Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), and author Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001), has ended her long-serving role as a trustee of the Vermont Arts Council.

Six years before the Battle of Bennington, the Green Mountain Boys were born when a handful of Vermonters frustrated the plans of a posse of New Yorkers in the “Breakenridge Stand-off.” Re-enactors and historians will celebrate the 250th anniversary of this little-known but important event Sunday, July 18.

My fellow Vermonters, today as we gather to celebrate the glorious history of the Fourth but we too wonder about our nation’s future. Let us take some consolation that many celebrants of bygone Fourths questioned if their nation would long endure.

In 1861 Gen. John Wolcott Phelps of Guilford had no authority to actually free slaves, but his tract became known as the Phelps Emancipation Proclamation.

The state’s first glassworks opened along the shores of Lake Dunmore in 1813. The lakeside workings, variously referred to as either the Vermont Glass Factory or Lake Dunmore Glass Company, consisted of a large factory complex that stood near today’s Sunset Lodge.

The oldest of the four chaplains on the USS Dorchester —Methodist minister George L. Fox—was from Thetford. When America had entered World War I, he had enlisted in the Marines at 17. Trained as an ambulance driver, he won a Silver Star on the Western Front for rescuing a wounded soldier from a battlefield full of poisonous gas—despite the fact that he had no gas mask. He stood just five feet seven; after Pearl Harbor, Reverend Fox enlisted in the Army the same day his 18-year-old son Wyatt, who survived the war, joined the Marines.

There was a lump in my throat as I sat in the stands at the Recreation Field when I saw this elderly, slightly overweight man, stroll, with a slight shuffle, to the mound with a borrowed glove on his left hand and toss the ball from the pitcher’s mound to the Mountaineer’s catcher. It was apparent that he no longer had a blazing, big-league fastball, but his pitch, slightly wobbly and off center, did reach the catcher mitt on the fly and was softly embraced. And I instantly thought back to memorable and poignant times of decades ago, when I sat transfixed, watching this ace take on my beloved Dodgers.

 In cooperation with the Vermont Division of Historic Preservation, UVM gave a group of civil engineering students an important task to prepare renovation plan for one of Kent’s Corner buildings. 

A recent rediscovery of a classic, 19th-century fossil site in northwestern Vermont is giving paleontologists a better understanding of Earth’s earliest lifeforms.