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Gilles and Carmen talk about all things Mount Mansfield Community. Special guests, community events.
Welcome to Talk of the Town with Jills and Carmen. We're your go to voices for everything happening right here in the heart of our community.
Speaker 2:That's right. From local news to the stories that matter to you, we're here to bring you the conversations that keep you informed and connected.
Speaker 1:Whether it's events, interviews with local leaders, or just those behind the scenes insights, we're bringing the pulse of the town straight to your ears.
Speaker 2:So sit back, relax, and let's dive into what's happening around town today. You're in good company with Talk of the Town.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to Talk of the Town with Jills and Carmen. I am Jills.
Speaker 2:And I am Carmen.
Speaker 1:It doesn't change, does it? Oh my goodness. We are back with part 2 of our exciting look into the Jericho Historical Society. And so And
Speaker 2:again yeah. And again, it's gonna be fascinating.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's fantastic. And, I think it's in this interview she's going to be talking about the fixing of the of the old red mill down there.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Where they where their headquarters are. And at that time, the, they hadn't finished the construction. Right now, as we record this episode, there is a crane down there doing work.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and I've seen people out there. I've seen Sue out there taking pictures and all of that. I've seen people watching. So And
Speaker 2:there's a there's excitement because right it's right there on the river, and when the water is in, man, they don't wanna lose this this building. No. You know? It it has a historical significance, of course, and they have plans to expand, hopefully, to upstairs or whatnot, but it's important to keep that wall retaining and take the pressure of the water. So, yeah, it was really neat to see the crane finally in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was really After the interview. Yeah. Yeah. Hey.
Speaker 1:We know stuff. Look at this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was kinda hard. I'm driving by and I'm checking it out. I'm like, I gotta focus on driving, but it got me wanting to see that wall, you know. So we don't advise you do that while you're driving.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Don't rub your neck.
Speaker 2:Go park there and then take a walk down down to the water, and you'll see that wall, you know, and, and why there's a need to fix it.
Speaker 1:Anyway So so we're I'm excited about today's interview with the part 2 of this conversation. You know, last week we really talked about Snowflake Bentley, but today we're gonna hear more about the history of Jericho and kind of Snowflake Bentley's impact in that history.
Speaker 2:As well. Yeah. And she's a wealth of knowledge because she's, you know, she's her family has had such an impact on the on the community because it's been here for generations, you know, and so she knows a lot. And that was that was just the blessing with that piece, so it was good.
Speaker 1:It is. So let's dive in.
Speaker 2:Yep. Let's do it. To keep it running.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So let's move into the Snowflake Bentley then.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:Who was he? Let's give us a little bit of a story. K. I mean, I know we homeschooled, and that was always a a story, whether it was in co op or in families' homes, that people went and got the books out of the library Yep. And learned all about it.
Speaker 2:So it was really cool when we moved here, and we actually came into the museum and actually saw some some of the original stuff. So tell us about who he is, you know, his story. Like, they would expand on the on the kids' book
Speaker 3:Absolutely. For us. Wilson Alwyn Bentley was born February 9, 18 65 on the family farm up there in the Nashville section of Jericho. He was the younger of 2 sons, his brother Charlie being 2 years older, and his parents, Edwin Edwin Bentley and Fannie Colton Bentley. Fannie had been a school teacher prior to her marriage, so she taught Willie and Charlie at home.
Speaker 3:And from a very, very early age, Willie was fascinated with everything in nature. He roamed those back hills and and, you know, looking at flowers and plants and trees and insects and everything in nature. When he was about 15 years old, his mother gave him an old microscope from her teaching days, and that's what really started this. He looked at everything from a blade of grass to a flower petal. But the first time he looked at a snow crystal, he was captivated with just how beautiful and delicate it was.
Speaker 3:And most people don't know the difference between a snow crystal and a snowflake, so the common vernacular is snowflake. That's just kind of a general term, but, actually, they're crystals. A snow crystal is the little individual ones that he photographed. A snowflake is 2 or more of them stuck together. So when you see those big fluffy flakes, those are a whole bunch of snow crystals stuck together.
Speaker 3:So Willie, after seeing this beautiful snow crystal, spent the next 2 winters working in an unheated woodshed at the back of the house with a makeshift table with his microscope and a sketch pad. He got a piece of dark fabric from his mother, and he would step out into the storm, catch the falling snow. And when he saw one he wanted to sketch, he'd take a a straw from an old broom, touch it to the center of the crystal and use that to transfer it to the microscope slide, holding his breath so it wouldn't melt. Then he would put it under his microscope and sit there again holding his breath and sketching. Turn away and catch your breath, go back to sketching.
