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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Migration: Past
Description
An account of the resource
Human settlement of Vermont began with Native American tribes who were displaced by first the French colonists and then by other mostly western European immigrants who came to escape oppression of different sorts (poverty, starvation, religious persecution) and also simply in search of economic opportunity. Through the late 1800s, federal policy allowed for a fairly diverse mix of European immigrants, although certain ethnicities were definitely favored. In the early 1920s, both policy and economic factors stemmed the flow of immigration.
The first humans believed to arrive in what we now know as Vermont were the Abenaki, “people of the dawn.” In the 16th century, the French became the first European immigrants to what the Abenaki called Ndakinna, “our land,” bringing a fort, trading outposts and missionary chapels.
The Treaty of Paris in 1763 ended large-scale French immigration and the English began to arrive, dubbed Yankee, English descendents born on American soil. They were flanked by Scots, Irish, Dutch, Germans and still some French. The largest early non-English group arriving in Vermont during this period was Scottish, settling largely in Caledonia county. There were also significant numbers of Dutch who came from the former Dutch colony of New York, many of whom settled in the Champlain Valley to farm. There were also a relatively high number of free blacks/African-Americans, particularly in Vergennes and Sheldon. The Abenaki population had been decimated by war and disease; those remaining settled mostly in Franklin country.
From 1776-1881, the US had an open door immigration policy, but preferred Western and Northern Europeans who they actively recruited. However, since life was relatively stable in Europe and it was expensive to relocate, there was not much movement. The 1840s brought a major change with the Irish potato famine and the Russian pogroms both resulting in major influxes of Irish and Russian Jews arriving in the US and in Vermont. By 1850, the Irish were the largest foreign-born group in Vermont. Industrialization in the 1880s and ‘90s with growth in slate, granite and woolen mills drew immigrants from Wales, Italy and Switzerland, among other countries. French-Canadians also came south due to Quebec’s weak economy.
Vermont actually recruited “desirable” northern Europeans (English, Finns, Swedes), but by the 1890s more immigrants were arriving from southern and eastern Europe – and were not always welcomed. Christian Greeks and Lebanese fled persecution and Russians and Poles of Jewish heritage did the same. The national Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924 along with the Great Depression effectively ended the kind of significant immigration that contributed to the historical make-up of Vermont’s population.
Interactive Resource
A resource requiring interaction from the user to be understood, executed, or experienced. Examples include forms on Web pages, applets, multimedia learning objects, chat services, or virtual reality environments.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Foodways
Subject
The topic of the resource
Food habits
Description
An account of the resource
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.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Vermont Folklife Center Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Vermont Folklife Center Archive
foodways
oral history
-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Agrarian Practices
Description
An account of the resource
This section, while by no means comprehensive, touches on some of the key aspects of food acquisition and cultivation in Vermont. Below is some brief background on some of the major food sources and farming emphases in Vermont over the last 200-plus years.
Maple: Legends describe the discovery of the sweetness within the maple tree in various ways. The most common tale involves a native hunter who notches his tomahawk into a sugar maple for safe storage one night. When his children go to fetch water the next day they leave their empty pot at the foot of the tree while they run off to play. The pot mysteriously fills with clear liquid and the venison their mother cooks in it has an unusually sweet flavor. The liquid, they discover, was not water, but sap dripping from the hatchet notch in the tree. The first settlers learned from the natives to make “Indian molasses” or “Indian sugar,” a homemade sweetener used when white sugar was rare and expensive. Although it can be hard to find today, maple sugar–then solidified into cakes–was the common form before refrigeration enabled longer-term storage of syrup. The Quakers promoted it as slave-free sugar and Thomas Jefferson, who planted a sugarbush at Monticello, hoped that maple sugar might make the country more self-sufficient. Founded in 1893, the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association claims to be the oldest agricultural association in the country and the state is the largest U.S. producer of maple syrup.
Hunting/Fishing: Bow hunting represents the earliest form of deer hunting in Vermont as practiced by the indigenous Abenaki, who depended on wildlife including the once abundant Atlantic salmon that returned each year to spawn before dams and polluted waterways put them on the endangered species list. Early settlers followed their example and Vermont still has an active community of hunters and fishermen who hunt everything from quail to cottontail rabbits to black bears. What is killed is almost always eaten and community game suppers even offer tastes of raccoon, muskrat, and squirrel. Long weekends away at deer camp are legendary and a young hunter’s first buck is reason for major celebration–and lots of venison stew or chili. During the winter, small huts sprout up along the frozen edges of Lake Champlain from which hardy souls fish through the ice for perch, smelt, trout, and hatchery-bred Atlantic salmon. In mid-April, anglers can start fly-fishing for trout in rivers and streams and in October, camouflaged boats slowly purr through lakes in search of duck.
