REVIEW:  Two Vermonts -- Geography and Identity, 1865 -1910, by Paul M. Searls, University Press of New England for UNH Press, Hanover, NH, 2006 
By Bruce Shields

Many people involved in support of traditional land based occupations, sports, and recreations have been puzzled by the apparent contempt poured on our activities by many otherwise very charming Vermonters.  For example, advocates of Wilderness in Vermont claim that totally excluding human activity is the only way to allow the environment to recover from centuries of disastrous mismanagement by our own and all previous generations of Vermont users of the land.  Yet when our farmers, loggers, and hunters search their activities over their own and their forefathers’ lifetimes, the alleged mismanagement never surfaces. 

Rural folk have long recognized that this perception varies by the background of the viewer: a person trained on farm or in the woods understands resource management in a particular way; a person of a more urban or suburban training has a wholly different perception.  For the past half century, rural people have pejoratively classed persons with the non-rural viewpoint as "flatlanders."  During Peter Smith’s second race for Vermont’s Congressional seat, a very deep issue among rural people was whether -- even though he was a Vermont native -- Smith was a flatlander.  Many rural people concluded that he was, and since that left a race between two flatlanders, simply declined to mark their ballots. 

Searls, a teacher in the History Department at University of Vermont, documents how the present division between town and country took shape in Vermont in the half century following the Civil War.  He uses a terminology found in writings of the time to distinguish two viewpoints: uphill and downhill.  Downhill encompasses many of the characteristics carried in the current term flatlander.  Uphill -- not precisely a geographical reference, but bearing some  sense of that -- refers to both the inhabitants of the primarily agricultural hill towns and to the world view borne by those folk.  He very briefly sets that division as reflecting the antebellum division of Vermont politics into Federalist and Jeffersonian parties.  Briefly united by the Civil War, the division resurfaced almost as soon as the troops returned home. 

The downhill group viewed themselves as bearing the flag of progress, and viewed the uphill folk as ignorant, stubborn, hidebound, and wanton destroyers of the abundant resources they should have been stewards of.  The uphill people viewed the downhill group as arrogant, caring only for money, and determined to destroy the uphill way of life.  The downhill group identified district schools (as opposed to consolidated regional schools) as the cause of uphill backwardness, and attempted for the entire period Searls reviews to pass a law requiring each town to consist of just one school district, achieved in the middle of his review period. The effort to  carve villages out of the towns also peaked then: the village government was thus removed from the baneful influence of the uphill farmers who supposedly opposed every element of modern life.

Searls chronicles how the downhill group formed economic development associations to bring in industrial development, create larger towns with a wide array of public amenities, create institutions such as colleges and universities, and spread railways throughout the state.  The uphill group fought to keep an agricultural component at University of Vermont, to maintain local control over taxation, and curb the influence of national corporations in such areas as railway and industrial development.  When, by 1900, it became apparent that large scale industrial development was simply never going to happen, the downhill group began to embrace tourism as a way to boost economic activity.  Already by 1895, development groups began to claim that tourism was Vermont’s #2 industry, soon to be #1.  This is a claim which has been repeated endlessly down to the present. 

To their horror, the downhillers found that wealthy tourists and vacation home buyers were attracted precisely by the lack of modernity among uphillers which the downhill so deplored.  Part of the solution was to get wealthy out of state people to buy farms and operate them as demonstration sites.  William S. Webb’s operation at Shelburne Farms, which he created using his wife’s Vanderbilt inheritance to buy up 35 small farms in a block, was widely viewed as providing a model for Vermonters to follow.  Eventually, the touristic downhillers embraced the pastoral Vermont of the hill farms as the image to use to promote Vermont development.  The magazine, The Vermonter, founded about 1900, was the vehicle of that promotion -- and eventually turned into Vermont Life still published under auspices of the Vermont Agency of Development, and still promoting to out of staters the arcadian vision of Vermont uphillers. 

Searls should be credited for careful research into the publications of the period in disclosing the issue of two Vermonts.  He had far less working material to present the viewpoint of the uphill folks, whose viewpoint emerges primarily from letters to the editor and in private writings.  Downhill folks directed the university, the newspapers, provided almost every candidate for statewide office, and directed the State agencies in charge of economic development.  Uphill folks served as members of the Legislature, primarily in the House.  Before the Supreme Court reorganized Vermont on downhill terms in the 1960’s, the House was controlled by the uphill, the Senate and Governor’s office the downhill view.  The downhill folks had to perform a remarkable mental gymnastic, to glorify for financial gain the traditions they thought in their hearts doomed Vermont to mediocrity.

This division has obvious implications for the Vermont Traditions Coalition, the Farm Bureau, the Forest Products Association, and for all of our traditional users.  Searls gives us no solutions, but more sharply defines our world than any other piece of writing I have seen in 25 years.
 

Bruce Shields has retired from three professions; college English teacher, sawmiller and executive of the Vermont Forest Products Association, and operator of a farm supply store.  In retirement, he works his woodlot and maple sugar place, sits on the boards of several statewide organizations related to natural resources, and serves as Lister in the town of Eden, VT.