Speaker 3:And he did over 400 sketches over those next 2 winters. And at some point in time, he came to realize that he was not an artist, and what he was sketching was kind of a poor representation of what he was seeing. Now keep in mind that when he was born in 18/65, that was just before the end of the Civil War when photography had come into fairly widespread use. His father had a cousin in Connecticut named Henry Seeley, who was a portrait photographer and had been there to the house, so Willie had seen cameras. And he got this idea that if he could combine a camera with a microscope, he could photograph these snow crystals and share this beautiful discovery with the world.
Speaker 3:The problem was that the camera he wanted cost a $100. And to give you a little perspective, land was selling for about $3 an acre. So that represented a 33 acres of prime farmland to a Vermont farmer who wasn't about to spend that kind of money even if he had it on something he saw as a boyish whim. But fate paid a played a hand in this. Fannie's parents lived about 3 miles up the road in West Bolton, and they had amassed quite a fortune.
Speaker 3:They had a 280 acre farm. They owned sawmills and forest land all over the town of Bolton, And the father had died in 18/72. So when the mother died in 18/80, she left this huge estate. And most of it was divided among her sons who ran the farm and the sawmills and everything, But Fannie received a piece of property and the sum of $100. Now an interesting side on this, during this time, 18 sixties, there were many parts of this country where women could not inherit.
Speaker 3:They couldn't own property, anything. It was always the their father or their brother or the spouse and nearest male relative. Women couldn't didn't have a lot of rights to own to money or anything in many parts of this country, But von Braun was a little more progressive, and women could inherit here, and they could own property. In fact, Fannie's parents owned everything jointly, which was kind of unheard of in that day and age, and their will was joint. So when Fannie received this inheritance in 1881, it was her money.
Speaker 3:She did, however, according to family lore, did at least talk with Edwin about it and convinced him to let her spend the money on something he saw as foolishness. But, she purchased the camera and microscope for Willie for his 17th birthday in 18/82. And it's interesting because Willie, I know from, interviews he gave and and just various statements that he made over the years, he didn't even know where the money came from. Because in those days, let's face it, he was 16 years old and grown up business stayed with the grown ups. But that's where the money actually came from, which was a mystery for most people for many, many years, and I discovered it several years ago when I found the estate papers.
Speaker 3:But once Willie had the camera and the microscope, it began that began a 3 year journey. He had to figure out how to put it together, which was a challenge in and of itself. He got that that figured out. And then by the winter of 18/83/84, he had it all figured out on how to focus it and and all the the mechanics of it. But then every photograph he took was overexposed.
Speaker 3:He was getting too much light. So by the following winter, he had a pretty good understanding of what he needed to do. If anybody's done photography, you've heard the term f stop. A stop is something that controls the amount of light coming in. So that winter, he experimented with several different ones, and he finally got it right.
Speaker 3:On January 15, 18, 85, a month before he turned 20 years old, he took the world's first photograph of a snow crystal. And over the next 46 years, he took over 5,000 photographs. Never found 2 alike. And even probably more importantly, every photograph had a number and a corresponding entry in his journal that he kept where he would document the temperature, the humidity, the part of the storm it came from, all of this data. And he studied it.
Speaker 3:Over the 1st dozen years or so, he didn't write about this or talk much about his theories, but he created what today we would call a spreadsheet. And from studying that data, he developed theories on how snow crystals form in the atmosphere. They were later proven true. He's he developed theories on a lot of different things, about snow formation, about clouds, and and he figured out a way to measure the size of a raindrop. So a lot of what meteorologists still know today about how snow crystals form is because of his research.
Speaker 3:And in 18/80/18/98, he hadn't written about any of this, but a professor from the University of Vermont named George Perkins heard about it. And he worked with Willie, encouraged him, and helped him write his first article for a scientific publication. And Willie then wrote prolifically over the next decade and was completely ignored by the scientific community. Not one word of anything, good, bad, or indifferent appeared in anybody else's writings, any other scientific publications. They ignored him until they couldn't.
Speaker 3:But I think possibly probably the reasons there were two reasons we we believe, he was ignored for so long was, first of all, there was probably some level of arrogance. What does some farmer know that we don't already know? But also, he was very eloquent in his style of writing. I say often he had the mind of a scientist and the soul of a poet, and you see it in his writings. And, of course, that's a no no in scientific writing.