Foraging: Like all first nations peoples, the Native Americans as the first human settlers in Vermont made use of existing plant life as food, eating inmature leaves, roots, berries and mushrooms. Early settlers followed their example as part of their efforts to survive while establishing agriculture. The traditions remain and have, in fact, become almost faddish with restaurants boasting of the first wild leeks (ramps), fiddleheads (the curled tips of ostrich ferns) and a variety of wild mushrooms. Other commonly foraged items include young dandelion leaves and berries.
Dairy has been Vermont’s most important agricultural product for more than 150 years, although the state’s dairy farmers struggle today in a commodity market in which larger out-of-state farms have advantages over typically smaller-scale Vermont agriculture. Many are going organic or creating local milk brands to keep small family farms alive and preserve the working landscape. Vermont does boast the highest per capita number of farmstead cheesemakers (meaning the cheese is made on the same farm as the herd or flock of animals) and has built a reputation across the country for award-winning cheese.
Sheep and lamb: Despite folklore to the contrary, cows have never actually outnumbered people in Vermont—but sheep have. From the 1820s to the 1860s, Vermont farmers made a great business of raising wool to satisfy the booming New England textile mills, bringing the sheep population at one point to well over one and a half million animals against a human count of less than three hundred thousand. Lamb and mutton for the farmhouse table were an inevitable sideline and spring lamb was especially welcomed as the first fresh meat after a long winter. But prices fell and the frontier pushed westward, opening up the wide flat plains of the Midwest for more economical ways to raise sheep.
Apples have blossomed in Vermont since colonial times when every hill farmer planted a few trees as part of their homestead. The fruit had many uses; they could be eaten fresh or stored to eat months later; cooked into pies or sauce; dried, canned, or pickled; and made into cider and cider vinegar. Cider—both sweet and hard—was the homegrown beverage of choice, and was also sometimes distilled further into applejack or apple brandy. Early varieties included Cox’s Orange Pippin brought over from Europe, Fameuse or Snow known for its snow-white flesh, and the whimsically named Sheep’s Nose. There were good keeper apples, apples with the juicy tartness perfect for cider, and naturally sweet apples that collapsed quickly into applesauce. As apple-growing developed into a commercial business in the late 1800s, apple diversity continued with traveling grafters carrying twigs across the state to ensure the perpetuation of preferred varieties. A few severe winters in the early 1900s, however, devastated many Vermont orchards and replanting focused on the most disease-resistant, cold-hardy, shippable varieties, led by the now iconic McIntosh. The harvests of the roughly 40 commercial apple producers left in Vermont today are still dominated by this shiny red variety, although many are rediscovering some of the older, less familiar apples.
Wheat: Historically, the Champlain Valley was a grain-growing area and was known, around the 1820s at its peak, as the bread basket of the U.S. As the Champlain Canal down the Hudson River opened up the market opportunity initially, the Erie Canal brought its demise because it opened up access to the flat plains of the west where grain production was more efficient than Vermont.
Interactive Resource
A resource requiring interaction from the user to be understood, executed, or experienced. Examples include forms on Web pages, applets, multimedia learning objects, chat services, or virtual reality environments.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Farming and farm life, rural community
Subject
The topic of the resource
Farming
Description
An account of the resource
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.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Vermont Folklife Center Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Vermont Folklife Center Archive
dairy farm
farm culture
farming
farmstead
oral history
-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Agrarian Practices
Description
An account of the resource
This section, while by no means comprehensive, touches on some of the key aspects of food acquisition and cultivation in Vermont. Below is some brief background on some of the major food sources and farming emphases in Vermont over the last 200-plus years.
Maple: Legends describe the discovery of the sweetness within the maple tree in various ways. The most common tale involves a native hunter who notches his tomahawk into a sugar maple for safe storage one night. When his children go to fetch water the next day they leave their empty pot at the foot of the tree while they run off to play. The pot mysteriously fills with clear liquid and the venison their mother cooks in it has an unusually sweet flavor. The liquid, they discover, was not water, but sap dripping from the hatchet notch in the tree. The first settlers learned from the natives to make “Indian molasses” or “Indian sugar,” a homemade sweetener used when white sugar was rare and expensive. Although it can be hard to find today, maple sugar–then solidified into cakes–was the common form before refrigeration enabled longer-term storage of syrup. The Quakers promoted it as slave-free sugar and Thomas Jefferson, who planted a sugarbush at Monticello, hoped that maple sugar might make the country more self-sufficient. Founded in 1893, the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association claims to be the oldest agricultural association in the country and the state is the largest U.S. producer of maple syrup.
