Lucy Terry Prince: Early Vermonter and First African-American Poet

Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, February 4, 2023 for the “Remember When” column with the title, Lucy Terry Prince

Lucy Terry Prince by artist Louise Minks

On August 14th, 1821, an unusual obituary ran in the Bennington’s Vermont Gazette. It was particularly detailed and for a woman, a black woman. Furthermore, this “remarkable” and “much respected woman” in whom “there was an assemblage of qualities rarely to be found among her sex,” was one of the first settlers in what would become the state of Vermont. 

If that’s not enough, she is considered this country’s first known African American poet. 

The story of Lucy Terry Prince is as fascinating as it is complex. The many twists and turns of her 90-plus years cannot possibly be captured here – what follows is the barest outline of a life that bore witness to the very beginnings of what would become the United States. (For a meticulously researched, in-depth study of her and her family, see Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina’s Pulitzer Prize nominated Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend.)

In approximately 1730, a little girl was born in Africa, who, when barely out of toddlerhood, was kidnapped and shipped off to the American colonies. Most likely landing in Boston, she was sold to Samuel Terry and given the name Lucy. From there she was sold to Ebenezer and Abigail Wells of Deerfield, MA, becoming an integral – but far from equal – member of the family.

Stone Storytellers: The Stonewalls of Vermont

Originally published in the Winter 2022 Rutland Magazine with the title, “Tumbling through Time.” (All photos taken by Joanna Tebbs Young)

When I was teenager, my father was obsessed with old stone walls. Old Vermont stone walls, to be precise. 

“There’s an old stone wall,” he’d say as he attempted to steer our 1979 maroon Pontiac ship-of-a-station wagon around the dried mud waves of some back road. We hadn’t long moved from England and many a weekend was spent exploring our new home state, which for my father meant turning down every dirt road we happened upon. 

“Look at that old stone wall,” he’d say to no one in particular as my sister and I bumped and swayed on the beige spider-veined vinyl of the back seat. 

“Oh, that’s a really old one.” 

To humor him, I sometimes generously offered a “oh, yeeeaaah.” But seriously? A stone wall? Whoop-de-do.

~~

Thirty years later, my teenage son slouches in the back seat, straining against the tight seat belt as he tries to conform his length to our compact car. He is all hoodie, earbud cords, and legs. He begrudgingly joined this road trip only when bribed with promises of McDonald’s iced coffee. 

We’re driving on a not-quite-dirt road near Shrewsbury, near Windsor, Springfield, Reading, hillside properties either side. The leaves are gone, the views are spectacular. Even in the brown-gray of November, Vermont awes. There are fields and there are woods, there are lawns and there are barns. 

And there are old stone walls. 

“There’s one!” I say. “Wow, that one really survived well!”

“And another one! 

My husband obligingly acknowledges the tumble of rocks just visible in the tangled undergrowth. Silence from the back seat. Except for the rattle of ice cubes and scree-scree of a straw in a plastic cup. 

“So, I know you don’t really care,” I say, glancing back at my son, “but I’m going to tell you about these walls anyway. We are surrounded by history and knowing it is important.” 

 “Aaaand, you never know…” I smile with mother-is-all-knowing-ness. “Maybe one day you’ll tell your kids about them.”

He peeks out from under his hoodie. “Yeeeaaah.”

~~

Vermont’s stone walls tell a tale of time. Not merely evidence of the immigrant and native-born farmers who settled here in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these walls summon a far older story. The stones puzzle-pieced into these walls tell of a land that wasn’t always green, rounded, and rivered. Smoothed into craggy slabs and spheres over eons, these rocks are a reminder that long, long ago this land was created as retreating glaciers grazed granite mountains along their way. These stones, and the silt beneath them, are the literal bedrock of Vermont’s history and of the people who have chosen to call it home. 

Doing the Turkey… Trot?

Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, November 26, 2022 for the “Remember When” column with the title, Doing the Trot: Three Centuries of a Turkey Tradition 

In February 1912, seemingly apropo nothing, a contributor to the St Albans Messenger quipped, “Vermont does not expect to see much of the turkey trot until just before Thanksgiving.” 

