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3.8.98
Not just a pretty face
Vermont is beloved as the epitome of the New England scenery. But behind the looks is something even more desirable -- quality of life.
By ARTHUR S. HARRIS JR.
Special to projo.com
Once it had more cows than people. While that's not so today, Vermont has one distinction: its tiny capital, Montpelier, is the smallest in population of all fifty states. Small is beautiful in the Green Mountain State.
Just imagine a state whose largest city, Burlington, is less than 50,000 in population. Give Texas its due -- it claims the biggest this and that, but Vermonters take pride in their small towns and villages. Even Burlington, situated on a lake and home of four colleges, doesn't seem like a city; there's a small town feel to it.
Home to IBM and GE plants, this city on Lake Champlain is such an attractive year-round city (nearby winter skiing and all sorts of summer water sports) that executives, faced with a transfer to some other city such as Cleveland, often decline both transfer and pay raise.
Why? Because quality of life is uppermost among many Vermonters, some of whom have put in time in cities -- particularly Boston, Philadelphia and New York -- and now enjoy the lifestyle of the laid-back Green Mountain State.
Incidentally, as though proof of its smallness, Vermont sends exactly one representative to Congress -- Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist who now calls himself an Independent.
Its governor is the only medical doctor among the 50 state governors. Call him Doctor Dean or Governor Dean, he's doing something about health care for Vermont citizens. Until the day he became governor, he was active in medical practice.
Forget stodgy, rock-ribbed New England values, Vermont was one of the first states to enact bottle-return laws along with a ban on highway billboards. With down-and-outers scavenging roadsides for redeemable cans and bottles, the state's highways are clean and blissfully free of highway advertising.
Of all six New England states, only mountainous Vermont is landlocked. No ocean beaches nor cities on the sea. What's more, except for Lake Champlain, Vermont lacks an abundance of large lakes as in Maine and New Hampshire. Ponds, yes. Streams a-plenty. And tiny lakes here and there, mostly used by locals who have seasonal summer camps on the shoreline.
Attractions
In these days when the travel industry says people are taking shorter but more frequent vacations, Vermont is seeing a greater influx of out-of-state cars. Most are seen cruising along our two-lane highways. But adventurous drivers prefer single-lane dirt roads with a clump of grass in the middle. Vermont is full of back roads that have yet to see an ounce of tar.
With one exception, Vermont has no spectacular waterfalls, no great public buildings, unless you count the capitol in Montpelier, a community which makes the national news only when its downtown is flooded in the spring.
So what are all these out-of-staters taking pictures of? We're told by the state that visitors focus their cameras on Vermont cows, mountains, and barns. Not a bad image for a state whose green-and-white number plates proclaim Green Mountain State.
Hildene
Did you know that President Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, had a love affair with the state of Vermont? She often summered, accompanied by son Robert Todd, in what was sometimes lyrically called Manchester-in-the-Mountains. Really just plain Manchester, in southwestern Vermont.
In fact, an exhausted President Abraham Lincoln promised his wife he would finally take a vacation from steamy, war-torn Washington. During the Civil War, Lincoln could not consider time off.
Under pressure to relax, Lincoln told his wife that during the summer of 1865 he would briefly join her at her favorite vacation spot.
Alas, an April in Washington assassination changed everything. Lincoln did not live through the spring and thus never saw the New England village, set between two parallel mountain ranges, that Mrs. Lincoln extolled.
Still, the Lincoln family remains linked to Vermont. Lincoln's wife not only vacationed in the Green Mountain State but the only Lincoln son to live to maturity built an expansive home in Manchester in 1905. The 24-room Georgian Revival "summer home," designed by Boston architects, was named Hildene, for hill and valley -- dene being Old English for valley. Lincoln descendants lived there until 1975 when Boston's Christian Science Church was willed the expansive estate.
It sold the property at a giveaway price to a hastily-formed Vermont non-profit organization, Friends of Hildene. The estate not only contained a main house, but numerous buildings including stables, carriage houses, an observatory, potting sheds -- and 412 acres of land consisting of open fields and woods.
