July 1911: When Vermont yearned for winter

July 2, 2026 / Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment

Original article published in The Weekend Magazine on July 19, 2025: “Remember When: The deadly month of July 1911”

Torrid. Sweltering. Unparalleled. Intense. Deadly.

These are just some of the words used to describe the eleven-day heatwave that hit the Northeast in July 1911.

It started on Sunday, July 2, when a blanket of heat and humidity settled in over New England. While only the most devout and devoted Vermonters were in church that morning, redundantly fanning themselves with stifling air, outside the temperatures were soaring. By that afternoon, it had reached 100 degrees in Rutland. Forecast to be a “hot wave of two or three days’ duration,” according to the Montpelier Morning Journal, Vermonters who had been looking forward to a fun-filled July 4th holiday, planned instead a quiet day and the “patronage of a rest cure under the apple trees.”

The next day, papers around the state and New England began to report the tragedy that was unfolding….

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Before the cows, sheep ruled Vermont

April 25, 2026April 25, 2026 / Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment

White wooly sheep with horns and a black nose peeking through the bars of a farm enclosure

A possible descendent of one of Vermont’s early sheep
herds at Tunbridge Sheep & Wool Festival.
Photo by Joanna Tebbs Young

(Originally published in the Rutland Herald/Times Argus “Weekend Magazine,” April 20, 2024)

Vermont’s short-lived wool industry was as rocky as the fields on which the sheep grazed and as up-and-down as its mountains.

Between roughly 1775 and 1825, European settlers — the majority of whom were of English origin from other parts of New England — were moving north into Vermont. Primarily subsistence farmers, they cleared small patches of hillside on which to grow their own food and graze English breeds of sheep which were raised for meat, not wool.

In 1809, the American Consul to Portugal, William Jarvis, imported 200 Merino rams from Spain. Merino wool was of higher quality than that of the English breeds — softer and more versatile. Its uniquely kinked fibers trapped more air and absorbed more water away from the skin, keeping the wearer warmer in the winter and cooler in the warmer months.

Moving to a farm in Weathersfield, Vermont, Jarvis eventually shipped 4,000 sheep to the U.S. He went on to breed and sell these to Vermonters, who, in turn, expanded their farming operations and began selling their wool to local mills.

Engraving of a black wrinkled sheep from the early 19th century

Photo courtesy of Vermont Historical Society

During the War of 1812, demand for such wool rose as factories were commissioned to make uniforms, but then fluctuated over the following decade. By 1820, however, in part due to protective tariffs, mills were paying farmers well for their wool. Soon sheep farming was more profitable than dairy or crop farming. Farmers were replacing their cows with sheep at such a frenetic rate that between 1824 and 1840 the sheep population had quadrupled. According to records from the time, in 1837, Vermont was home to more than one-and-a-half million sheep, six sheep per resident. Every town in the state was grazing at least 1,000 sheep and some had over 10,000.

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The Great White of ’88

March 3, 2026 / Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment

Center Street, Rutland, Vermont. March 1888 (Rutland Historical Society)

(Originally published in the Rutland Herald/Times Argus “Weekend Magazine,” March 23, 2024)

In the late 19th century a rivalry arose between the Midwest and East of the United States — over the weather. Newspapers in the Dakotas in particular liked to make fun of New England’s supposedly awful winters, which, compared to theirs… well, didn’t. Snarky quips, such as these from Redfield (South Dakota) Journal, were sometimes printed in the papers: “Liartown, N.Y…. citizens have made tunnels along the sidewalks and at the crossings by eating the snow as they proceeded.” And: “A woman at Pittsfield, Vt. went out… the blizzard overtook her. She was blown to atoms.”

The West’s one upmanship was mostly justified. Especially in 1888, when a massive and unexpected January storm — which became known as the Children’s Blizzard — killed hundreds of people, many of them school children and teachers, who, on a day that had started springlike, found themselves walking home in sudden frigid temperatures in a raging blizzard.

But two months later, on March 12, 1888, the East saw the start of a storm that not only rivaled the Midwest’s, but one of the biggest snowstorms in US history and by far the worst Vermont had/has ever recorded. The storm even prompted the Minnesota Journal to declare that “the Dakotan may thank his lucky stars that he does not live in the storm-ridden East.”

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Dancing the winter blues away: Kitchen Junkets

January 27, 2026 / Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment

This is a repost of an article originally published in the Rutland Herald/Times ArgusWeekend Magazine on January 20, 2024.

For our ancestors, winter in rural Vermont was long and arduous. The short days were crammed full with laborious farm and house chores while the dark nights were long and filled with… not much. Maybe dreams of warmer days? And when the snow was too deep for even ox-pulled snow rollers to clear a path, it was not unheard of for some families to be housebound for days at a time.

