We spent the night in Northampton, MA. Before we left town, we went for a grand breakfast and then stopped at WEBS, the most amazing yarn store I've ever seen. They snagged the domain www.yarn.com, which alone shows a great deal of forethought, but that's not what makes them so cool. The storefront has a large retail space, about the size of a Joanne's Fabric or similar, and it's got a great selection of yarn, needles, patterns, and accessories. All well and good and a lovely place to munge around for yarnish things… but what makes the place really cool is that there's a warehouse in back that's probably 3000 square feet of 6' shelves of yarn that's on sale for one reason or another. It's so big that there are signs above the aisles saying "100," "200," and so on, like a library. I understand that knitters all over New England drive there to make obeisance. The Babe spent about an hour there and got some lovely fabric and a pattern for a shawl.
Equipped with blue and green wool/silk blend and replete with lots of good coffee and a large breakfast, we headed north to Vermont. There wasn't a lot about the trip, really, except that it's very pleasant to see how heavily forested Vermont is, too. (We've just gotta get back to New England again!) We stopped at the Visitor's Center right past the Vermont border for a pit stop and got a few tourist brochures, then headed north. We turned left at Ascutney and eventually arrived at the home of the Babe's high school friend, Nancy.
Nancy's retired now after a career in civil service doing some pretty interesting stuff. Her husband is going to be retiring shortly and moving up to the new house with her. Meanwhile, she's been staying with Zach, who is a charming dog (and you know that I don't much care for dogs usually, so trust me when I say that he's a really charming dog). Zach is very well trained (Nancy did an exceptional job) and has a very sweet disposition.
We got settled in and had a quiet evening playing cards. The next morning, we set out for breakfast in town and to do Tourist Things. (Sadly, I left my camera at home, so I didn't get photos of our day out, which was a real disappointment to me.) Nancy said we should go to the Calvin Coolidge birthplace in Plymouth. The Babe and I were a little unsure of this at first but Nancy said we should go, so go we did.
I'm glad we went. I knew very little about Coolidge prior to this and I learned a lot. I'd known about his legendary devotion to hard work and a sober attitude, but I hadn't known much else. There was a timeline of his life with a number of pictures, stories, and mementos. I'd never really looked at his pictures before and I didn't realize that he'd been quite a handsome man. Since the pictures of him were almost always black-and-white, I'd also not realized he was a redhead. His wife was quite a beauty as well.
One of the stories told about Coolidge is that a guest at a White House dinner bet her friends that she could get Coolidge to say at least three words during the course of the meal. When she told Coolidge about the bet, he replied "You lose." However, unlike Coolidge's tight-lipped personality, his wife Grace was fun-loving and rather effusive woman and they had an exceptionally happy marriage. Not long after they were married, Coolidge approached his wife with 52 pairs of socks that had holes in them. She asked him if he'd married her to darn socks. He replied, “No, but I find it mighty handy.”
Coolidge became president when Warren G. Harding died. He was sworn in as president by his father, who was among many other things a notary public, in his home at 2:47am by the light of a kerosene lamp. (The house didn't yet have electricity or a telephone.) He was an able administrator who did a pretty good job of holding the country together and keeping things going, but I don't get the impression he was much of a leader: Coolidge was not the dynamic sort.
Coolidge stayed at the homestead for one summer (the Secret Service men slept outside in tents!) and conducted the business of the country from there. There's a small post office station there at the homestead. The postmistress's salary was $50/month plus a percentage on the postage she sold, which brought her $1500/month with all the mail.
One other memorable thing of Coolidge's history: his son, Calvin Jr., died tragically about a year after Coolidge become president: he'd been playing tennis at the White House and gotten a blood blister on his foot… from which he developed septicemia and ultimately died. It was a great sadness.
The homestead itself has a number of buildings including a pretty church that's still used by the townsfolk. We saw the house Coolidge was born in. The bed was decorated with a hand-sewn quilt that Coolidge had made himself at the age of 10. It started raining about the time we'd made the tour through all the buildings. We ducked into the café that's on the premises and had tea and pie while the rain poured down for the better part of half an hour, then headed off.
Our next stop was the Billings Farm Museum. The Billings Farm Museum is a working dairy farm that's been in operation since 1871. Frederick Billings, the founder, was also an early conservationist and planted more than 10,000 trees in the area in a successful effort to reforest Vermont (which had been logged off very severely by 1840). The museum is fascinating, with exhibits of farm tools and farm machinery, even dioramas of activities. There's also a video tape loop showing a carpenter making a large water tub (which is on display nearby) using water-powered tools of the time. There was also a quilt show going on the week we were there (the Babe was particularly pleased about that). We spent a couple of hours looking at everything and then left.
It had been a remarkably edifying day already--I felt a bit like I'd done two school trips without the schoolbuses or having to keep track of a trip buddy--but we wanted to stop at a maple sugar farm, so we went to Sugarbush Farm. The gift shop was very large: they sold a wide variety of cheeses, lots of maple sugar goodies, and tons of jams, chutneys, preserves, mustards, and the occasional sausage, all of which presumably comes from the neighborhood. There were several dozen jars of assorted this and that opened for sampling in one room; I stayed there and grazed for a little while. The Babe and I ended up getting a selection of maple syrup gift tins and maple sugar candies to take home with us, but a 72-month old preposterously sharp cheddar came with us for nibbling on the trip. (You can buy this stuff off of their website; if you like a sharp cheese then this one's for you.)
We got back to Nancy's, enjoying the Vermont hill scenery along the way. We did dinner there and then popped out to a church rummage sale that was well worth the trip: the Babe and I got a couple of lovely sweaters for 50 cents each, as well as a few other items. (Great rummage sale!) We returned home and curled up for the night.
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