Hunting/Fishing: Bow hunting represents the earliest form of deer hunting in Vermont as practiced by the indigenous Abenaki, who depended on wildlife including the once abundant Atlantic salmon that returned each year to spawn before dams and polluted waterways put them on the endangered species list. Early settlers followed their example and Vermont still has an active community of hunters and fishermen who hunt everything from quail to cottontail rabbits to black bears. What is killed is almost always eaten and community game suppers even offer tastes of raccoon, muskrat, and squirrel. Long weekends away at deer camp are legendary and a young hunter’s first buck is reason for major celebration–and lots of venison stew or chili. During the winter, small huts sprout up along the frozen edges of Lake Champlain from which hardy souls fish through the ice for perch, smelt, trout, and hatchery-bred Atlantic salmon. In mid-April, anglers can start fly-fishing for trout in rivers and streams and in October, camouflaged boats slowly purr through lakes in search of duck.
Foraging: Like all first nations peoples, the Native Americans as the first human settlers in Vermont made use of existing plant life as food, eating inmature leaves, roots, berries and mushrooms. Early settlers followed their example as part of their efforts to survive while establishing agriculture. The traditions remain and have, in fact, become almost faddish with restaurants boasting of the first wild leeks (ramps), fiddleheads (the curled tips of ostrich ferns) and a variety of wild mushrooms. Other commonly foraged items include young dandelion leaves and berries.
Dairy has been Vermont’s most important agricultural product for more than 150 years, although the state’s dairy farmers struggle today in a commodity market in which larger out-of-state farms have advantages over typically smaller-scale Vermont agriculture. Many are going organic or creating local milk brands to keep small family farms alive and preserve the working landscape. Vermont does boast the highest per capita number of farmstead cheesemakers (meaning the cheese is made on the same farm as the herd or flock of animals) and has built a reputation across the country for award-winning cheese.
Sheep and lamb: Despite folklore to the contrary, cows have never actually outnumbered people in Vermont—but sheep have. From the 1820s to the 1860s, Vermont farmers made a great business of raising wool to satisfy the booming New England textile mills, bringing the sheep population at one point to well over one and a half million animals against a human count of less than three hundred thousand. Lamb and mutton for the farmhouse table were an inevitable sideline and spring lamb was especially welcomed as the first fresh meat after a long winter. But prices fell and the frontier pushed westward, opening up the wide flat plains of the Midwest for more economical ways to raise sheep.
Apples have blossomed in Vermont since colonial times when every hill farmer planted a few trees as part of their homestead. The fruit had many uses; they could be eaten fresh or stored to eat months later; cooked into pies or sauce; dried, canned, or pickled; and made into cider and cider vinegar. Cider—both sweet and hard—was the homegrown beverage of choice, and was also sometimes distilled further into applejack or apple brandy. Early varieties included Cox’s Orange Pippin brought over from Europe, Fameuse or Snow known for its snow-white flesh, and the whimsically named Sheep’s Nose. There were good keeper apples, apples with the juicy tartness perfect for cider, and naturally sweet apples that collapsed quickly into applesauce. As apple-growing developed into a commercial business in the late 1800s, apple diversity continued with traveling grafters carrying twigs across the state to ensure the perpetuation of preferred varieties. A few severe winters in the early 1900s, however, devastated many Vermont orchards and replanting focused on the most disease-resistant, cold-hardy, shippable varieties, led by the now iconic McIntosh. The harvests of the roughly 40 commercial apple producers left in Vermont today are still dominated by this shiny red variety, although many are rediscovering some of the older, less familiar apples.
Wheat: Historically, the Champlain Valley was a grain-growing area and was known, around the 1820s at its peak, as the bread basket of the U.S. As the Champlain Canal down the Hudson River opened up the market opportunity initially, the Erie Canal brought its demise because it opened up access to the flat plains of the west where grain production was more efficient than Vermont.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Hunting, fishing, and trapping
Subject
The topic of the resource
hunting
Description
An account of the resource
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.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Vermont Folklife Center Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Vermont Folklife Center Archive
fishing
hunting
oral history
trapping
Vermont Folklife Center