If written in today’s paper, most readers would assume this statement referred to the popular Thanksgiving Day foot-race where turkey-costumed runners proactively burn the calories they will consume later that day. Although by 1912 the event that is now known as the Turkey Trot had been around for sixteen years (the first turkey-day race was held in Buffalo, New York in 1896) the race had not yet claimed the monika it holds today. 

So, what was the St. Albans Messenger referring to? We can safely assume that contemporary readers would have understood it perfectly well. It was a pun. Because in 1912 the term “turkey trot” was going viral (so to speak). 

Let’s start with the “trot” of actual turkeys.

Haunts of History: How Halloween – and mischief – came to Vermont

Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, October 29, 2022 for the “Remember When” column with the title, Up to No Good

Cabbage Night was also known as Gate Night

“There is in every village and hamlet in America, a vulgar class of recreant mortals, who endeavor yearly to signalize the anniversary of ‘Halloween,’ by acts and deeds, more characteristic of devils than of boys or men.”

This moral outcry, published in the November 2, 1872 edition of the Middlebury Register, was in response to a “disgraceful scene” that had occurred that Halloween night. On Seminary Street in Middlebury, “the witches” had taken “gates off their hinges, and exchanged them for a neighbor’s gate… other gates were borne away to secret places.” Among “other annoyances too numerous to mention,” “door bells were rung.” Two cast iron lions were also taken from their perches atop a stone entryway and thrown in the mud. 

Why were the boys up to such mischief, and why on October 31st specifically? To answer that question we have to take a whirl-wind journey through 3,000 years, give or take a few, beginning with the ancient Celts. 

Apples, apples everywhere: When homegrown became Vermont’s business

Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, October 1, 2021 for the “Remember When” column with the title, Apple of Vermont’s Eye

This roadside fruit stand was pictured near Bennington in 1939 (Library of Congress)

In September 1922, Bess M. Rowe penned an article for The Farmer’s Wife after she visited the Dimock Orchard Farm in East Corinth. In “Bringing Back the Old Trees,” Miss Rowe wrote of the charming conversations she had with the self-named “farmerettes” who, since taking charge while “the men” were away at war, continued to be instrumental to the farm’s successful operation. After Mr. and Mrs. Julian Dimock — a magazine writer and former professor, respectively, and farming novices both — moved to Vermont and started the farm 10 years earlier, they were proving themselves adept orchardists.

Their success could be put down to natural talent or, as Miss Rowe noted, their receptiveness to “modern ideas and methods,” and having “nothing to unlearn.” But the couple’s move into apple-growing also came at an opportune time in Vermont’s fledgling apple industry.

Early Female Education: Because Women were Cheaper

Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, June 18, 2022 for the “Remember When” column with the title, “Female education: From the home to the school house“

Sampler made in Orange, Vermont, with text: “Made in school A.D. 1814 by Roxcinda Richardson”
(Vermont Historical Society)

1800–20

Early Vermont women were far from uneducated. In the 1770s, literacy among females is estimated to have been at 60%, and by 1820, over 80%. But most girls educated prior to 1800 could only expect to learn enough basic skills to become a proficient housekeeper.

When Miss Ida Strong opened a girls-only school in Middlebury in 1800, it was the first of its kind in Vermont. The idea of designing schools and curricula specifically for girls was progressive and marked the beginning of a nascent trend in Vermont’s female education.

Educating women to be interesting wives

Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, May 18, 2022 for the “Remember When” column with the title, “Female education, for happiness and cordiality“

Sampler made in Orange, Vermont, with text: “Made in school A.D. 1814 by Roxcinda Richardson” in the 9th year of her age.
(Vermont Historical Society)

“Whatever the fine ladies think of the matter, it is certain that the only rational ambition they can have must be to make obedient daughters, loving wives, prudent mothers and mistresses of families, faithful friends, and good Christians.” 