Speaker 3:It's supposed to be very objective, just factual. And he couldn't help but wax poetic. He just said go off on these flowery pearls, so they ignored him for a long time until they couldn't. But colleges and universities all over the world were learning about him and were writing to him and wanting to buy copies of his negatives for teaching purposes or his prints. And he happily obliged, and he charged 5¢ apiece, which is what it cost him to make a duplicate.
Speaker 3:And when he died in 1931, he was still charging 5¢ apiece. He never raised his price because it was never about the money for him. It was always about sharing this beautiful discovery with the world. And his he never married or had children, but Charlie did, his brother. And Charlie had 8 children, and they owned the farm together after their parents died.
Speaker 3:So Willie lived in one half of the house, and Charlie and his wife and 8 children lived in the other half. And his favorite of the 8 children was the 6th child, Amy. She worked with him. She she, spent a lot of time with him growing up and she even worked with him doing part of the process called etching of the negatives for which he paid her a penny a piece and she was my grandmother. So I grew up on her farm here in Jericho surrounded by the cameras and the photographs and the negatives and the equipment and, of course, her wonderful stories.
Speaker 3:And that's how my involvement came with the with the historical came society came to be because Graham was kind of the family historian, and I took on that role after she passed away in 1988. But in the late seventies, when the historical society had gotten the mill pretty that made a lot of progress with the preservation of the mill, Blair Williams, founder of the historical society, who was a friend of my grandmother's, came to my grandmother and asked her if she could borrow uncle Willie's camera and some of the negatives. Because she thought it would be really neat to be able to display the camera. It would bring people in. And the negatives, they wanted to do a series of limited edition prints to sell as part of the the effort ongoing efforts to raise money to fund this preservation.
Speaker 3:So my grandmother had always been very generous with with allowing people to to borrow the negatives to to do things. There's a beautiful plate, a dinner plate type thing that was done in 1963 for the 200th anniversary of the town. It was done with his photographs that that Graham loaned them the negatives to do that. So Graham agreed to loan the camera to the historical society so that Blair so that they could continue to raise money for for the mill preservation. And over the years, the family has added to that collection.
Speaker 3:I have and my brother has and and, so that's how the involvement with the historical society and the Bentley family came to be. And the exhibit in its current state, in the current space and and everything was done, I wanna say, about 25 years ago. So it's a wonderful exhibit because we have the cameras. Not all the camera he did the photographs with, and there were 2 microscopes. 1 which was the one that was attached to the camera and another which was his observation microscope, which had unfortunately gotten out of the hands of the family family story there.
Speaker 3:My grandmother one of my grandmother's sisters had taken it without and denied having it, and she never had kids. When she after she passed, her husband ended up with it. And after he passed, his niece ended up with it, who was not part of the family, and and it was covered up all those years that they had it. And then she put it up for sale. So the historical society was able to acquire the microscopes to reunite that with the camera.
Speaker 3:So now when you visit the exhibit, as you walk down the hallway to the Snowflake Bentley exhibit, on both sides are photographs some of his photographs with various quotes from articles that he wrote and from interviews that were done with him. And the exhibit itself houses the camera that he worked with and the microscope, the wooden tray that he caught the snow falling snow on, the heavy mittens that he wore to keep to prevent any heat transference from his hands to anything he was working with, his observation microscope, and the smaller camera that he acquired later, which he used, for a number of purposes. But he took a lot of family photos and photos of clouds and snow rollers and everything. And the back wall has a whole series of photographs that are his actual original photographs, not reprints or anything. These are photos that he took and developed and printed himself, and they're arranged in a very specific order to show you the the different types of crystals.
Speaker 3:One of the things he learned was that the colder the temperature that the crystal formed, the more solid the crystals. So these are arranged this way to to to show you the the ones that formed at very cold temperatures and kind of the progression to the ones that formed at warmer temperatures. And in the in the side room is a projector. In later years after he became more widely known, he was invited to lecture at colleges and universities, and he bought this projector. He had slides made from his photographs.
Speaker 3:And this projector, the light source is a little oil lamp. It was before electricity. And it there's mirrors inside there. There's little oil lamp fits in there, and there's mirrors, and they could project they amplify the light and project it out onto a blank wall or a screen or a bedsheet on a clothesline in the backyard for the neighborhood kids, which is something he did often. So the exhibit is really extraordinary.
