e- 
 
 ^ ; 
 
 
 MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE 
 
 / BULLETIN 
 
 
 f Vol. XV SEPTEMBER, 1920 
 
 ' >V' . -niit t iHnihV Of THE - • 
 
 No. 1 
 
 Vermont As An 
 Educational Environment 
 
 An Address at the Opening of the 121st Year of 
 Middlebury College, September 23, 1920 , 
 
 BY PRESIDENT JOHN M. THOMAS 
 
 Published by the College, September, October, Novem- 
 ber, December, January, February, April, and July, and 
 entered as second class matter at the postoffice Middle- 
 bury, Vt., under act of Congress, July 16, 1894. 
 
VERMONT AS AN 
 EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT 
 
 OPENING ADDRESS 
 SEPTEMBER 23, 1920 
 
 At the fiftieth anniversary of Middlebury College, 
 August 22, 1850, Daniel P. Thompson of the Class of 1820, 
 author of “The Green Mountain Boys”, the book that gave 
 Vermont its fame, spoke as follows: 
 
 “About thirty years ago, a poor, untutored, unfriended 
 boy, who had never seen books but in visions, whose almost 
 every merit, indeed, consisted in 
 
 The dream, the thirst, the wild desire. 
 
 Delirious, yet divine — to know' — 
 
 found his way out of the woods to Middlebury College. 
 And during his residence here, having been inured to the 
 active habits which a boyhood life on a farm in a new part 
 of the country naturally engenders, and which cannot at once 
 be thrown off; and being withal an enthusiastic admirer of 
 nature in her more undisturbed retreats, he wandered, in his 
 vacations and leisure days, over nearly every square mile of 
 the surrounding region from the third Falls of the Otter 
 upwards, to its mouth downwards, — from the margin of the 
 beautiful Champlain, westward, to the summits of the tower- 
 ing Green Mountains, eastward, pausing in his solitary rap- 
 ture, over its picturesque scenes of hill and dale, lake and 
 river, and taking mental daguerreotypes of them all. 
 
 [ 1 ] 
 
“These, in after days, gradually grouped themselves 
 around the seat of the Alma Mater which had made him 
 intellectually what he was, — which had drawn to itself his 
 fond and clustering associations and which, therefore, became 
 the bright centre-piece of a thus curiously composed ideal 
 picture. 
 
 “The impresses of such scenes, — drawn by the glowing 
 pencil of youthful fancy upon the fresh, unvexed ground- 
 work of youthful feeling, and kept bright by such associa- 
 tions, — are prone to occupy a prominent place in the mind 
 of the maturer man, to be constantly struggling up to the 
 light, and forcing themselves upon the view of others. They 
 did so, at least, in his case; and in subsequently devoting his 
 leisure to the composition of a literary work, illustrative of 
 the Revolutionary action and early settlement of his own 
 loved Vermont, he laid the scene in this section of the coun- 
 try; because, while his general purposes would be equally 
 well thus subserved, it would afford him, besides the advan- 
 tages of eye-drawn description, an opportunity — a gratifying 
 opportunity, to bring out many of his long cherished pictures. 
 And in following the chain of his partially assumed events 
 from place to place in the rounds of his former rambles, he 
 came at length to the site of the future Middlebury; when 
 pausing, in fancy, on yon commanding swell destined to be 
 crowned by the proud and enduring marble pile emblematic 
 of the honor and permanency of the institution nestling within 
 its walls, — when pausing thus, and pondering on what that 
 spot was, — on what it has since become, — what it had been 
 to him, and what great and benign influences it had scattered 
 abroad through and upon thousands of others in the land, 
 he, in the fullness of feeling, exclaimed : 
 
 ‘O, if there be a town in Vermont, whose first set of 
 inhabitants deserved the appellation of high-minded and 
 worthy, it was the early settlers of Middlebury. Distin- 
 guished from their first pitch on the fertile banks of the 
 
 [ 2 ] 
 
