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dianeduaneThe Once and Future Republic of Vermont
(Edit: I should mention that Vermont has been and continues to be of interest to me because of family history. Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys -- some of the USA-to-be's earliest freedom fighters / terrorists, depending on which side of the street you're working -- put a price onmy six-times-great-grandfather's head because he spent a lot of time trying to get a significant portion of what would later become Vermont reassigned / reclassified as part of New York. (He owned 64,000 acres of this land, but the records say he "was never able to take possession", which may simply mean he wasn't wild about settling somewhere that a lot of people wanted to kill him.) It looks to me as if his position as a signer of the Articles of Confederation and as Mayor of New York City, as well as the support and good opinion of George Washington and the behind-the-scenes pressure of friends with a lot of power and money, kept him from coming to an untimely end (instead of being buried, old and full of years, in the middle of a whole lot of his own real estate, up near Schenectady).
I could go on about him for quite a while: he was a fascinating creature -- maverick legal talent, early real estate mogul, mover-and-shaker, troublemaker, sometimes politically astute and sometimes a complete idiot. He deserves a book to himself, one which I may or may not ever have time to get around to.
That said: I really like Vermont.
