My daughter, Shelby, and her husband, Julian, joined me for a week of hiking in Vermont. I jumped off trail and took a zero day in Bennington, VT in order to meet up. This turned out to be a stroke of luck as I thoroughly enjoyed the town.
I stayed at the Catamount Motel which is a favorite amoung the thru hikers. It is no-frills, but hiker-friendly. They provide a free shuttle from the trailhead, do your laundry for $4, give you “loaner clothes” to wear, and don’t get upset when you hang your tent to dry outside your door. The manager told me they rent to skiers in the winter and hikers in the summer. He said the hiker business dominates, accounting for 1300 room bookings a year.
There was a lot to like about Bennington. The downtown retains a traditional feel, with the strip malls and such being located a couple of miles outside of town. They have a shuttle bus service which for fifty cents took me out to Walmart to do my resupply.
The town is an accommodating place. Traffic will stop to let you cross the street even where there is no crosswalk. There are lots of parking spaces on the street with no parking meters anywhere to be found. One day I stopped at the visitor center to ask the best place to leave our car for a week while we hiked. The guy said to check at the town office next door where he thought they would take our license plate and let us park in their municipal lot. But, he said, “If that doesn’t work out, just park in our lot behind our building.”
The residents seem to take a lot of pride in their homes. There were some impressive flower gardens.
There were several pretty churches in the downtown area.
First Baptist Church
Sacred Heart St. Francis de Sales Church
My favorite church was “The Old First Church”, built in 1805, which sits at the top of the hill in the center of Old Bennington. I have seen some awe-inspiring churches like the cathedrals in Burgos and Leon, but nothing with the elegance and simplicity of this church.
The Old First Church
They hold Sunday services at the church, but it is open to visitors during the week. A unique feature is the boxed seats, which are present both in the main level and the balcony. According to my guide, the boxes are not assigned, but being creatures of habit, people tend to occupy the same boxes each week. This sounds no different than in any other church I have attended.
Inside The Old First Church
Boxes on the upper level
Reflecting its Puritan influence, there are no stained glass windows and little decoration. The church contains but one cross, which is formed by the ceiling moldings.
The Cross
The church construction shows great attention to detail. The doors on the boxes have narrower hinges at the top so they swing level even though the aisle is sloped. Wider clapboard was used on the upper sections of the exterior so that when viewed from the ground, the siding appears to have uniform width.
In the church cemetery, I visited the grave of Robert Frost. Next to the burial plot is a stand of birches and a plaque containing his poem In a Disused Graveyard.
Robert Frost Gravesite
Epitaphs
In a Disused Graveyard
The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
“The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.”
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can’t help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.– ROBERT FROST
I also paid a visit to the Bennington Museum which is the home of the Grandma Moses Gallery. The gallery contains largest public collection of the artist’s paintings.
Bennington Museum
Grandma Moses did not start painting until she was in her seventies, but would go on to crank out more than 1,500 canvases. In her early days, she sold her paintings for $3 to $5. She was unknown until some art collector saw her work in a drugstore window and bought their entire stock. Three of her paintings soon ended up in New York’s Museum of Modern Art in an exhibition entitled “Contemporary Unknown American Painters”, and the rest is history. Grandma Moses would become a cultural icon with her paintings showing up in such places as Hallmark greeting cards. In her later years, she could fetch $8,000 to $10,000 for a painting.
Here is one of the paintings the museum had on display. (No photography was allowed in the gallery, so I snagged this image off the web.)
Grandma Moses – ‘Bennington’
The placard by the painting said that the horse and buggies should have been automobiles to match the period, and that the monument and the buildings are not really visible from a single vantage point. Rather than being flaws, explained the placard, the painting was a juxtaposition of places and times (or something to that effect). Yeah, whatever. It’s a nice painting.
Now that I am advancing in age, it is nice to see that people will cut you a little slack when you are old. And Nancy, there is yet still hope for you to become a famous watercolor artist. Or a potter…
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