 The Best of Vermont by Douglas Wissing
THE BEST VISTAS “The gods of the valley are not the gods of the hills,” Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen proclaimed, and driving around Vermont it’s obvious that both mountain and valley have their divine beauty. While most any Vermont route in the fall will yield more than a modicum of heavenly scenery, a few stretches are especially blessed. Route 100 snakes up the center of Vermont, from the southern ski town of Wilmington all the way north through Stowe to the Canadian border at Newport. “Route 100 is your quintessential Vermont,” long-time resident Jon Julian says. “You got your cows, you got your mountains, you got your little farms. It’s bucolic.” Route 17 starts at Chimney Point on Lake Champlain and rises through the dramatic notch of the 2,365-foot Appalachian Gap, with magnificent views west to the Adirondacks. The route then twists and turns east through the Green Mountains, over gorges and past hulking 4,000-foot peaks to the round-barn town of Waitsfield. By the way, America’s longest covered bridge (each Vermont town thinks its beloved covered bridge is the best) is a 460-foot-long Cornish-Windsor Bridge that has spanned the Connecticut River at Windsor since 1866. CLASSIC TOWN COMMONS
Grafton is another picture-postcard village located just off Route 35, the old stagecoach route between Boston and Montreal. Since it began in 1801, the Old Tavern Inn has sheltered Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Theodore Roosevelt. Grafton’s archetypical New England charm includes an artisanal cheese factory, blacksmith shop, and a sheep operation. GREEN MOUNTAIN MUSEUMS The Shelburne Museum houses the grandmother of all American folk-art collections, gathered by heiress Electra Havermeyer Webb in the first half of the 20th century. In the 39 historic buildings and galleries scattered over the formally landscaped 42 acres is an amazing array of cigar store Indians, scrimshaw, folk paintings, carvings and furniture, carousel animals, weathervanes, bird decoys, rugs, coverlets, hatboxes, and vintage advertising signs. The museum’s collection of antique buildings includes a 1783 stagecoach inn, an 1840 schoolhouse, and an 1800 blacksmith’s shop. The National Historical Landmark steamship, the 220-foot Ticonderoga, sits prim on a shorn lawn.
Primitivist painter Grandma Moses helped imprint Vermont in the nation’s mind. Her naïf paintings can be seen at the Bennington Museum, which also houses fine collections of Revolutionary War artifacts and Bennington Pottery. Beginning at the age of 67 and until her death at 101, Grandma Moses depicted a vanishing world of harvest picnics, sugarings (the process of making maple syrup and sugar), and farmhouse Christmases, which became part of American popular culture through her greeting cards, calendars, and magazine illustrations. VERMONT PROVENDER
Apples certainly rank as the classic Vermont fruit, perhaps best celebrated with a glass of fresh-pressed cider. According to Yankee magazine, New England’s best apple cider is made at Cold Hollow Cider Mill in Stowe. Cold Hollow presses cider daily in their sprawling old barn and also sells Vermont specialties such as pickled fiddlehead ferns, maple-sugar candy, and cider relishes. Vermont is sometimes accused of being a bit scruffy, ramshackle even, but never cheesy—which is odd because it produces some of America’s best farmstead cheeses. In Putney, Major Farm’s champion Vermont Shepherd sheep cheese is a rustic Gouda-shaped round that looks a tad like the granite boulders that abound in the state, with a firm texture and a complex nutty flavor. The Cabot Annex Store in Waterbury near Stowe features the products of Cabot Creamery, a farmer-owned cheese cooperative since 1919. Renowned for its flavorful cheddar, particularly the premier, two-year-aged Private Stock Cheddar, Cabot won the “World’s Best Cheddar” award at the 22nd Biennial World Cheese Championship.
