Driving through rural Vermont, one is struck b how beautiful the country is, and how unpopulated it is. I understand that Vermont was settled n the late 1700’s, but that people found it a hard place to live in-and by the early 1800’s an xodus was uderway-some Vermont towns actually became ghost towns. I guess that Vermont (being mountainous) has a small amount of good farmland (the river valleys)-but once this was taken, you had thehilltops, which were unfertile andgiven to early frosts. So, did the early settlers just say “the hell with this-let’s move to Ohio”?
Was life too hard in Vermont?
I’m not sure where you got your “mass exodus” information from, but this population chart from Wikipedia suggests otherwise.
Pop. %±
1790 85,425 —
1800 154,465 80.8%
1810 217,895 41.1%
1820 235,981 8.3%
1830 280,652 18.9%
1840 291,948 4.0%
1850 314,120 7.6%
1860 315,098 0.3%
1870 330,551 4.9%
1880 332,286 0.5%
1890 332,422 0%
1900 343,641 3.4%
1910 355,956 3.6%
1920 352,428 −1.0%
1930 359,611 2.0%
1940 359,231 −0.1%
1950 377,747 5.2%
1960 389,881 3.2%
1970 444,330 14.0%
1980 511,456 15.1%
1990 562,758 10.0%
2000 608,827 8.2%
Est. 2008[1] 621,270 2.0%
The Vermont wikipedia page has a table of population over time. The only periods of negative growth were during the Depression and WWI, and growth in the early 19th century was ~10% per decade.
I recall hearing that the large early rise in population at the end of the 18th century was due to people fleeing to the then independent Republic of Vermont after Shay’s Rebellion. Probably not true, but its a fun story.
If you’re interested in New England ghost towns and why they were abandoned, I recommend the book Abandoned New England: Its Hidden Ruins and Where to Find Them by William F. Robinson but it seems to be out of print.
Early farmers in northern New England actually preferred to build their farms and villages on ridge tops and hillsides, not valleys. The valleys tended to be too wet and swampy for crops unless artificially drained and the dampness was considered unhealthy. Also, cold air tends to sink at night so the growing season is actually longer higher up the hillside as long as you don’t go too high.
With the advent of the Erie canal and later the railroads, it ceased to be economically feasible to grow much grain in New England and many of the hilltop farms and villages were abandoned. Others concentrated on dairy farming, depending largely on inexpensive grain imported from farther west. Many of the people who left the hilltop farms moved to towns in the valleys to work in factories powered by water. Others moved west. I recall from my New York history class that central and western New York state was settled largely by people from Vermont and western Massachusetts, and not so much by people from eastern New York. Joseph Smith, for example, was born in Vermont, but his parents moved the family to western New York shortly after he was born in 1805.
Many of my ancestors were born in New England, particularly in Vermont, and emigrated to Upstate New York as it opened up. From my own Chaffee line, I see large families being born in Berkshire Township, some staying there or in heighboring townships and some emigrating to New York and further west, during the first half of the 19th century. I’m unsure how this could be statistically documented, but my hunch is that (a) Vermont population increased but (b) the birth rate exceeded the carrying capacity and many Vermont natives emigrated – enough staying to cause steady increase in state population, enough leaving to justify Ralph’s perception.
Right. There was a massive emigration from New England into New York at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century even before the building of the canals, just because of high land prices in New England and relatively cheap land in New York.
As a former Vermonter, I can assure you that life was not easy. We used to say our largest export was the young people. Lack of jobs other than farming was the main cause of this.
However, we imported a lot of “flatlanders” too, and as the ski and tourism industry grew, more people came to work in the lodges, ski areas, motels, etc. And summer homes also brought temporary people who often decided to live there permanently.
Of course, the summer is short. Last year it came on a Tuesday.
The agriculture business was almost exclusively dairy farming, which to me is possibly the most difficult of all occupations. The damned cows have to be milked twice a day, 365 days a year, and pretty much at the same time each day. The summers are spent working from sunup to sundown haying. You really have to love farming to run a one or two-man dairy farm. Farmers depended upon their sons to help and take over eventually, and more and more these guys decided against it, and left the state. Big companies bought up these smaller farms one by one, and there are still about the same number of cows being milked now, but far fewer farms.
