Foodways
Food habits
In conjunction with foodways demonstrations set up by the VFC for festivals around the state, the archive includes a collection of interviews with cooks which explore the interrelationship of food, heritage, and identity. These interviews also document the histories of individual families, the immigration history of particular ethnic/cultural groups, and the values and institutions of these communities.
Vermont Folklife Center Archive
Vermont Folklife Center Archive
Farming and farm life, rural community
Farming
This is the largest body of material in the archive, and it includes VFC folklorist Gregory Sharrow's dissertation research on the culture of farm life, research for a radio series on contemporary farm experience, research for the exhibit "Making and Remaking Vermont Farmsteads" (supported by an NEH grant), as well as interviews documenting change in the rural countryside. These materials span the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and document farm culture, the fabric of community, dairy farm operation, and the trajectory of the massive changes that occurred over the course of the past century. They offer an in-depth personal look at the ways in which individual farmers responded to the challenges of increasing mechanization, new management strategies, depressed milk prices, the loss of farm community--to name only a few examples. Thus these interviews represent a critical mass of information that is an extraordinary research resource because they touch on an array of social, cultural, political, economic, and technological issues.
Vermont Folklife Center Archive
Vermont Folklife Center Archive
Hunting, fishing, and trapping
hunting
The bulk of the hunting materials focus on deer hunting in Vermont and Maine with additional interviews on moose, bear, turkey and other game birds. The interviews include information on habitat, strategy, and technique, traditional knowledge, social context, change across time, and environmental issues. The fishing materials document the full range of fishing in the region: from native brook trout to land-lock salmon and from catch-and-release fly fishing to commercial ice fishing. The collection also includes historic materials on the sturgeon fishery and such now outlawed practices as seine fishing. Trapping interviews include an array of information on animal habitat and behavior as well as general woods-lore, and document such related activities as hunting and harvesting ginseng. The collection also includes interviews with game wardens and hunting/fishing guides.
Vermont Folklife Center Archive
Vermont Folklife Center Archive