Otter, for enterprise, firmness and intelligence, they were 
 among the foremost to resist the aggressions of a government 
 which, unwittingly perhaps, had lent itself to aid the unprin- 
 cipled scheme of a few rapacious land speculators; while 
 the opening scenes of the Revolution found them ready to 
 engage, with the same alacrity, and with the best of their 
 means, in the greater work of achieving the independence of 
 their whole country. And scarcely had the storm of war 
 passed over, and the sun-light of peace begun to break in on 
 their infant settlement, before they united, with a zeal as 
 extraordinary, considering their means and circumstances, 
 as it was commendable, in rearing, by private munificence 
 alone, a collegiate institution which, for many succeeding 
 years, did more towards elevating the moral and literary 
 character of Vermont than any one cause operating within 
 her borders. And her Alumni, now many of them in emi- 
 nence at the bar, and in the pulpit, from the humble school 
 room to the Senate chamber of the nation, but nobly dispens- 
 ing her light among the people of every clime upon the face 
 of the broad earth, whither, in the fearless and enterprising 
 spirit of their fathers they have scattered themselves, — now 
 to teach the arts to the boorish Russ or besotted Turk, — now 
 to assist the enslaved Greek, or South American, in his 
 struggles for freedom, and now to rear the standard of the 
 Cross among the degraded Pagans of the East, — her grateful 
 Alumni, often, turn back, in fancy, to their beloved Alma 
 Mater, 
 
 “To linger delighted o'er scenes recall'd there," 
 
 and admire, and bless the noble and self-sacrificing spirit of 
 Painter, Chipman, Miller, Storrs, Matthews and others of 
 her munificent founders, who made themselves poor in 
 pecuniary estate, that they might make the children of their 
 country rich in knowledge’. ” 
 
 What interests me particularly in this noble tribute is 
 
 [ 3 ] 
 
Thompson’s testimony to the influence of his Vermont envi- 
 ronment in his education. His wanderings in fields and 
 woods up and down this valley, his excursions in the moun- 
 tains, to Lake Champlain and Lake Dunmore, wrought 
 mightily upon his mind and spirit. The hills and the 
 forests were important elements in his education. He studied 
 deeply and intimately also in the early records of this region, 
 so that in scaling mountains and threading forests he did 
 not merely look upon beautiful scenery, but he made real to 
 his mind the character and spirit of the men who settled these 
 valleys and won and saved the freedom of the early Ver- 
 mont commonwealth. 
 
 We look out to-day upon the same majestic mountains 
 as greeted the eye of the author of the story which gave the 
 world its fixed impression of the character of Ethan Allen 
 and the early Vermonters. The same documents and sources 
 are open to us as those which so stirred his imagination, 
 and every year is bringing new ones to light. We ought to 
 make more of our Vermont environment. I trust we may 
 soon find larger use in an educational way of the magnifi- 
 cent Green Mountain Estate which is the unique possession 
 of this college. Many of you are Vermonters by birth and 
 residence; others have chosen Vermont as the place of your 
 college education. To all of you Vermont has much to give, 
 through its rugged climate, its beauty of valley and moun- 
 tain, and particularly through its marvellously interesting 
 and instructive history, especially the story of its founders, 
 the men who made Vermont. 
 
 In an old hair-cloth, brass-studded trunk, a faithful 
 repository for many years of some of our college archives, 
 there is an age-yellowed bit of paper, entitled, “Schedule of 
 Articles to Beneficiaries of the Northwestern Branch of the 
 American Education Society, from the Depository in Middle- 
 bury, 1821/’ It records that W. P. Hooker, “Receiver” of 
 
 [4] 
 
the Society — the term evidently has another connotation than 
 financial embarrassment — -had delivered in behalf of the 
 
 Northwestern Education Society, — 
 
 
 “To Henry Boynton 
 
 
 
 1 vest, valued at 
 
 $ 2 50 
 
 
 1 pr. socks 
 
 50 
 
 
 1 hat (I suppose) 
 
 3 50 
 
 
 2 shirts and 1 shirtee 
 
 4 50 
 
 
 2 handkerchiefs 
 
 1 00 
 
 
 1 silver watch 
 
 9 00 
 
 To 
 
 Solomon Hardy 
 
 
 
 1 pr. thick pantaloons 
 
 4 50 
 
 
 1 thin vest 
 
 2 00 
 
 To 
 
 Frye Bailey Reed 
 
 
 
 2 pr. socks 
 
 1 00 
 
 
 2% yds. cloth 
 
 3 34 
 
 
 1 double cravat 
 
 67 
 
 
 7 yds. cotton cloth 
 
 1 75 
 
 
 2% yds. blue gulled cloth 
 
 4 50 
 
 To 
 
 Luther Shaw 
 
 
 
 2 % yds. cloth 
 
 2 67 
 
 
 vest pattern 
 
 75 
 
 To 
 
 Merrit Harmon 
 
 
 
 8% yds. great coat cloth 
 
 11 00 
 
 
 4% yds. coat cloth 
 
 6 50 
 
 
 7 yds. cotton for shirts 
 
 1 75 
 
 To 
 
 William P. Atwater 
 
 
 
 1 surtout 
 
 10 00 
 
 
 2% yds. cloth for pantaloons 
 
 3 25 
 
 To 
 
 Lyman Gilbert 
 
 
 
 1 pr. mittens 
 
 50 
 
 
 
 $76 68 
 
 The above prices are nominal — some high, others low, — as 
 they were valued by the travelling agent and those who made 
 the donations. Some other articles may have been delivered 
 in my absence. W. P. Hooker, Receiver.” 
 