The state is indeed so mountainous that many farms are hilly. The Vermont hillside cows have the legs on one side shorter than the other so they can graze on the slopes. 
Oh yeah, the rocks. The land is so rocky, farmers have to remove them by the hundreds. That is why there are so many stone fences there. Some farmers said the only way to plant corn was to load shotgun cartridges with corn and shoot it into the ground. When asked what the main crop of Vermont was, the answer, of course, was rocks.
In the 50s and 60s, the state pushed hard for industrial development, and many large companes such as IBM opened plants there. Most executives who explaned this said it was because the style of living there was conducive to attracting good scientific and executives, and many people came in to work at those places.
Incidentally, back in the 50s, it was fun to note that Vermont had more cows than people. Vermot-born President Calvin Coolidge was once asked why there were more cows than people, and he replied, “We prefer 'em.”
The state was strongly conservative politically for most of its history until the early 60s. A Democrat governor, Phill Hoff as I remember, was elected then and was the first Democrat governor in 104 years. Since then it has all gone downhill. The influx of more and more liberally-minded people has changed that so now it is far more liberal than conservative.
It is an astonishingly beautiful state. The winters may be severe, but gorgeous, as is the fall foliage season, and the summers are great. Many states have great foliage displays, but because Vermont has so many sugar maples, whose leaves turn a brilliant scarlet, it is one of the most amazing displays anywhere.
Oh yeah, the maple syrup business is big too. As early spring is when most farmers have little to do, they started tapping the trees then and it is an extra cash crop. For years there has been a contest between Vermont and New York as to which produces the better syrup, and we won most of the time.
Don’t get me started on this subject again!
The difficulties of grain farming in New England were memorably captured in the short story The Devil and Daniel Webster by Stephen Vincent Benet, in which a struggling New Hampshire farmer sells his soul to the devil after breaking his plowshare “on a rock that he could have sworn hadn’t been there yesterday”.
One seldom thinks of Stephen Douglas as a New Englander, but he was another Vermont “exoduster”, who moved to Illinois in 1833 at age 20. But as everyone else has said, it wasn’t so much a depopulation as a case of northern New England growing more slowly than the rest of the country.
The bigger boom came between 1790 and 1810, after the land title controversy was finally cleared up with the validation of the “New Hampshire Grants” and Vermont’s admission as a state.
Well, KlondikeGeoff already said a lot of what I was going to, but another thing worth mentioning is that in the late 19th through early 20th century, the big thing in Vermont wasn’t dairy farming, but sheep farming. Sheep are much better at being raised on the hilly, rocky land than cows. Vast amount of woodlands were stripped down (giving rise to a large logging industry as a byproduct.) By the end of the 19th century, there were very few trees anywhere. All the beautiful foliage that brings all you damn flatlanders up here every October is barely a century old.
The sheep industry died in the 20th century, and beef and dairy were becoming a lot bigger, so a lot of farmers just switched over, while a lot more others went under. That’s why if you walk in a lot of the woods in Vermont, it’s not uncommon to come upon an old stone fence or foundation in the middle of nowhere.
You sort of beat me to it, but I was going to say that that was the situation in Massachusetts in particular. If you fly over MA now you’ll note that it is heavily forested, but 100+ years ago this was not the case. The land had largely been cleared for raising sheep. Supposedly (I’ve never seen it) you can walk through the forests and come across old stone fences and building foundations in what appears to be the middle of nowehere.
I don’t have a specific cite although I believe this is discussed in Bill Bryson’s “A Walk In The Woods”.
It wasn’t so much that people left Vermont, as it was nobody new came. Population was driven by immigration, not by births. And as one poster noted, as children grew those that didn’t inherit land found cheaper land out west, or those that went to school (such as Dartmouth) found jobs in Boston and New York City.
Actually New Hampshire and Maine didn’t experience real growth in population till Boston became overcroweded. Most of the population growth in those two states has been as a result of the suburbs of Boston moving north as the cost of living close in to Boston has risen. (Indeed Boston proper recently passed NYC and San Francisco as the most expensive city in the USA to live in)
Textiles and such which drove growth in early America were relocated down south were it was cheaper to find labor.
