A Community-Produced Podcast
Roadside Vermont is a podcast series about the historical monuments, markers, and plaques that are all too easy to drive by and never stop to read. In each episode host Kelby Greene travels to the far corners of Vermont to talk to local storytellers, historians, and community stewards about the quirky, quizzical, and surprising events of the history hidden down the dirt roads and rural highways of the Green Mountain state. From vampires to missile silos, to pencil mills and famed fiddlers, this season will span all fourteen counties of Vermont. This season is supported in part by a grant from Vermont Humanities, in partnership with the Vermont 250s Commission and Junction arts and Media—JAM. Special thanks to story editor Sophie Crane.
Episodes
Episode 5 – The Estey Organ Company: On Canal Street in Brattleboro are the remains of one of Vermont’s most influential companies. In the 19th and early 20th century people across the country—and the world—played music on reed organs made right here in the Green Mountain state. What is a reed organ? And why were they so popular in a bygone era? Dr. Dennis Waring recounts the story.
Episode 4 – Ben Thresher’s Mill: A few miles off the interstate, on the banks of the Stevens river in Barnet, Vermont is a bright yellow mill. The rooms are crammed full of old tools, machines, parts, and pieces of a bygone age. One man, Ben Thresher, kept the mill going into the 1990s. Stan Crane, and a team of volunteers, helps to keep this place alive today.
Episode 3 – The Old Country Fiddler: In the early 20th century one Vermonter found fame as a traveling musician, humorist, and recording artist. Charles Ross Taggart was at the height of his career in the early 1920s, touring the country and talking so much about Vermont he earned himself a nickname: the Man from Vermont. Across the country he shared his stories, music, and dialect with his fellow Americans, and helped preserve disappearing parts of the Green Mountain State’s culture. Historian and fiddler Adam Boyce brings Taggart to life.
Episode 2 – Barre, By God: In 1793 a town meeting was held in Wildersburg, Vermont. The only item on the agenda was renaming the young frontier town. Wildersburg was a mouthful. Two passionate contenders offered up the names of their home towns back in Massachusets—but neither would concede to the other. Victory in a brawl gave one of the men the right to name Barre, well, Barre. Librarian and community historian Paul Heller shares this curious incident.
Episode 1 – The Manchester Vampire: In 1793 the town of Manchester Center, then Meads Mill, was rocked by an other-worldly threat. A young woman was supposedly coming from beyond the grave to suck the life out of the living. It was a vampire panic—one of scores that rocked rural New England in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The frenzied family looked for answers and settled on an unconventional remedy. Was the young Rachel Burton really a vampire? or could science explain the deadly incident? Shawn Harrington from VT Folklife unravels the story of the Manchester Vampire.
ABOUT THE PRODUCER: Kelby Greene (she/her) is a Norwich, Vermont based journalist and independent radio producer. Her work is about explaining the present through the past—looking for the precedents to seemingly unprecedented times. Rooted in a passion for rural places and their unique histories, she hopes to tell stories worth talking about: in the car, over dinner, and passing by the state’s hundreds of roadside markers.