Skeptics said that while tourists sometimes visited presidential homes (Roosevelt's Hyde Park, for example, or Coolidge's Vermont birthplace), few were likely to be interested in the second home of President Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln, who lived in Chicago. The presidential connection was just too remote even if the son, 22 at the time, had stood by his father's deathbed in 1865.
Now in its 13th full year of operation as both a tourist attraction and year-round activity center, Hildene has proved the locals right, the experts wrong. This year, at least 60,000 paid visitors are expected to visit the sprawling estate.
The big neo-Georgian "summer house" is the main attraction, for it has been carefully restored -- its oak floors sanded, its Aeolian organ repaired. Old, flaking wallpaper has been duplicated. It's taken years and generous donations to revive the formal gardens at the rear of the house. Many family artifacts are on display, including possessions of President Lincoln.
Hildene is well named, for it is sited on a hill overlooking a quiet valley bisected by the sluggish (except in spring thaw) Batten Kill, which empties into the Hudson not far away in New York State. Directly ahead lie ridges of the Green Mountains. Behind Hildene to the west is Mount Equinox, over 3,000 feet high, with a paved toll road to its top.
Tourists approach the main house over a one-mile, tree-bordered, dirt road which, nearing its end, gives a straight-on view of the house. Fortunately, parking as well as the visitors' center, once a carriage barn, are removed form the house. The visitors' center contains a 50-seat theater where a slide show prepares one for a guided tour.
Tourists who are guided through the multi-room house may assume Hildene is some sort of museum, for the estate is included in the National Register of Historic Places. But Hildene has a very active life. It's the scene of garden parties, classical music evenings, pops concerts. It can even be rented for social occasions such as weddings. The large meadows host horse shows and craft fairs. In winter Hildene is a ski touring center.
The entrance road to Hildene is off Route 7A about two miles south of Manchester Center and the intersection of Routes 7A and 11/30. From mid-May through Oct. 31 the estate is open seven days a week, 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., although the last guided tour of the day leaves around 4 p.m. For further information: Friends of Hildene, Box 377, Manchester, VT 05254. Phone: 802-362-1788.
Manchester
While many residents of Manchester are distressed to see their village become home for discount outlet stores (Liz Claiborne, Bass Shoes, Brooks Brothers, Ralph Lauren, Benetton, Calvin Klein, Ellen Tracy) and complain of traffic, the explosive growth of Manchester, fueled by retailing, has brought high employment to the area along with stop and go traffic on summer weekends and during leaf-peeper season.
Not all venerable residents of once bucolic Manchester appreciate this invasion of "flatlanders" with their "out-of-state number plates." (The fact that some of these Manchester residents in their 18th-century remodeled "farmhouses" once earned a living making TV commercials in New York or producing beer in Milwaukee seems not to matter.)
Still, the surrounding pristine countryside is largely undisturbed. In the meadows a few miles south of Manchester in an area the locals call "The Wilcox Flats," you can see a genuine Vermont dairy farm (they're disappearing). You can buy locally made ice cream at a stand staffed by the sons of the Wilcox Dairy Farm family. Oh, yes, and aim your point and shoot camera at their grazing cows.
Mount Equinox
Looming over the dairy farm is the summit of 3,835-foot Mount Equinox, the tallest mountain of the Taconic Range. Look for the entrance to the toll road leading to the summit of Equinox on the westerly side of Route 7A.
From the summit there's a 360-degree view that encompasses Mont Royal in Montreal and views of five states -- that is, on a clear day when the summit isn't socked in with clouds.
The serpentine 5.2-mile toll road called Sky Line Drive is paved. A car and one passenger can drive to the summit for just $10. Up top, beside the view, are walking trails, one of them about 1/4-mile long to a lookout to view Manchester in the valley below.
