The legacy of Castleton’s Calvin Coolidge Library

Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, February 25, 2023 for the “Remember When” column with the title, The Right to Read and Savor.

This article was written in response to a plan to remove the majority of books from Vermont State College’s libraries. This terrible idea was — thankfully — eventually abandoned.

“A library is the nucleus of an educational facility… a college can only be as good as its library.” — Castleton State College Long Range Objectives Report, 1976 

Students studying at Castleton State College’s Calvin Coolidge library in 1958

Last week I drove over to Castleton to my alma mater. I walked through campus, stepping over the plaques embedded in the path, each engraved with a name of the school, from Rutland County Grammar School in 1787 to today’s Castleton University. Even thirty years after I graduated, this still feels like home. Pushing open the door into the Calvin Coolidge library, I was filled with the same mixed sense of calm, comfort, and excitement as I had as a student. Surrounded by the intangible presence of knowledge, I spent many hours here studying, researching, browsing—learning who I was and wanted to be. 

Michele, one of the incredibly helpful and knowledgeable Castleton librarians, showed me into the Vermont Room where the information I needed for this column is stored in file boxes, on shelves, and safely behind glass (including a green bound copy of my own History Honors thesis). There I sat for a few hours—and wanted to stay for many more—carefully leafing through the ephemera, much of which is priceless (and un-digitizable) pieces of Castleton’s—and Vermont’s—history: two hundred-year-old log books, one hundred-year-old course catalogs, faded photographs of Mercel-permed students, and mimeographed letters from the 1960s. 

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.

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.