SIT A SPELL Enough driving and noshing: There comes a time to sit down and eat politely. A favorite place to do so is the rambling Dog Team Tavern near Middlebury, with its Vermont fare, such as baked ham, country-fried chicken, and maple-oatmeal pie. Their sticky buns and Spinning Relish Wheel (imagine a windmill with buckets of veggies) are patron favorites. The Dog Team began in the 1920s as a tearoom run by missionary Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, who displayed his Far North artifacts from his work in Labrador and Newfoundland. The New England Culinary Institute operates the wildly popular NECI Commons on trendy Church St. in Burlington, which includes a bakery, bar, cafe, and upscale restaurant. The Commons is a founding member of the Vermont Fresh Network that partners the state’s growers with restaurants, so fall offerings include robust, late-harvest tomatoes, a cornucopia of squashes and pumpkins, and dishes such as locally gathered Woodland Mushroom Risotto. Acclaimed by the New York Times, the modest Farmers Diner in Barre is also part of the farm-to-table revolution that has enlivened the Vermont dining scene. Diner owner Tod Murphy trumpets, “Think locally, act neighborly,” and hopes to create a national chain of farm-cafe cooperatives. His goal is to have 80 percent of the cafes’ food grown within an hour’s drive. It has made his cheeseburger an act of regional will. The meat comes from the nearby Montana Yankee Farm and is butchered locally at a packinghouse Murphy had to buy to keep open. The bun is from a Northfield bakery, the cheese from Cabot, and the bacon from a Vermont smokehouse. The lettuce and tomatoes are naturally local. How did a nice Jewish boy from Indianapolis become the Barbeque King of Vermont? Jon Julian was one of thousands of hippies who made their way to the comforting green hills of Vermont in the 1960s. Unlike many of them, he put down roots and raised a family. About 10 years ago, Julian combined his loves of vernacular Vermont architecture and cooking feasts for his friends by building the Top of the Hill Grill Bar B Que in Brattleboro. The smokehouse is inspired by the rustic, utilitarian design of Vermont sugarhouses, and his pavilion room overlooking the picturesque Meadows wetlands is an Adirondack-style dining hall. His award-winning barbeque, gumbo, crisp coleslaw, and intensely flavored beans have made the place an instant institution. Being Birkenstock country, the Top of the Hill also offers tempeh burgers and mesclun salads that would scant be seen in a barbeque stand south of the Mason-Dixon Line. FESTIVE VERMONT
But the annual festival that perhaps best exemplifies Vermont’s amalgam of nostalgic agrarianism and cosmopolitan wit is Brattleboro’s laid-back answer to Spain’s Running of the Bulls: The Strolling of the Heifers. In support of Vermont’s family farms and sustainable agriculture, crowds throng to downtown Brattleboro in early June to watch over 85 winsome, flower-bedecked cows amble up Main Street, accompanied by the world-famous countercultural Bread & Puppet Theater troupe from Glover, Vermont, acrobatic baton twirlers, a fife and drum corps, old-fashioned unicycles, colorful floats, miniature horses, oxen, baby water buffalo, and a Dairy Fairy. Cow-costumed pooper-scoopers follow to make things nice. Vermont in the fall often has warmish days and cool nights, so a jacket is in order. Good walking shoes open up the state’s excellent network of hiking trails to some rambling. Vermont information Ben & Jerry’s Shelburne Farms The Shelburne Museum Bennington Museum Cold Hollow Cider Mill New England Dakin Farm The Strolling of the Heifers Parade and Festival The Farmers Diner Major Farm Cabot Creamery Annex Store Dog Team Tavern NECI Commons Top of the Hill Grill Dummerston Apple Pie Festival Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival Originally Published September 2005
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The leaves are vivid on the mountainsides, there’s a coolness in the air, tractors chug by with hay-laden wagons, and pyramids of red, red apples rise at farm markets. Suddenly it’s autumn in Vermont, and time to again explore the best of the Green Mountain State.
Newfane is the iconic town green, a vision of white clapboard and green-shuttered Vermont. The columned Windham County Courthouse dates to 1825, the Union Hall to 1830, and the Congregational Church to 1839. The Newfane Inn began in 1793 and is the state’s second-oldest operating inn. Together with the adjoining Four Columns Inn, these buildings form the ultimate ensemble of Vermont architecture. Across the way, the Newfane Country Store is the place for everything from a soft drink to expensive quilts.
Shelburne Farms, nearby, is a 1,400-acre agricultural education center anchored by the luxurious Inn at Shelburne Farms. For day visitors, the farm offers slide shows, educational programs, and guided tours of the monumental Tudor-style barns and the champion dairy herd.
Maple syrup is synonymous with Vermont, a sweet symbiosis of the state’s abundant maple forests (or sugar bush, as it’s called) and the 2,400 sugar makers who still boil the sap in billowing sugarhouses across the state. Maple syrup is sold in a variety of grades, quantities, and containers. Vermont Grade A Medium Amber’s dark, beautiful color and intense maple flavor is perfect for a steaming stack of flapjacks. You can taste all four grades of Vermont maple syrup at the New England Maple Museum in Rutland. Between Burlington and Middlebury, Dakin Farm is a landmark during sugaring season, when the steam from the sugarhouse pours across the highway. The retail store has maple products and other Vermont foodstuffs.
And then there’s Ben and Jerry’s, the ice cream empire that exemplifies Vermont’s quirky marriage of traditional dairy farming with 1960s hippie panache. South of Stowe a few miles, Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream’s psychedelic factory is Vermont’s number one tourist attraction, where visitors can sample sweet, cold Vermont.
Vermont is festival-mad, with celebrations of harvests, music, antiques, crafts, animals, and people throughout the year. On September 18, the Shelburne Museum “Goes to the Dogs,” when it hosts its annual dog party, with prizes for categories that include best kisser, best costumed dog, and the best lap dog over 50 pounds. Over 800 eager contestants vied for the awards in 2004. The Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival in Essex Junction, October 1-2, commemorates the sleek sheep, goats, llamas, and alpacas that proud breeders display, as well as some of the region’s best fiber arts. The Dummerston Apple Pie Festival, October 9, attracts thousands each year to devour hundreds of freshly baked homemade pies on the village common, along with a hearty fireman’s breakfast.