Rewinding the Past Year

I am on vacation for the next three weeks and I am going to spend lots of time doing research for this blog. I've got a lot of topics in mind for the upcoming weeks and months and once I start the new school year, I won't have as much time. I've ordered some books from Amazon.com and plan to spend some time in Barnard at the town hall, the Woodstock Library and the state historical library in Montpelier.

It's been a year since I started writing Upper Valley Anonymous, and I'm still amazed at the amount of hits I've had. I get more and more every week. The blogger website lets me know what people are googling before they choose my site, and which posts are most popular. The general store post has had more hits than any other poste by a wide margin, and much of my research over the coming weeks, as well as the book I ordered from Amazon, will be on general stores in New England, so that I can write a “General Stores Part II” article.

Again, I want to say that I would welcome any and all help, a guest writer or a regular writer who would like to contribute to “Upper Valley Anonymous”. It wouldn't have to be history related or court related, anything Upper Valley related at all would be great, including even recipes, household tips, book, reviews of movies, books or restaurants, hiking or camping articles, interviews of local celebrities or business people, or anything else you can think of. I would love to have a pastor of an Upper Valley church write some posts. I have a couple of ideas about how I would like to expand the scope of this blog, but I can't do it without help, especially during the school year.

I've been thinking about the families and places that I've discovered and written about over the past year. I knew quite a bit about Fort Number 4, and I chose to start the story there because I knew that place pretty well, having visited it quite often with school groups over the years. I didn't know the story of the Farnsworths, though, and found their family fascinating. The Farnsworth story presented one of the first questions I have that will never be answered: After the autumn when the English settlers abandoned the fort, after David and Stephen were captured by Indians, why did Stephen and Eunice return to the Fort at Number 4? Did Eunice want to go back? I get that they were heroes, they didn't give up easily, they were tough, they weren't weaklings, etc, but there must be more to the story than that. David was never healthy after his ordeal with the Indians and died soon after that, and Eunice lived for almost a year without Stephen, and had to go from Charlestown back to Massachusetts, without her husband, and with her infant son. It had to have been unbelievably difficult to return and start again. Then I followed Oliver Farnsworth from Charlestown to the founding of Woodstock, Vermont.

I randomly discovered Simeon Ide, and then coincidentally, he had apprenticed with Oliver Farnsworth when he was young. We know more about Simeon than we do about Oliver Farnsworth because Simeon's autobiography and biography are available to read online, but still, there are nagging questions in his story as well. How did he become so prosperous due to his hard work and then end his life nearly penniless? I get that it was a combination of bad business decisions and too much trust in his relatives, but still, it's hard to understand.

Then I googled the 1830's and the Upper Valley and found Noyes Academy, which I had never heard of, and just found that story fascinating. The nagging question associated with Noyes Academy was how anyone ever trusted George Kimball, and why in the world would Nathaniel Currier give him money – a significant amount of money – to start somewhere else after he had pretty much screwed everything up in Canaan. Of all the people I have “met” from the history of the Upper Valley so far, George Kimball remains my least favorite and is the closest to a villain that I have found. I can even sympathize with the Indians who captured the Farnsworth brothers, because they have a side to the story too, but I do not have much sympathy for the problems of George Kimball.

With the 150^th Anniversary of the Civil War, and all the events and media surrounding Vermont in the Civil War, I thought I should do a post on the Upper Valley in the Civil War. It was very random that I found Charles Aikens, and of course, there is a nagging question surrounding him as well. After he had left for nine months, and after he had been in the Battle of Gettysburg, why did he leave his wife and go back to war? Again, I get that the soldiers were heroes, doing their duty, bravery in the line of fire, but in terms of real life, to leave your wife and go back – it seems hard to understand.

I feel like I've written more about Vermont than New Hampshire, and I hope to rectify that in the coming year. To be honest, there is more information available in one place about Vermont. The Vermont Historical Library has all of the newspapers ever published in Vermont. The New Hampshire Historical Library's collection of publication isn't nearly as extensive, but I'm going to try to do a better job on the New Hampshire side in the coming year.

It's harder to find information on more recent families and events. I actually read one town history that said that nothing worth writing about happened after the Civil War. I'm finding plenty of interesting stuff, but certainly not as much information, so I'm looking forward to spending some time in Montpelier and various Upper Valley town halls during this vacation.