 Henry Boynton was a student in Middlebury College 
 in the Class of 1826 and was bom in Cornwall, Vermont. 
 Solomon Hardy hailed from Hollis, N. H., and was gradu- 
 ated in 1824. He became a Home Missionary in the West, 
 and was the father of seven sons. Frye Bailey Reed of the 
 
 [ 5 ] 
 
Class of 1824 entered college from Brookfield, Vt., and was 
 a missionary in western New York and in Wisconsin for 
 fifty years. Luther Shaw , 2nd, came from Rutland, gradu- 
 ated in 1826, served missionary churches in Michigan for 
 thirty years, and sought recreation in his old age as travel- 
 ing agent for the American Bible Society. Merrit Harmon 
 of Rupert graduated in 1825 and took his “great coat” on 
 missionary service to Michigan, whence he later pushed west 
 to Iowa. William P . Atwater , of Castleton, was a member 
 of the Class of 1824, but the $10 surtout must have spoiled 
 him, since he did not graduate. The fifty-cent mittens of 
 Lyman Gilbert , of Brandon and the Class of 1824, failed to 
 win him to missionary service, for he spent his life in the 
 luxuries of a Congregational pastorate in Newton, Mass. 
 
 My interest in this old schedule is in the location of 
 the towns from which these young men came, and the geo- 
 graphical portion of the name of the society of which they 
 were beneficiaries: Hollis, N'. H., and the Vermont towns 
 of Cornwall, Brookfield, Rutland, Rupert, Castleton, and 
 Brandon. And the organization was the “Northwestern 
 Education Society”, organized and promoted to assist young 
 men of the Northwest to an education. Other documents in 
 the old trunk prove conclusively that the object of this society 
 — the pioneer of American Education Societies — was not to 
 send men to the Northwest, but to help Northwestern young 
 men. Vermont was then — or at the time when the Society 
 took its name — the Northwest. There was a time when 
 Vermont was the western frontier. All through the years 
 of its foundation and settlement it was regarded as the far, 
 forbidding West. Fifty years after the beginning of rapid 
 growth of the State, the designation Northwest was not 
 incongruous in the name of one of its benevolent agencies. 
 
 The feel of the West — consciousness of possession of 
 immense spaces, of marvelous fertility, of unexampled eco- 
 nomic opportunity — came over the early settlers of Vermont. 
 
 [ 6 ] 
 
Writing in 1794, Dr. Samuel Williams said, — “This is the 
 youngest of the States, an inland country, and now rapidly 
 changing from a vast tract of uncultivated wilderness , to 
 numerous and extensive settlements. In this stage of society, 
 industry and economy seem to produce the greatest effects, 
 in the shortest periods of time.” (History of Vermont, 1794, 
 p. viii) The impression of tremendous size and of a won- 
 derful new wealth of nature is thus recorded by Dr. Williams 
 in another passage: — “Uncultivated by the hand of man, it 
 (Vermont) presents to our view a vast tract of woods, abound- 
 ing with trees, plants, and flowers, almost infinite in number, 
 and of the most various species and kinds.” (ibid. p. 66) 
 Again he says: — “The land included within these limits is 
 of a very fertile nature, fitted for all the purposes and pro- 
 ductions of agriculture. The soil is deep, and of a dark 
 colour; rich, moist, warm, and loamy. It bears corn and 
 other kinds of grain, in large quantities, as soon as it is 
 cleared of the wood, without any ploughing or preparation; 
 and after the first crops, naturally turns to rich pasture or 
 mowing.” The familiar Western ring is heard in Dr. Wil- 
 liams’ comments on “the power with which nature acts in 
 the productions of vegetable life in this part of America,” 
 denoting, he says, “an energy, a power in the vegetable life, 
 which nature has never exceeded in the same climate, in any 
 other part of the globe.” (ibid. p. 80) 
 
 Visitors to Palestine, observing the poverty-stricken 
 appearance of the country, have often marvelled at the 
 Biblical descriptions of it, as a land flowing with milk and 
 honey, “a land of wheat and barley, and vines and fig trees 
 and pomegranates; a land of oil olives and honey.” With 
 all allowance for the bleeding taxation of the Turk, it does 
 not seem possible that those stony hillsides could ever have 
 been described as “a land wherein thou shalt eat bread with- 
 out scarceness, thou shalt not lack anything in it.” The expla- 
 nation is that the visitor approaches Palestine from the well- 
 
 [7] 
 
tilled fields of Europe and America, while the people who 
 found it a land flowing with milk and honey approached it 
 from the desert. In contrast with the steppes of Moab and 
 the sands of Arabia, the holy land was a paradise of fertility 
 and wealth. To realize the mind of any people as they 
 settle a new country, one must consider its contrast with the 
 region from which they came, not its qualities in relation to 
 territory which has since been opened for settlement. 
 