So Vermont simply didn’t get any new people coming into it. Similar you see places like North Dakota today. There is nothing really to attract new people into it, so the population growth is small.
Yes, I have hiked through rural Vermont, and it is common to come upon cellar holes in the woods, also old lilac bushes in the woods-that was somebodies dooryard, long ago. It is kind of sad to see the deserted areas where people once lived. I have often thought of retiring to Vermont, but I don’t know if I an handle the winters.
This is the biggest factor, I think. The last glacial period scraped most of New England down to bedrock. When the last round of glaciers melted around 10,000 years ago, they left glacial “till” almost everywhere. Till is a mixture of broken bits of scraped-up bedrock, ranging in size from small grains to house-sized.
The first settlers in Connecticut farmed the sediment-covered river valleys. Little did they know that this was just about the only arable land in the state. Everything is else is rocks.
It’s no wonder that New England farmers headed west as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
I’ve heard that New England is actually more forested now than at any time since the first Europeans arrived. (Actually, this is starting to reverse itself with the continued spread of suburban sprawl.) Much of this forest consists of the regrowth of forest in abandoned 18th and early 19th-century farms.
Out behind my last house were thousands of acres of woods, all privately owned, and all criss-crossed with stone walls. These stone walls all marked out the edges of fields, but their primary purpose was to just get the rocks out of the fields so they could be plowed.
I pulled more rocks out of my yard than I could count when I first tried to establish a lawn in our newly built house.
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Right bouv, that was well worth mentioning about sheep farming. I forget the exact details, but many were the great Marino sheep, that used to be only in Spain. They were well guarded so nobody could take them out of the country, but some guy managed to smuggle some out and brought them to Vermont where they flourished and produced wonderful wool. Can you remember his name?
Another interesting result of that was the building of many wool mills along any river where they could have a water wheel. They became electrified later and it was a big industry. Unfortunately, again in the 50s and 60s, most of these mills shut down and went down south where there was cheaper labor.
Laughed at your comment about the tourists flocking in during fall folaige season. We called them Leaf Peepers. They drove about ten MPH down our roads, causing massive traffic jams as Vermonters were trying to get somewhere.
FYI, I worked for the then Vermont Development Department and did pictures for Vermont Life Magazine (which my father started). He also was the founder of the Vermont Country Store in Weston. Been there?
Where do you live? We were in Waterbury Center, and later in Springfield.
No mention of a Spanish monopoly here, but there’s some interesting stuff on the Vermont-Australian sheepherding connection: Merino - Wikipedia
One reason for a population exodus in the early 19th century was the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816. The harsh winter did drive many people out of the higher, colder, rockier New England land and toward the more hospitable lands farther West.
One interesting outcome of this was that the Smith family moved from their Vermont home and ended up in Upstate New York, where young Joseph Smith said that he dugup the Golden Plates of Moroni at Hill Cumorah, and started the Mormons. You can visit the Smith Homestead in Vermont and get the whole story. But the story of being forced out by that cruel winter was a common one that year.
Just wanted to add my 2 cents. The reason Vermont and New Hampshire grew in the late 1700’s is because there was no land left in southern New England. New Englanders had very large families back then. In the first few generations there was enough land that a father could give a big farm to all of his children, or failing that, they could go settle a new town. By the 1760’s Southern New England was mostly all settled and the family farms had been divided up as small as was economically viable. This left a generation that rightly feared they wouldn’t be able to achieve the same standard of living as their parents (incidentally, many historian consider this angst to be one of the instrumental factors driving the events in MA that led to the American Revolution, see: The Minutemen and Their World). One of the option for these left out sons was to try and make a go at it in the poor agricultural lands in Vermont and New Hampshire.
I’ve never been myself, but I know of it and my mom and several of my aunts make a trip down there a couple of times a year, at least.
I say ‘down there’ because I’m from Bristol, though I’ve lived in Burlington as well.
Just a note: I have loved your posts in this thread, Klondike Geoff, but as a native son of Northern New York, I do have to take exception to the penultimate paragraph of post #7. Vermont has the reputation, to be sure, but for the true connoisseur of maple syrup, there is no comparison – New York is far the better!
I have never read a statement that is more false than this.