By Guy Page

The famed woman aviator who would disappear two years later over the Pacific Ocean “attracted the excited attention of Vermonters and the Vermont media” in a March, 1935 visit to Vermont.

As reported by Vermont Public Radio in 2013, Earhart had just completed her Hawaii to California flight two months earlier and was floating high on the warm updrafts of public adulation. It wasn’t her first trip to Vermont. She’d landed in White River Junction and St. Albans, and had stopped in Burlington twice the previous year, once to be awarded the Key to the City by the mayor. 

Earhart had at least one other Vermont connection. She had been the matron of honor at the wedding of Norwich University President Porter Adams, an important figure in the early history of U.S. aviation. In March she visited Norwich then delivered her address on the future of the airplane to the Legislature.

VDC couldn’t find a copy of the speech – although no doubt one could be found in the state archives.