 The men who made Vermont came from Connecticut 
 and western Massachusetts, and largely from the hill towns 
 in those regions. Any one who has travelled in those parts, 
 or who has observed from a car window from Bellows Falls 
 to Boston, with the numberless acres of rocks and scrub 
 oaks, can well understand the impression of boundless fertil- 
 ity, of almost miraculous exuberance of vegetation, which 
 was made upon the early settlers by the rich valleys of 
 Vermont. They felt themselves in God’s new country of 
 boundless wealth and promise — the same feeling that has 
 come over the Western pioneer in every stage of his march 
 to the Pacific. 
 
 The kinship of Vermont with the ever-receding West 
 is further manifest in the rapid acquirement of substantial 
 means by the men who made the commonwealth. The West 
 has always been a get-rich-quick country, in purpose, ambi- 
 tion, and spirit, if not always, in fact, in individual instances. 
 Such was Vermont in her early days, — an opportunity to 
 improve one’s condition, at least to a competence, by leaps 
 and bounds. A year or two ago an exiled Vermonter in 
 the woods of Wisconsin sent me a pamphlet reciting the 
 matrimonial misfortunes of one Elias Hall, who was brought 
 by his father from Cheshire, Conn., to Pittsford, Vt., in 1785, 
 and who removed in 1800 to Middlebury. The title page 
 reads > — 
 
 [ 8 ] 
 
DISCLOSURE OF FACTS 
 
 in consequence 
 of a 
 
 DECREE FOR ALIMONY 
 
 BY THE 
 
 Supreme Court 
 
 Addison County, January Term, 1823, 
 against 
 
 ELIAS HALL 
 
 “The worst of curses yet bestow'd on man, 
 “Since first in paradise his woes began, 
 Ts to be doom'd to drag the load of life, 
 'Forever goaded by a scoulding wife." 
 
 Montpelier, Vt., 
 
 1825. 
 
 I will not entertain you by a recital of Elias Hall’s 
 struggle for freedom, but I am interested in the incidental 
 references in his narrative of woe to his business adventures 
 and the success which attended them. Hall came to Middle- 
 bury in 1800, when the settlement was only about a dozen 
 years old, a young man without a cent. He went to work in 
 a shop and learned the trade of a gunsmith. He says: “After 
 about ten years’ industry, and the most rigid economy, I 
 
 [9] 
 
found, by estimation, that I had acquired from ten to twelve 
 thousand dollars worth of property; consisting of building 
 lots and buildings in Middlebury, wild lands, mills, etc. I 
 had acquired the whole by my own industry and hard earn- 
 ings, not by speculation.” (p. 5) Imagine a young mechanic 
 doing that in Middlebury today, or in any other town in 
 Vermont ! 
 
 You have to travel to the far West before you find simi- 
 lar rapid increase in estate, or the spirit of ambition and 
 achievement which leads to it. It is a pioneer accomplish- 
 ment. Elias Hall did it in Vermont, but it was when Ver- 
 mont was the pioneer West, when every town in the State 
 was filled with young men alert to establish their fortunes, in 
 the real Western spirit. 
 
 To the possibilities of rapid economic advance in the 
 early days of Vermont, the historian from whom I have 
 already quoted, Dr. Williams, bears striking testimony. He 
 says: “Amidst the hard living and hard labour that attends 
 the forming a new settlement, the settler has the most flatter- 
 ing prospects and encouragements. One hundred acres of 
 land in a new town does not generally cost him more than 
 he can spare from the wages of one or two years. Besides 
 maintaining himself, the profits of his labour will generally 
 enable a young man, in that period of time, to procure him- 
 self such a tract of land. When he comes to apply his labour 
 to his own land, the produce of it becomes extremely profit- 
 able. The first crop of wheat will fully pay him for all the 
 expense he has been at, in clearing up, sowing, and fencing 
 his land; and, at the same time, increases the value of the 
 land eight or ten times the original cost. In this way, every 
 day’s labour spent in clearing up his land receives high wages 
 in the grain which it procures, and adds at the same time a 
 quantity of improved land to the farm. An acre of land 
 which, in its natural state, cost him perhaps the half of one 
 day’s labour, is thus in one year made of that value that it 
 
