Are Vermonters All Green?

The following is an excerpt from Ron Strickland's book:   Vermonters -- Oral Histories from Down Country to the Northeast Kingdom. Bill Godfrey, a retired auctioneer and sugarmaker related this story. See our Book of the Month Reviews for more information about this collection of histories.

"People move in here and, of course, they think Vermonters are all green. When you get right down to it, they're the green ones. They try to tell you what to do, but the first thing you know they're out of business.

Up above here some folks from California bought a second home. I owned a seventy-five-acre lot up beyond theirs to which I had a right-of-way. One day the woman and her husband came down. "I'm your new neighbor from California," she said. I says, "You are?" And she said, "Yes. I've come down to see the man how has a right-of-way through our property." I said, "Well, you're lookin right at him."

She saw my big garden -- I always have about an acre -- and she asked if I had it every year. I said yes and she said, "Well, I'll show you how to make a garden next year. We're going to have a garden." I thought, Well, I've heard them folks talk before; it don't worry me any.

So the next year they plowed a piece out south of their house. I don't know what they planted in it, but I don't think they ever touched it. I went up there one day and the weeds were about four foot high; not a vegetable in sight.

They'd bought one of those rototillers that they claim never ball up. The weeds had wound right around that about the size of one of them old wooden nail kegs. She said, "Don't you want to take it down and try it?" I said, "No, I don't want to try it; I've got one I like better than that. Mine don't wind up so bad."

That was the last of their gardening. They moved away. But they'd come on here from California and they were going to show us how to do business.

A lot of these people come in here and try to tell ya how to do things and the first thing you know they're out on the limb."

Source: Vermonters: Oral Histories from Down Country to the Northeast Kingdom, Ron Strickland, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998.