GREENSBORO – The Hazen Road Dispatch, the annual publication of the Greensboro Historical Society, is now available and it contains eight articles illustrating interesting aspects of the history of towns in this area.
The first piece is by historian Daniel A. Metraux and outlines the beginning of this journal. His mother, anthropologist Rhoda Metraux, purchased the Hazen Road School House on the Greensboro-East Craftsbury Road in 1969 as a summer home away from New York City, where she was associated with the American Museum of Natural History and a colleague of Margret Mead, who sometimes visited her here. He saw the need for a publication to explore local history and starting in 1974 put out a series of six newsletters in cooperation with Nancy and Lewis Hill in the years around the Bicentennial Anniversary of the American Revolution in 1976. In 1977 the Greensboro Historical Society was formed, the writing of a town history was proposed and the first volume of the Hazen Road Dispatch was issued under Daniel A. Metraux’s editorship. His tenure was followed by that of Sally Fisher until 1995, then by co-editors Stefanie Ayers Cravedi and Andrea Perham until 2000 and with Gail Sangree until 2023. Presently Dan Penrise is editor and Stefanie Ayers Cravedi is associate editor and this edition is the 50th volume. What a remarkable achievement by so many contributors over the years to enrich our understanding and appreciation of the past!
A major accomplishment of several recent year’s work has been Thomas Twetten’s book, “Craftsbury Celebration, Old Homes, Barns and Their Stories,” with photographs of some 75 structures by Harry Miller. There was an excellent earlier survey of old houses in Craftsbury in 1985 done by Mathew Cohen and edited by Gina Campoli for the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, but except for two short histories of Craftsbury by Daniel A. Metraux, there has been no substantial book about Craftsbury since the first settlers in 1789-90. This generously illustrated volume covers homes constructed before about 1860. Research by present owners in the recorded deeds at the town clerk’s office fill out the history of the original builders and subsequent inhabitants combined with other sources to give a broader historical context to many familiar homes in Craftsbury. Sales from this work go to benefit the Craftsbury Public Library.
The second part on the “One Room Schoolhouses of New England,” published last year by Paul Wood, focuses on the original twelve small local schools in the town of Walden from the early years of the Nineteenth Century to their consolidation into one building in the 1990s. The twelve school districts, each with their separate buildings, were probably dictated by a reasonable walking distance for children from their rural homes to the schools. Wood’s article shows extensive research into primary sources evoking the interesting details of their architecture, interiors, funding, teachers and students, particularly on the Eddy schoolhouse that was located on his present property. The second part of his article discusses the rather controversial transition to the present single structure which opened in 1995. The only remaining one-room school house in Vermont is located in Elmore.
Elizabeth Dow, the president of the Hardwick Historical Society has a well-documented and illustrated study of the “Bridges of Hardwick Village.” She traces the numerous structures across the Lamoille River from the beginning of the Nineteenth Century that were built as Hardwick, developed from just a few mills to a thriving town with the growth of the granite industry after the coming of the railroads in the 1870s. From open wooden spans to covered bridges and footbridges, a repeated scenario was how many were swept away by high flood waters and spring ice jams over the years well into the Twentieth Century. The most important bridge was on Main Street connecting the northern residential area of Hardwick with the commercial southern section, with a smaller bridge later built several times over to the west, plus various pedestrian bridges (including the last “swinging” suspension bridge) to serve the Sam Daniels factory on the north side of the river. This article gives a relevant perspective on the current project now going on reconstructing the south bank of the Lamoille between the Village Restaurant and the old Hardwick Gazette building, with a new pedestrian bridge.
George and Elaine Harris were residents of Craftsbury after their retirement from long careers in Washington, D.C. Elaine’s article on the “Greensboro Authors” is especially fascinating in its presentation of how many writers have been attracted to this area since the 1890s to spend their summers around Caspian Lake. A great many of them were university teachers typically having three months of vacation, and they would come with their families for June through August to their modest but homey camps, often for generations. They enjoyed the pleasures of canoeing, sailing and swimming in the lake and hiking in the mountains of Vermont, but would also be writing their scholarly works, novels, poems, memoirs and children’s books. Some of them achieved national prominence, such as Wallace Stegner, Alfred Barr Jr., Judith Jones, John Gunther, Mansfield Freeman, Lewis Hill and Anne Stuart (Krissie Ohlrogge). Harris’ piece was originally published in the Hazen Road Dispatch in 1992, and Nancy Hill has updated it to the present with additional authors as well as vignettes of their get togethers over the years. In the Greensboro Free Library is an Author’s Collection which contains more than 200 writers connected to Greensboro.
Charles T. Morrissey contributed a curious anecdote, “Robert Frost, Wallace Stegner and the ’Frost Heaves’ of 1938.” In it he relates an incident at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference of 1938 in Ripton, under the auspices of Middlebury College, hardly flattering to Frost, in which he repeatedly interpreted a poetry reading by Archibald MacLeish, to whom he had a strong aversion. Wallace Stegner also attended that conference and had visited Greensboro the previous summer to see his fellow faculty member Philip Gray of the University of Wisconsin. He later wrote a biography of Bernard DeVoto (“The Uneasy Chair”), an organizer of the conference, who reprimanded Frost for his rude and unacceptable behavior. His descriptions of the Bread Loaf Conference in that book have been praised as exceptionally vivid.
The last article in this year’s Hazen Road Dispatch is a review written by Gail Sangree of Allen F. Davis’ memoir, “The Lucky Generation, Growing Up in Depression and War,” published in 2025. This piece was originally printed in the Hardwick Historical Society Journal, Volume 15, Number 2, Fall 2025. Davis was born in 1931 in Hardwick and thus his childhood was much influenced by two major historical disasters, the Great Depression and World War II. His father had a general store that sold groceries and clothing, but he had other ambitions than to continue the family business, going to Dartmouth College and the University of Wisconsin, later teaching at Temple University in Philadelphia as an historian. His recollections of his relatives, and the activities supporting the war efforts as he grew up, document a time quite different than our own today. His book can be purchased at the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick and it would be a good companion to Joyce Mitchell’s reminiscences of people in Hardwick during the same period.
David K. Rodgers
David K. Rodgers is a writer, mason and card carrying dilettante, who dabbles and babbles in art. He has lived in East Craftsbury for the past 40 years.