 [ 10 ] 
 
will afterwards annually produce him from fifteen to twenty- 
 five bushels of wheat, or other kinds of produce of equal 
 value. In this way, the profits attending labour on a new 
 settlement are the greatest that ever can take place in agricul- 
 ture; the labourer constantly receiving double wages. He 
 receives high wages in the produce of his com or wheat; and 
 he receives much higher wages, of another kind, in the 
 annual addition of a new tract of cultivated land to his farm. 
 This double kind of wages, nature with great benevolence 
 and design has assigned to the man of industry, when he 
 is first making a settlement in the uncultivated parts of 
 America: and in two or three years he acquires a very com- 
 fortable and independent subsistence for a family, derived 
 from no other source but the earth and his own industry.” 
 
 The same author’s description of the activity and enter- 
 prise which characterized the Vermont settlers reads like the 
 prospectus of a Western Board of Trade. “A spirit of activ- 
 ity and enterprise is everywhere found in a new State. 
 Depending upon their own industry, and having nothing to 
 expect from speculation and gaming in public funds, or from 
 the errors or vices of government, the views of the people are 
 directed to their own employments and business, as the only 
 probable method of acquiring subsistence and estate. Hence 
 arises a spirit of universal activity and enterprise in business. 
 No other pursuits or prospects are suffered to divert their 
 attention; for there is nothing to be acquired in any other 
 way. Neither begging, or gaming, or trading upon public 
 funds, measures, and management can be profitable employ- 
 ments to the people who live at a distance from wealthy cities 
 and the seat of government. The only profitable business is 
 to pursue their own profession and calling. To this pursuit 
 their views become directed; and here their activity and 
 enterprise become remarkable. No difficulty or hardship 
 seems to discourage them; and the perseverance of a few 
 years generally serves to overcome the obstacles that lay in 
 
 [ 11 ] 
 
their way at first. It is only those who are of this enterpris- 
 ing spirit who venture to try their fortunes in the woods; and 
 in a few years it generally raises them into easy and comfort- 
 able circumstances.” 
 
 It is a temptation to parallel many characterizations and 
 praises of early Vermont with familiar boastings of Western 
 historians and promoters, as each new territory from western 
 New York to the Pacific slope has been hailed as the country 
 of man’s perfect dreams. The climate of Vermont is the 
 most healthful and invigorating in the world; the woods and 
 streams produce game and fish in abundance never witnessed 
 elsewhere; the mean period of human life exceeds that of 
 . the ancient and populous countries of Europe ; the soil exhib- 
 its a power of vegetable life never exceeded in any part of 
 the globe; the political institutions guarantee perfect freedom 
 and protect all classes in perfect enjoyment of every right 
 and happiness; the population is made up of the brave and 
 hardy, the sifted and selected of older societies. All this 
 is thoroughly Western and stamps the men who made Ver- 
 mont with the unmistakable mark of the Western pioneer. 
 
 Vermont was the first Northwest in the manner of its 
 settlement and in the character of its population. It was 
 opened for possession just when the American people began 
 their rapid march toward the Pacific. It took nearly 200* 
 years of American settlement to reach and people the valleys 
 of Vermont. Southward the progress had been fully as slow, 
 and the ragged line of settlement hugged close to the summit 
 of the Appalachians. After the Revolution began the great 
 migration, which is the outstanding fact in American history, 
 which peopled the vast convex of the continent from the 
 western slope of the Alleghenies to the foot-hills of the 
 Rockies. From Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay to south- 
 ern Vermont the advance of settlement was scarcely a mile a 
 year. The settlers were few; Indians held the country and 
 the soil was forbidding. The forests were clogged with vines 
 
 [ 12 ] 
 
and brush, and it took a man a life-time to clear 30 acres. 
 On the prairies a strong plow and four horses changed virgin 
 soil into fertile farm in one season. There the frontiers- 
 man’s advance was 20 to 30 miles a year. It was this physi- 
 cal fact which enabled the nation to take possession of the 
 vast mid-continent in a fourth the time which had been 
 required for the conquest of the Atlantic slope. 
 
 The territory of Vermont is not prairie, but it far sur- 
 passes lower New England in agricultural possibilities. In 
 the Connecticut and Champlain countries and the innumer- 
 able narrow but fertile river-beds of Vermont, the New Eng- 
 lander first came into contact with rich American soil. He 
 managed to wrest a living from the sand dunes of Massa- 
 chusetts for the love of God and his dislike of Episcopacy, 
 but he caught the breath of heavy-laden fields, he thrilled 
 with the possibilities of the wealth of a virgin continent, 
 when first the West opened before him. 
 