Speaker 3:There's also a quilt that was handmade by his mother and a sampler. And then, of course, the the craft shop features a number of his photographs, the the beautiful montages that he created, individual photographs, and the collection, that we do each year with Danforth Pewter of ornaments that are date stamped. We have all the way back from 1997 to current. Each year, we pick one of his photos and create a beautiful ornament, tree ornament, as well as jewelry collection. And the shop, of course, also has the work of about 85 Vermont artists and crafters represented there too.
Speaker 3:But Wilson Bentley left a lasting legacy. The book there was a book published just about a month before he passed called Snow Crystals. It's a collection of about 24100 of his best work. It came about because of a fellow by the name of William Humphreys, who was head of the National Weather Bureau. He was a longtime supporter of Willie and his work, and he felt very strongly that this work needed to be preserved.
Speaker 3:So about 1929, he set out to raise money to publish this collection. They spent 2 years going through the 5,000 plus photographs and narrowing it down to the best 24100. The book was sent to the publisher early in 1931. And the day after Thanksgiving, 1931, Willie received his copy of his book, Snow Crystals. It's a large format with a the original has a blue leather cover with a gold snow crystal embossed in the center.
Speaker 3:On the spine in gold, it says snow crystals, Bentley Humphreys. He his dream had always been to show your share this beautiful gift with the world. His dream came true, and he held it in his hands. How many people get to do that? Really.
Speaker 1:That's so cool.
Speaker 3:It it was extraordinary. And a month later, he was gone. But 92 almost 93 years later, the book is still in publication in a softcover edition, and we carry that at the mill. Of course, the children's book that was written in 1998 and won the Caldecott award, is still in publication, and we also carry that in the shop.
Speaker 1:Who wrote that book? What what's this book about?
Speaker 3:It's a children's book about Snowflake Bentley. And the That's what
Speaker 2:I was talking about. Yeah.
Speaker 3:The, yeah, the, the illustrations, which were done by Mary Azarian who lived here in Vermont, was the reason it won the Caldecott award. So it's a wonderful publication. It's probably in most every school library elementary school library in the country and public libraries. We get at the mill, at the exhibit, we get visitors, teachers from all over the country who have been reading this book to their students for years years. And this is almost like a pilgrimage for them to come there and see the cameras and the equipment that he actually worked with.
Speaker 2:It's a great field trip.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It is. We get a lot of school groups, and then I do Zoom programs with schools around the country too in the wintertime. They'll read the book to their class and then task them with coming up with questions to ask me, and we'll do a Zoom program. One at a time, they'll come up and ask a question, and I'll answer it.
Speaker 3:It's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:How cute is that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And sometimes if it's a little bit younger group, I'll actually read the book to them via Zoom and and add a little, you know, touches in. So it's it's really a lot of fun to work with that. But he left an extraordinary legacy. He truly did.
Speaker 3:A year
Speaker 2:just legacy. I mean, it was like a real fact of life that he uncovered. Right. You know? He was a scientist.
Speaker 2:I can see how he's a scientist, and it's romantic when you see snowflakes falling. And so he's poetic, and they 2 go together. It doesn't matter what that person said.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and his writings are so eloquent and so so beautiful that it really, he was extraordinary in that aspect because usually people who are very scientific don't have that other side to their personality. They're it's usually he was both right right brain, left brain. He had both both aspects there.
Speaker 2:Actually artistic. Yes. And our artists, you know, if they're photographers, I mean, you know, right, you you know about light Mhmm. And all this. And so it just happens to be on the science side, but he's an artist.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:So the 2 come together
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he uncovered a scientific. Yeah. No. I mean
Speaker 3:And well, and the scientific piece of it was was very important to him. That was that was the the journals he kept and the data that and the discoveries that he made. And he wrote many, many articles for scientific magazines about his theories on how on snow crystals and on on different aspects of weather phenomena. In, 18/98, he made a discovery. This is kind of a a neat story.
Speaker 3:It wasn't just snow that fascinated him. At that time, scientists were starting to study annual rainfall totals around the country and around the world. And Willie read about this with great interest, and he thought about it. And he came to this conclusion that just like with snow, if you want to understand it, you have to go to the source, which is the individual raindrops. So he had this idea on how he could measure the size of a raindrop using a pan of flour from his mother's kitchen.
Speaker 3:He stepped out into the rainstorm, caught the falling raindrops, and then brought it back inside and let it sit. Now his original theory was to measure the diameter of the hole, the impression that the raindrop left in the flower and thus discern the the sizes of the different raindrops. Well, we know when you mix flour and water, you get dough. And what he discovered and we have the transcribed journal entry from that date. I came across it in in our transcribed copies of his journals where he talks about that he made a great discovery, and this was on November 9, 18, 98, that he discovered that there's in the bottom of each one of these indentations, there was a dough pellet that could be measured.
