first white 
child born in Vermont. That child was born 
to a Massachusetts mother who was being 
By JARED VAN WAGENEN, JR. 
carried captive by the Indians down the long 
wilderness trail to Canada. Such grim hap¬ 
penings as this seemed only a part of daily 
life, at least of daily risks, to those heroic 
souls who laid the foundations of our rich 
and luxurious civilization. 
Where the Real Yankee still Stiinrives 
Much has been written, but perhaps the 
full story can never be told—the story of 
the moral splendor of Puritanism, for those 
bygone men who made New England fear 
God and nothing else. And in Vermont, the 
Puritan has made his last stand. In the in¬ 
terior towns of the State, more especially 
perhaps on the eastern side of the Green 
Mountains’ range which forms the “back¬ 
bone,” survives as nowhere else, the Yankee, 
uncontaminated and undefiled. Perhaps the 
world may yet want to come back here to get 
seed of the men of that dauntless race. 
In this region half way up the State and 
a little drive back from the Connecticut 
River, is a little village. West Stratford, un¬ 
less my memory is wrong — and on a rise of 
ground in the fork of the road, stands one of 
those wonderful churches that the Puritan 
built. The edifice is astonishingly large — 
they told me there were 2,000 tiny panes of 
glass in its many windows. And within the 
memory of living men, the preacher looked 
out over a great audience of farmers and 
their folks filling its main floor and gallery. 
That was in the Golden age of the Church — 
an age that flowered in New England as 
nowhere else. 
And behind the church, under white slabs 
of Vermont marble “The rude forefathers of 
the hamlet sleep.” 
I love to walk in old grave yards in quiet 
country places. The records there are brief, 
but wonderfully authentic and sometimes I 
can reconstruct history and sometimes I can 
weave romances concerning men and women 
whose hearts have been at peace and whose 
bodies have been dust for these hundred 
years. So after the session was finished, I 
went out in the August afternoon to this 
God’s Acre, where every carved surname 
was pure English, while the given names 
were so frequently names In which the Puri¬ 
tan loved to baptise his children. Very sud¬ 
denly, for no one had told me it was there, 
I came on the tomb of Justice Morrill, and 
then I remembered Vermont’s great Senator, 
the Grand Old Man who served his State for 
more than fifty years at 
Washington, and then re¬ 
turned at last to lay him 
down among the hills 
where he was born. We 
farm people may well 
honor him, because by 
common consent he is the 
father of our nation-wide 
system of agriculture col¬ 
leges. I 
The sun shines nowhere else 
so bright 
As up in old Vermont. 
The snow lies nowhere else so 
white 
As up in old Vermont. 
So when the native comes to 
die, 
He loves to go back there and 
lie 
Up where the mountains meet 
the sky— 
In little old Vermont! 
It is a piece of great 
good fortune to be born 
wifh a Puritan consci¬ 
ence. It was this pitiless New England 
“Thou shalt” that made Vermont send to 
the Civil War more soldiers in proportion to 
her population than any other State. More 
than one half of all her men of military age 
were volunteered (not drafted) with the 
service. 
It was this same New England ethical 
idealism—a spiritual inheritance from Ply¬ 
mouth R,ock—which with the exception of a 
few large towns, has made Vermont “dry” 
since the mind of man runneth not to the 
contrary. 
I suspect that it is this same stern uncom¬ 
promising mentor that still impells Vermont 
men to go to the “town-meeting” and vote by 
word of mouth, aye or nay, on all town meas¬ 
ures, and that permits every township in the 
State to send one Representative to Mont¬ 
pelier, the State Capital, and only one. Thus 
Burlington with 30,000 population, sends one 
representative and Glastonbury with thir¬ 
teen voters sends just as many. 
The Settlers of Northern New York 
It was Vermont that a century ago felt she 
was already over-crowded and her swarming 
children “went West” around the northern 
fringes of the Adirondacks and settled the 
“North Country” of New York. Hence the 
North Country, true to ancestral habit al- 
{Continued on page 162) 
The days are about numbered to the time when the sugar bush will come to life 
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