 The men who made Vermont were the advance guard 
 of the American army of conquest of the West. They did 
 not come for religious purposes. They were satisfied with 
 both religious and political conditions in the older communi- 
 ties. But they wanted more land and richer fields. They 
 were not pushed out; they were invited in. It was not un- 
 desirable conditions behind them, but attractive opportuni- 
 ties before them, which were the dynamic of the movement. 
 In all the settlements of the maritime Atlantic plain, it was 
 not so much the desirability of the new region which effected 
 the change of home as the dissatisfaction of the immigrants 
 with conditions, sometimes economic, sometimes religious, 
 sometimes political, in the countries of the old world. But 
 the opening of Vermont was the beginning of a new move- 
 ment with a new motive. The vast continent had begun to 
 beckon. Generations had come at last which could turn 
 their backs definitely and forever on the old world, and who 
 felt their fortunes bound up solely with the new. Then was 
 
 [ 13 ] 
 
begun the real conquest of the continent, and in this conquest 
 the men who made Vermont were in the forefront and opened 
 the highway for the great horde which followed them, the 
 vast army, larger than ever an emperor commanded, of the 
 American Western pioneers. 
 
 The settlement of Vermont has its kinship, not with 
 Jamestown and Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, but with 
 the extension of American territory over the vast interior. 
 The original Vermonter was not the weak successor of John 
 Smith and John Alden, but the precursor of the Western 
 frontiersman. Ethan Allen and Daniel Boone were brothers 
 in spirit, pioneers of a new race, the stalwart men who sub- 
 dued the continent and wrought for America its home. It 
 is a far cry from the Pilgrim Fathers, with their Cambridge 
 learning, their psalm singing, and their missionaries to the 
 Indians, to the Green Mountain Boys, with their buckskin 
 breeches, their rude, brusque speech, and their beech seal for 
 Tories, but across all the miles of forest and prairie the 
 Green Mountain Boy is own brother to the cow-boy of the 
 plains and the trapper and fur-trader of the Rockies. The 
 older communities of the Atlantic seaboard have contributed 
 much to the life of the nation. They have promoted culture, 
 swayed national policies, developed American industry, and 
 preserved a stable finance. But the national domain, the 
 continent whose broad extent is the foundation of the dis- 
 tinctive American culture, whose wealth has enforced the 
 will of the nation, furnished food for her industry and saved 
 her finance, was won by the pioneer with the squirrel cap. 
 He has had too little honor in American history. His rough 
 speech and forbidding exterior have not especially com- 
 mended him to those who write books. His vices have been 
 plain enough in all too many instances — coarse language, 
 intemperance in drink, anger that burned fiercely, hatred of 
 an enemy that lasted till death. But his virtues are also 
 discernible — he could fell the largest trees and ford the 
 
 [ 14 ] 
 
wildest rivers, he could shoot straight and wait for his range 
 under fire, and take care of himself alone in the forest in the 
 dead of winter; he was afraid of nothing under God’s open 
 sky, and his boy could take up his axe and rifle at an age 
 when European offspring are scarcely out of the cradle. If 
 virtues are qualities which God needs for His work, the qual- 
 ities of the American pioneer must be judged less harshly 
 than our drawing-room doctrines have been inclined. 
 
 The men who made Vermont were pioneers of pioneers 
 — the ambitious, discontented, restless element from a com- 
 munity made up of eager and impetuous spirits. The Amer- 
 ican wilderness had already begun to do its work with them. 
 Their clan had been trained for 150 years in the conquest of 
 the forest. They knew the manner of the god of the land. 
 They knew its game and how to hunt and fish. There was 
 no need for thousands of them to starve, as at Jamestown, 
 while experiments were being made in trying to grow Euro- 
 pean crops in the European way. They had learned the new 
 life necessary for the new world and they pressed into its 
 heart with the eagerness of men who were creating a new 
 civilization. 
 
 Such men are always democratic and lovers of freedom 
 in the extreme. They had no other idea than that they were 
 complete masters in all affairs in the new lands they had 
 bought and paid for, and which they had won from the 
 wilderness by severest hardship and toil. They carried 
 individual and community liberty to such a length that it 
 impressed conservative and cultured observers from the sea- 
 board region as the veriest anarchy and disorder. When 
 Timothy Dwight, ex-President of Yale College, traveled in 
 northern New England at various times from 1798 to 1810, 
 he noted the radical and unconventional ideas of large por- 
 tions of the inhabitants and characterized the Vermonters as 
 “Arabian troops”, “lovers of disorder”. Their tendency to 
 go into politics he especially deprecated. His judgment of 
 
 [15] 
 
the inhabitants of the new region doubtless represents fairly 
 the opinion of the more cultured communities. I mention it, 
 not because I think his judgment correct, but to illustrate the 
 new force which was coming into American life. He thought 
 the people of Vermont restless, bold, ambitious, cunning, 
 talkative, skilled in land- jobbing. The noise of the men in 
 the taverns talking politics until late at night disturbed his 
 rest, and he lit his candle to record in his note book that 
 “first settlers are usually those who have met with difficulties 
 at home”. 
 
