It was a bit overcast today but has warmed up quite a lot so after breakfast we decided to walk up to Woodstock to have a look round. This was never going to take long as there are only 3 streets in Woodstock, Elm, Main and Pleasant Street, but they do have a covered bridge in the middle of town called Middle Bridge! It only took about half an hour to walk up to the green and back again so we then got in the car and drove to Taffsville Covered bridge which was built in 1836 and overlooks the dam on the Ottauquechee River. This is the second longest and third oldest bridge in Vermont, we got out and walked up to it then drove over it to get to the town of Quechee which is possibly even smaller than Woodstock! We parked the car and walked up to the covered bridge, this is relatively new but seems to have been built on the site of an older bridge and possibly beside what was once a mill as a pond has been created that then lets the water out over the rapids. Next we went to Norwich as we had picked up a historic walking tour leaflet when we were in Montpelier yesterday, on the way we drove past Quechee gorge which seems to be a shopping outlet! Norwich was granted a charter on 4th July 1761, the founding families purchased large tracts of wilderness in the southern end of town and they subsequently cleared the land of trees and rocks, they built the roads and used water to create grist and saw mills. A community grew and grand houses were built, the centre of town saw the construction of a Meeting house in 1817 and the American literary, Scientific and Military Academy in 1819, it was founded by Captain Alden Partridge who believed that in addition to the classics, physical education was essential to the development of a student and arranged field trips and “rigorous Pedestrian Marches some 60 miles in a single day” as part of the curriculum. The town became prosperous by exporting apples, wool and other agricultural products. Tanneries and potash, cloth dyeing and other factories joined the grist and saw mills. The Collage in Hanover brought affluent people who built stylish homes but prosperity began to erode in the 1840s as the price of wool dropped and people migrated west to farm or to the cities for factory jobs. By the mid 1800s the settlers who has begun to arrive in the 1760s had left leaving behind a rural townscape dotterel with fine examples of early nineteenth century architecture. This is another extremely small town in this case made up of one street called Main Street! We had originally planned to stop for lunch here but as it was only just gone 11 we decided to continue with our quest of finding as many of the covered bridges in Vermont as we can!! We were fairly successful finding eight more which were: S. Randolph VT, no other information available; an unnamed one that looked like people didn’t actually trust it as there was a path down to the river and up the other side that it looked like a number of cars had used; Flint Bridge – 1845; Mosley Bridge – 1883; Larkin Bridge -1902; Mill Bridge – 1883; Callie Bridge – 1883 and Howe Bridge – 1879 which was actually next to a really big farm that seems to be owned by the Howe family. Mid way through this selection we had stopped for lunch but it is rather ‘rural’ here so we didn’t linger long! Our final stop of the day was the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Park. It had been really hard to find out information about this Park but it seemed as though there was a house somewhere in the park, as it turned out there is a house that was built by George Perkins Marsh who has returned to Vermont and noticed that after the American Revolution and seen that most of the trees had been cut down causing severe erosion and flooding, the people had then just moved on to the next land where they could make a living. Marsh was a very early environmentalist and wrote a book called Man and Nature in 1864 which described the impact on the environment we were having, he made a plea for responsible land stewardship which was picked up by Frederick Billings who purchased the house after Marsh died. Billings had made a fortune during the California Gold rush and returned to his native Vermont to find barren hills and devastated countryside. His solution was to build a farm that would serve generations as a model of wise stewardship, he employed almost all of the local population to stop them moving and imported purebred Jersey cows and implemented the countries first forest management system. After his death first his wife, then his three daughters and finally a granddaughter Mary continued to manage the farm. Mary married Laurence Rockefeller and they continued the work, after Mary died Laurence gifted the house to the Park service who now manage it but had another house in the area so continued to visit until he died 7 years later in his 90s. We joined a tour of the house and had a number of rooms explained, for some reason we weren’t allowed on the 3rd floor although they do occasionally do tours of this! Having said that the rooms we did visit were magnificent, most providing spectacular views over the valley which almost take away from the decoration in the rooms. The tour ended just before 5pm so we came back to the hotel and sat on the deck for a while watching the sunset and updating the website.