Speaker 3:And that he then he tested that theory by using a known quantity of in a drop and dropping it into flour and came to the the conclusion that indeed the dough pellet was the size of the raindrop. And fast forward a 100 years, a fellow by the name of Duncan Blanchard was a meteorologist. He wrote the biography, the official biography on Snowflake Bentley when he retired. But he told me the story about 25 years ago, how, after he retired from NOAA, he taught at SUNY Albany, taught meteorology students, and he tasked his students with coming up with a way to measure the size of a raindrop. And as you can probably imagine, these brilliant minds came up with all kinds of wild ideas.
Speaker 3:And one morning, the student runs in comes into the classroom all excited. Professor Blanchard, I had this great idea. I took a pan of flour and went out in a rainstorm. And so Duncan, of course, commended him on thinking outside the box, but then had to burst his bubble by explaining to him that that is a very effective method. However, it was invented by a Vermont farmer about a 100 years ago.
Speaker 3:So that method is still used. So, again, it wasn't just rain. He he took pictures of frost on window panes, dew on plants, on this one of my favorite photos is on the very last page of his book, Snow Crystals. It's a grasshopper on some flowers. Look kinda like daffodils.
Speaker 3:I'm not sure what the flowers are because these are black and white photos, of course. But I know the story behind it. He actually captured this grasshopper and used sewing thread to loosely tie it to the flower so he wouldn't hurt it, let the dew fall on it overnight, photographed it, and let it loose. And it's such a cool photo. There's one of a fly on a blade of grass and dewdrops on spider webs.
Speaker 3:You know? And a wooly worm covered in dew.
Speaker 2:I'm just fascinated fascinated that there's this whole science part of him, and yet there's that artistic part of him. And the 2 came together.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And that's very un again, it's unusual.
Speaker 2:Usually tied a grasshopper to a flower.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, usually, you have the the right brain, left brain. You know? You're either scientific or you're or you're artistic. But finding those 2 in one person is not that common.
Speaker 3:And he truly was, fascinated with science. He collected rocks and crystals. The hill behind his house was known as Crystal Hill because we know that rock crystals form in granite and there's a lot of granite in Vermont and there were outcroppings up there and you could literally he could literally go up there and pick up these crystals. In front of his house, in front of his side of the house, there was this pyramid that he made out of some kind of plaster, and it was covered with these crystals. And I remember that it was upstairs in the carriage house at my grandparents when I was a kid.
Speaker 3:And that pyramid did not survive, but the crystals did. I still have them. But you can see it in one of the photographs of the house with with Charlie sitting there with some of the kids, and and there's this pyramid thing in the front in the yard surrounded by other types of rocks and geodes and things that he had collected. So he was fascinated with everything in the natural world, weather and and auroras. He used to to write about those.
Speaker 3:He had 2 journals. 1 was his photographic journal. The other was a weather journal that he kept. Four times a day, he did weather readings. And he had this whole series of of symbols for the various things that looked like little hieroglyphics, but so he didn't have to write it all out.
Speaker 3:He had his symbols. And, he even taught those to a couple of the nephews. So if he was away lecturing or whatever, that they could do the weather journals for that day.
Speaker 2:I know why he wasn't married. Well, I mean, think about it. Yeah. Some some people are not meant to get married. Right?
Speaker 2:Yep. And then you look at their life work, and you're like, they were meant to have that time
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:So we could learn and enjoy and understand. Mhmm. I don't know. That was just a little
Speaker 3:Well, you know, he had several lady friends that he corresponded with, but, yeah, he never married. He, I think he was married to his work. Mhmm. And, you know, he was okay, though.
Speaker 1:But he's a a farmer by trade. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 3:By by vocation. Yeah. That's how he supported himself. They had a quite a good sized farm there, and they had a dairy. They had cows, but they also grew potatoes.
Speaker 3:That was their main crop. And with a lot of farmers in that time period would have a primary crop. They would have their vegetable garden, what they needed for their families, but they would have one major crop, and that they would barter with at the they would sell them to the the local stores, you know, to for other things that they didn't grow, or they would trade with other farmers. They might be growing potatoes, and the guy down the street is raising beef cows. So they they you know, I'll give you extra number of potatoes for for a side of beef or, you know, they'd swap them for for various things.