Equinox Mountain Inn on the summit has now reopened after refurbishing. Guests can drive up for the sunset, have dinner, stay overnight, and watch the sun rise over distant Maine in the morning before breakfast. The inn is open until the end of foliage season. Call 802-362-1113 for more information.
For summit conditions, call Equinox Skyline Line Drive toll house at 802-362-1114.
Vermont, like its neighbors New Hampshire and Maine, may be best considered a three-season destination for tourists, who, after spring skiing ends, may not care to stay for the mud that follows.
Of course, skiing and snow-related activities are the main attraction in the winter, with Vermont's peaks often maintaining better conditions than mountains a little closer to the Ocean State. The latest ski reports are available online via several sites, including this ski-info page from www.travel-vermont.com.
Keep in mind that many ski areas offer plenty of excitement in the summer months. Bromley Mountain, for example, just east of Manchester, has its Alpine Slide operating for about five months from late May onward into the fall. Call: 802-824-5522.
Fall attracts the leaf-peepers, who find plenty to view along the state's back roads and mountain byways. During foliage season, the state itself keeps excellent track of the color of its leaves as part of its tourism Web site, at: www.travel-vermont.com/falltips.htm
In the summer, Vermont's waterways are popular. Among them is Lake Champlain, which can't lay claim to being the largest lake in New England because it borders New York and Canada. But it's one mighty big lake. Three ferries cruise back and forth. The longest run is from Burlington, the state's largest city, and Port Kent, N.Y. This scenic route opens in late May. For information: 802-864-9804.
Also near Burlington, as fine a lakeside college town as you could ask for, is Shelburne Museum, just south of the city, with one of the nation's greatest collections of American folk art. From late May into mid-October, the museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Phone: 802-985-3346.
For information on events in and around Lake Champlain, get in touch with the Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce, 60 Main St., Burlington, VT 05401. Phone: 802-863-3489. Among them this year is the 10th Anniversary Lake Champlain Balloon and Craft Festival, June 5-7 at the Champlain Valley Fairgrounds in Essex Junction (just outside Burlington). Route 89 leads into Burlington. For information: 802-425-4884.
For information on fishing in the many streams of Vermont, contact Vermont Fish and Wildlife, 103 South Main Street, Waterbury, VT 05671. Phone: 802-241-3701.
For more ideas on summer fun, go to: www.travel-vermont.com/summer.htm
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Accommodations
One of the most famous hotels is The Equinox on Route 7A in Manchester Village. This venerable hotel and resort dating back to 1769 was closed awhile back so its new owners, Great Britain's Guinness Co., could restore the fine old hotel to its former glory. They've successed admirably. The golf course has been completely redone. Phone: 802-362-4700 or 800-362-4747.
One of the most popular inns in Vermont is the venerable The Old Tavern in Grafton, once a stagecoach stop. The impeccably restored 19th-century three-story lodge, which opened in 1801, lies in a living, working community with a general store, a gallery and an historical museum. For more information, contact The Old Tavern at 1-800-843-1801. Or write: The Old Tavern, Grafton, VT 05146.
Small Vermont inns as well as bed-and-breakfast establishments abound in the surrounding towns of Arlington, Sunderland, Dorset, Peru, and Londonderry.
If you arrive in Manchester without accommodations, ask for the small white building of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce just north of the intersection of Routes 7 and 30. The staff at this visitor center will assist with locations of various hotels, motels, inns, and bed and breakfast establishments.
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Climate
Current weather forecast
Getting there
Directions to your destination
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More information
For general information on Vermont, dial toll free: 1-800-VERMONT.
For a list of Vermont state parks, with write-ups, pictures, and maps of campgrounds, call the Forests, Parks, and Recreation Department of Vermont at 802-241-3655.
A list of Vermont events, as well as a road map of the state, is available from Vermont Department of Tourism, 134 State Street, Montpelier, Vermont 05602. Phone: 1-800-622-4553.
Related Web links
Office of Travel and Tourism
Events
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