Brattleboro Historical Society podcasts.
It was 150 years ago this week that Brattleboro’s Overseer of the Poor signed an Indentured Service contract with a farmer in Dover for the services of a ten year old boy named Robert Drake. That’s right! In 1866, one year after the Civil War ended, and 4 months after the United States Congress abolished slavery, a ten year old boy from Brattleboro was made an indentured servant until he reached his 21st birthday. Here’s the story…
It was 103 years ago this week that the Vermont Phoenix reported that the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution was locating and marking the graves of Revolutionary War soldiers in Brattleboro and nearby towns. You may not be aware that Brattleboro is virtually surrounded by the history of the American Revolution.
In the spring of 1909, the completion of a new hydro-electric dam in Vernon created at 28 mile long lake, from Vermont’s southern boarder with Massachusetts to Bellows Falls, as waters began to back up and subsume much of the river-adjacent countryside. On average, the water level rose 30 feet and eventually flooded more than 150 farms. Among the lands subsumed by permanent flood waters were a series of petroglyphs sites near the confluence of the West River and Connecticut River dating from a precolonial epoch, in the lands now known as Brattleboro, Vermont. In August of 2015, after a 30-year search, underwater explorer Annette Spaulding found one of the petroglyph sites, subsumed in 1909 and unseen by persons for over a century. In March of 2016, Annette presented her finding to a Vermont Historical Society brown bag lunch at the Vermont History Museum in Montpelier. BCTV and the Brattleboro Historical Society were on […]
It was 86 years ago this week that the writer HP Lovecraft was home in Providence, Rhode Island creating his story, “The Whisperer in Darkness”. Lovecraft was a self-described writer of “weird tales” which often blended fantasy, horror and science fiction. “The Whisperer in Darkness” is one of those weird tales set in a fictionalized Vermont in an area much like our own Brattleboro.