From the “Of the peculiar Management of Daughters” in the August 14, 1802 edition of Randolph’s Weekly Wanderer

At a time when schooling was usually limited to subjects and skills deemed absolutely necessary to their future roles as wives and mothers, the above statement makes sense. But it was actually in an 1802 article written in support of furthering the formal education of young girls. 

Two years earlier, Miss Ida Strong – considered to be the “pioneer of female education in this state “ by Vermont’s more famous first lady of education, Emma Willard – had begun instructing the “various branches of Female Education” at the Middlebury Female Seminary. And in her belief that girls should receive a more well-rounded and thorough education than had their mothers and grandmothers, she was not alone. 

When Vermont almost gave Frost the cold shoulder

Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, April 23, 2022 for the “Remember When” column with the title, “When Frost almost got heaved.”

Robert Frost in the 1910s (Wikicommons)

One hundred years ago, long before April would be designated as National Poetry Month or March as Women’s History Month, the following little known story offers an interesting intersection of the two. In addition, our still sometimes not-so subtle resistance to “outlanders” has been brought into sharp focus over the last few years and so it is always timely to look to history to see just how far—or not—we have come. 

On April 17, 1922, Miss Fanny B. Fletcher of Proctorsville gave a lecture and poetry reading at Ludlow’s Fletcher Memorial Library. Miss Fletcher, who “spoke with the authority of one who had studied our Green Mountain poets well,” had been appointed by the Vermont Federation of Women’s Clubs to compile a list of potential state poet laureates. The “impelling motive” was that of “creating interest in Vermont verse.” 

Miss Fletcher’s talk, titled “Poets of Vermont” and “interspersed with humorous anecdotes,” was a follow-up to the Free Public Library Commission’s publication of Miss Fletcher’s candidate roster. Newspaper articles about the upcoming election encouraged Women’s Clubs around the state to study the poets’ work and then vote for their favorite.

This action would start a debate neither Miss Fletcher nor Mrs. O. H. Coolidge, president of the Rutland Woman’s Club and originator of the idea, could have anticipated. 

Radio Comes to Vermont

Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, March 19, 2022 for the “Remember When” column with the title, “Can You Hear Me Now?”

Radio in a home in Bradford, Vermont, 1939 (Library of Congress)

In April 1930, the U.S. Census enumerators knocking on Vermonters’ doors asked a question unlike any asked before (or since): “Do you own a radio?”

The census ultimately found that, in 1930, 40-50% of Vermont households did, indeed, own a radio. This ranked the state among the highest radio-owning states, lagging behind only a handful of other northern states (plus California), which boasted up to 63% ownership.

(Many southern states, on the other hand, trailed far behind with only 5-10% of their population owning a “wireless.”)

The first successful public American radio broadcast aired from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City in 1910, but restrictions placed on radios during World War I temporarily thwarted this new form of communication. But when the war ended, soldiers who had served as radio operators returned stateside, bringing with them their new technological skills.

Messiah in the Mountains: When Vermonters First Sang Hallelujah

Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, December 18, 2021 for the “Remember When” column with the title, “Hallelujah!: When the Messiah came to Vermont.”

A capacity crowd stands for the “Hallelujah” Chorus at the finale of Handel’s “Messiah,” an annual holiday concert at Rutland’s Grace Congregational Church, conducted by Alastair Stout.
Photo by Arthur Zorn

On May 7, 1822, Thomas P. Matthews, “Sec’y” of the Addison County Musical Society placed an ad for their “Annual Concert at the Meeting House in Middlebury.” Extending a “general invitation” to “all Choirs in the County,” he also specifically and “respectfully invite(d) the assistance of Ladies acquainted with the music.”

What music would that be? Well, not what you might expect in the valleys and hillsides of a sparsely populated, farm-dotted state 3,000 miles away from Europe: Handel’s “Messiah,” the “Grand Hallelujah Chorus” and excerpts of Part III, to be exact.

Three centuries later, for the descendants of those Middlebury singers, as it is for many Americans, “Messiah” has become as synonymous with Christmas as Santa Claus and eggnog.