 This is President Dwight’s idea of the men who, as he 
 confesses, had already struggled onward from New England 
 to Louisiana, i. e., the Mississippi valley. It is the conserva- 
 tive Easterner’s idea of the Western pioneer, whom we can 
 now more justly estimate from the results of his labor, the 
 winning of the continent for the national home. 
 
 Undoubtedly, from his point of view, President Dwight 
 was a fair and impartial observer. But as a seaboard man 
 he could not understand nor portray sympathetically the new 
 style of manhood which the American wilderness was creat- 
 ing, just as later the East could not understand Abraham 
 Lincoln. Nothing shows this more clearly than his char- 
 acterization of Ethan Allen. Dr. Dwight describes him as 
 a man of “confined education, naturally haughty, restless, 
 and enterprising. In his conversation he was voluble, blunt, 
 coarse, and profane; in his pretensions to knowledge, daring; 
 and in his assertions, bold and peremptory. The confidence 
 which he seemed to possess in himself naturally inspired con- 
 fidence in others, still less informed ; and they really believed 
 that he who asserted so positively must be sure that his asser- 
 tions were true. With these advantages, and these only, he 
 early obtruded himself upon the public as an opposer, and 
 ridiculer, of Christianity; and gloried in the character of an 
 Infidel. A little circle of loose persons will always gather 
 about a man of this description. Allen was surrounded by 
 
 [ 16 ] 
 
a herd of such men, both parties being equally pleased; he, 
 to be listened to as their oracle; and they to learn that a 
 virtuous character was no better than a vicious one, and that 
 God would punish vice neither here nor hereafter. By his 
 own companions he was heard with attention and credit; 
 and at times triumphed over modest antagonists by peremp- 
 toriness and effrontery, by rudeness and ribaldry.” And 
 this was all that President Dwight could find to say of the 
 father of the freedom of Vermont, the man who, whatever 
 his limitations, saved the very life of our brave little Com- 
 monwealth. It was the seaboard man again who remarked, 
 in the person of Benedict Arnold, that Allen was “a proper 
 man to lead his own wild people, but entirely unacquainted 
 with military service”. 
 
 The Hudson and Champlain valleys, the sea-level high- 
 way from the Atlantic to the St. Lawrence, seem to form a 
 natural unity of all American territory to the east and to 
 include Vermont with New England. Vermonters are blood 
 relatives of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hamp- 
 shire, and filial homage binds us to their fellowship. A 
 thousand ties, in culture and thought, in religion and edu- 
 cation, in commerce and industry, unite us with the parent 
 States, and we glory in our New England heritage and 
 proudly claim our part in New England eminence and worth. 
 
 Nevertheless Vermont is not duly appreciated nor rightly 
 understood until she is accorded her place as the last-bom 
 child of New England and the first bold emigrant to the 
 West. It was the West in Vermont which President Dwight 
 failed to appreciate. Our people were too rough for him 
 and there was too much of the frontier about them. But it 
 was the “wild people” of Ethan Allen who represented the 
 New America, the America which was to become the Ameri- 
 can nation, rather than the cultured theologian or the gentle- 
 man soldier of the older communities. Two years after the 
 Declaration of Independence, Massachusetts banished 60 
 
 [17] 
 
graduates of Harvard College among some 300 Tories, and 
 the roster of the English sympathizers is declared to read 
 like “the beadroll of the oldest and noblest families con- 
 cerned in the founding and upbuilding of New England civil- 
 ization”. The “wild people” never sold out their country. 
 They made her what she is, subduing the continent for her 
 home, and in conquering forest and prairie they created the 
 type of man who was to stand before the world as the repre- 
 sentative of the new continent — tall, sinewy strong, keen in 
 wit, droll in speech, piercing to the heart of a matter with 
 shrewd, discerning instinct, quick to pick a quarrel where 
 his rights were concerned and never ready to lay it down till 
 the last ball had left his rifle, generous in service for the 
 common good, believing in the Declaration of Independence 
 as his very gospel, his face to the empire in the west, whither 
 his restless spirit led him on until he had stamped his insti- 
 tutions and his character on the nation whose home he 
 had won. 
 