But Vermonters — many of whom were not long descended from the dance and music-loving English, Scottish, and Irish, or were newly settled French-Canadians — knew how to brighten the dark nights: With music. And more specifically, with a “kitchen junket” or “tunk.”

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Hydropathic Healing in the Hills

November 18, 2025 / Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment

This is a repost of an article originally published in the Rutland Herald/Times ArgusWeekend Magazine on September 23, 2023.

*credit: Brattleboro Historical Society*

Pus-filled boils, anyone? Brattleboro’s Wesselhoeft Hydropathic Institution was once a favorite of New England’s literary elite despite its questionable treatments.

Horace Greeley, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Beecher, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow… undoubtedly some of the most famous progressive and creative thinkers of the 19th century. As well as all knowing each other, they have something else in common: they spent time here in Vermont getting plunged in cold water multiple times a day, wrapped in wet sheets for hours, and eating bland food — willingly — at the Brattleboro Hydropathic Institution founded by one Dr. Robert Wesselhoeft…

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Murder in the Mountains

October 30, 2025 / Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment

Over 100 years ago, the last person to be hanged in Vermont was a man convicted of a murder in Wallingford, Vermont. It was just one of a number of killings in the quaint New England town.

This is a repost of an article originally published in the Weekend Magazine on October 26, 2024.

Today, beautiful Wallingford, Vermont may be known to visitors for its historic architecture, its (sadly, recently vandalized) leaking boot boy statue, and the ice beds at White Rocks. But once, two hundred years ago, and again (and again, and again) one hundred years later, the small mountain-side Rutland County town made headlines for something only the most macabre tourist brochure would advertise: Murder.

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Vermont according to Greeley

September 30, 2025September 30, 2025 / Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment

This is a repost from my “Remember When” column first published in the Rutland Herald/Times Argus Weekend Magazine on May 27, 2023.

Horace Greeley may be remembered as the 1841 founder and editor of the New York Tribune. He may also be remembered as the Liberal Republican who, endorsed by the Democrats, lost his presidential bid against Ulysses Grant. Or as the man who gained the unfortunate distinction of being the only presidential candidate to die during the election process. Or maybe he will be remembered as the man who (allegedly) said, “Go West, young man!”

But what did Greeley himself remember?

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Elizabeth Blackwell: How Vermont almost claimed America’s first female M.D.

September 16, 2025September 16, 2025 / Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment

Whether Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive an MD, ever visited Vermont is uncertain; she most definitely never lived here. Ironically, Vermont’s role in Elizabeth’s career is something that didn’t happen: in 1847, she didn’t enroll at Castleton Medical School…

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With a hope of heaven, the fear of the poorhouse

February 12, 2025 / Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment

*Castleton’s Poor Farm potato field, located where Crystal Beach is now on Lake Bomoseen), c. 1913. From* Lake Bomoseen: The Story of Vermont’s Largest Little-Known Lake. *Courtesy of Carol Thompson.*

Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, July 16, 2022 for the “Remember When” column with the title, A reverence for God, the hope of heaven, and a fear of the poorhouse

When Mrs. K. Lottie and her fourteen-year-old granddaughter were moved out of their cellar abode on Berlin Street, Montpelier, in February 1922, they didn’t go willingly. City officials, however, believed the two women would be better cared for on the town-managed poor farm on Elm Street.

As Mrs. Lottie and her granddaughter were moving into their new “home” forty miles away, William Seeley was setting himself free from his. The “straight as an arrow” 72-year-old was done with sleeping on a straw mattress in a building on Goodrich Road that used to house smallpox patients. Having “every inclination to work,” he went in search of a better life than the one he was living on Burlington’s poor farm. But soon Mr. Seeley found himself in jail – where “tramps and vagabonds” were often sent at the time – arrested for the crime of vagrancy. Suddenly, the poor farm may not have seemed so bad.

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Having a Ball at Holiday Time

December 10, 2024 / Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment

(all images courtesy Vermont Historical Society)

Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, December 24, 2022 for the “Remember When” column with the title, When Holidays Were a Ball

Once upon a time, even here in little ol’ rural Vermont, in the 19th century, any time seemed a good time for a ball. However, the holidays – from Thanksgiving through New Year – were a particularly popular time. And in a time of rapid industrial growth, the expanding middle-class was eager to enjoy the kind of fun previously afforded only to the Old Rich.

While private by-invitation-only balls and parties had been held earlier in the century – such as the ball held on Christmas Day, 1806 at Hyde’s Hall in Castleton – ticketed events open to the public weren’t generally known until mid-century. In fact, the first (known) advertised Christmas ball was in 1858. It was one of five “Anniversary Balls” listed in the Middle Register on December 15th, 1858 to be held at Hyde’s Hotel in Sudbury. (Some may recall the huge tumbling-down mansion on Route 30 just north of Hubbardton. This was the once-grand Hyde’s Hotel, or as it was renamed in the late 19th century, Hyde Manor.)