<>Vermont History
Summer 2005

Town Meeting 5
In Our Times

1. "Relative Market Position":This excerpt from the Vermont Ski Areas Study of 1970. It has been submitted to your town meeting in the interests of influencing your town’s decision concerning whether to allow local ski resorts to appropriate significant amounts of your town’s running water for snowmaking. Good idea or bad idea?

2. Battle of the Chicken Pot Pies: One of these recipes is from the cookbook of an elderly native-born Vermont woman from a hill town. The other is from the cookbook of a quaint country inn run by transplanted New Yorkers. Which is which, and why, and, of course, what does it say about Vermont in the 1970s?

3. "Vermont Scenic Landscapes": Yet another government commission on what wise use of Vermont land is! Jeez Louis, talk about going back to the 1870s! Or is it? What do you make of the perceptions of Vermont land in this study? What does it say about how the question of wise use has evolved in preceding decades? Are the state’s general values characterized by continuity, or by change? Do you endorse the commission’s recommendations?

4. Battle of the $169,000 Houses: Okay, you can afford a house for $169,000. Here are two: one in Berlin next to I-89, the other in Holland. Proximity to work isn't an issue; let's say you telecommute (yes, I know uphillers don't telecommute, humor me here). Which of these two houses would be your preference to buy?

5. Dull Short Stories Written by Vermont Nurses Slam: ah!, but what different nurses they were. The doll beaming out at you from the cover of "A Nurse Smiles" is our uphill candidate, a native of Fairfax who worked at Mary Fletcher in Burlington, in addition to being a school nurse in St. Albans. (And by the way, uphill women make the best nurses!) The other story was written by a woman, also a nurse, from out of state who's husband was dean of UVM's medical school.