 In the history of America the East has always been a 
 fixed term. It has denoted, and still denotes, the Atlantic 
 seaboard, Europe-facing and Europe- thinking, conservative, 
 commercial, manufacturing, tending to quiet, ordered ways, 
 guardian of old-world culture, nursery of American litera- 
 ture, American learning, and American thought. So long 
 as America was confined to the fringe of colonies on the 
 Atlantic, the nation remained economically dependent, 
 European in thought and culture. The nation was made by 
 its expansion toward the west. Its real independence — intel- 
 lectual, spiritual, and personal — was achieved in the con- 
 quest of the wide spaces of the mid-continent. The Ameri- 
 can genius was wrought on the ever-receding frontier. 
 
 The first stage of the march in the conquest of the con- 
 tinent was accomplished by the Green Mountain Boys. Our 
 glory is not alone in Plymouth Rock; it is far more on the 
 prairies and beneath the Rockies, where the spirit that awoke 
 
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first in the Green Mountain valleys has made America great. 
 Vermont, 'first inland State, first proved the power of expan- 
 sion in the American people. She was the first State which 
 was never a colony, never in bondage to any man. Her clos- 
 est kinship is with the free American pioneers, not with the 
 old-world colonists. She can never be content as a minor 
 state of New England, a dependency of Boston. The men of 
 Vermont started for the west, and, if they did not get far, 
 they got far enough to catch the spirit. It is ignorance of 
 her history and denial of her genius that advise her to remain 
 selfrcentered, training her children toward the occupations 
 which their fathers happened to choose. Vermonters are 
 citizens of great America, pioneers of a continent, and we 
 demand an education toward the life of the nation. 
 
 Old Vermont! — to the hurrying traveler along her east- 
 ern and western highways, a wilderness of wild mountains 
 with a narrow foreground of meager farms, but to those who 
 know her defiles and passes a net-work of fertile valleys, 
 smiling in plenty and content; baptized in struggle and bred 
 to diplomacy and war, her children fighters all, yet as true 
 a lover of peace as ever lived beside great hills; cautious, 
 close-mouthed, secretive, trained by bitter experience to the 
 wisdom of suspicion, yet opening her heart to her friends 
 with the candor of a child; excelled by none in unity and 
 brotherhood when roused to a common cause, then lapsing 
 by reaction to jealousy and neighbor hate when times are 
 tame and dull; never less defeated than when her case has 
 gone against her, and always prompt with a motion to recon- 
 sider; the passions of two peoples struggling within her, 
 the stable East and the restless West; loving her mountain 
 sod with devotion unsurpassed in any land beside the seven 
 seas, yet thrusting her children out to a better country — a 
 mother of pioneers prodigal beyond all others; brave and 
 self-sacrificing to a fault, proud and self-reliant, yet in her 
 secret heart an underlying fear born of the bitterest disap- 
 
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pointments that ever attended the birth of a State; land of 
 contradictions to her friends from without and to all who 
 seek to put her genius into words; but to those who know 
 her and to whom she accords her love, straightforward and 
 single in loyalty to her mission: dear old Vermont! 
 
 MEMBERS OF THE CLASS OF 1924: 
 
 We welcome you this morning to the college of Daniel 
 P. Thompson, where he learned just 100 years ago to love 
 the Vermont forests and the story of the Vermont pioneers. 
 We hope you will come to love them, too, and to imbibe as he 
 did the strength of the hills. Whether from near or far, you 
 will look out for four years on the graceful valley and the 
 glorious mountains beyond, and, if you view them with 
 sympathetic soul, they will teach you beyond any power of 
 books. These mountains have been makers of men, men of 
 strength, lovers of freedom more than lovers of life, simple 
 in bearing, unpretentious, not effusive, but keen in mind, 
 shrewd in judgment, unconquerable in will, good fighters, 
 content that life should hold its inevitable disappointments, 
 but never yielding their faith nor their pride. It is character 
 we seek to build in you, Vermont character, founded on the 
 strength of the hills, which we believe our college symbolizes 
 both in outward form and in inward spirit. However 
 learned or skilled you become, we shall have failed in our 
 chief purpose unless we reach this goal. Very frankly and 
 definitely Middlebury College is committed, not to the setting 
 of all wisdom before you that you may choose we care not 
 what, but to the exposition of that wisdom which makes men 
 of the calibre of the men who made Vermont. There was 
 never more need of such men than just now. To this work, 
 therefore, let us set ourselves with all our strength. 
 
 I now declare you duly matriculated students of Middle- 
 bury College and members of the Class of 1924. 
 
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