Speaker 3:And that's, but they Willie was not a very big man. He was reportedly only between 5 2 and 5 4 and about a £120, but he was wiry and he was strong. And they it was said that he could dig a row of potatoes faster than any farmer in the valley. So it's fortunate that his magnificent obsession took place during the wintertime when there's not as much to do on the farm. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:If he'd been collecting butterflies, it would have been a whole different story. Right. But, yeah, he he really was just an extraordinary extraordinary man. And, you know, after his book was published, that winter, as I mentioned, he died a month later, and it was snow that led to his death. How how, poetic, if you will.
Speaker 3:That winter was started out much warmer than normal, the winter of 1931, 32. And by the 7th December, there hadn't been a single snowstorm. So Willie did something that he did often. He walked from his house up over the mountain, if you will, down to Richmond and took the train to Burlington. Coming back that afternoon, it started snowing, And it's kept getting snowing harder and harder, and the temperature dropped.
Speaker 3:And by the time he got to Richmond, it was snowing pretty hard. And there was a friend of his there at the station, and I remember my grandmother telling me this story. I don't remember if this friend was on the train with him from Burlington or was at the depot picking somebody up or picking something up. But he tried to convince Willie to stay the night with his family because the snowstorm was getting so bad, and Willie was not dressed for it. He had on just his regular shoes and a top coat, but he didn't have the heavy scarf, the heavy mittens, or anything like that, the heavy winter coat.
Speaker 3:But he was determined to get home and photograph whatever the storm had to offer. So off he went on foot, 7 miles over the mountain in the mid in a blizzard. And, of course, by the time he got home, he was bone chilled and soaked to the hide, and he took sick. And it kept getting he said it was nothing. It was just a cold.
Speaker 3:He didn't want, his nephew or his nephew's wife, Alrick or Mary, to come in because they didn't want them to get sick. And by the time it got to the point where they knew that they needed to call a doctor, it had turned into pneumonia. And we didn't have antibiotics in 1931. And he died on the 23rd December. And he was only 66 years old.
Speaker 3:And from one perspective, it's sad because longevity tends to run-in the family, and he could've lived another 20 or 30 years. And who knows what else he would have discovered? But from the other side of the coin, he lived long enough to see his life's work come to fruition, his dream to come true, and so few people in this world get to do that. And the fact that 94 years, 90 90 almost 93 years later, that people are still fascinated with his work and still literally come here from all over the world to see this is just an incredible testament to the
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:To the the legacy that he's left behind. You know, last June last January 2023, the London Natural History Museum published a collection of his photographs of about 80 of his photographs that they purchased from him directly in 18/99. And because it was a large collection, he put it together in kinda like a notebook with handwritten notes next to each of the photographs. They digitized it and put it online for the world to see. I had a a PhD candidate from Germany visit earlier this summer.
Speaker 3:We had been corresponding by email for a while. He's he was working on his doctoral thesis on the history of snow science. So he flew to the United States from Germany to spend the day here and explore the exhibit and spend some time, you know, with us. And it was just it's it's extraordinary to me that people still are are so enamored and and just still love his work. And I just I, so this is my dream retirement job being at the at the mill and with the exhibit.
Speaker 3:And when people come in and I have a chance to spend time with them and take them through there, it's just, it's kind of my way of of honoring him and continuing the the family legacy.
Speaker 1:So excuse me. You've done all the talking. It's been awesome.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I have a question or 2.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, I was gonna say, I mean, encourage people. We need to encourage people to go in and see the Jericho Historical Society, not just listen about it, but come on in and see it. And you will give them a tour, and, they'll get to to see the actual telescope and mic microscope, not telescope. Microscope and camera.
Speaker 2:And the old mill itself is still has some of the old equipment in there.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The roller mills are still there. The there's a lot of old tools and equipment around. And the building itself is so extraordinary because when they built the upper levels to install these roller mills, they the roof that was on it was apparently very well built. So rather than tearing that off and reinventing the wheel, they jacked the roof up to basically 2 stories and built the walls up to meet it.
Speaker 3:And they built with a stacked style, 2 by 6 planks, literally stacked 1 on top of another like a deck of cards. So those walls are 6 inches thick. And they put in this carrier beam and columns to support it that are tree trunks milled on homemade lathes by local craftsmen. And you look at the the joists, the support beams, and they're only about 12 inches apart. Because at the any given time, that mill would have 40 or 50 tonnes of of grain going through it to be processed.
Speaker 3:And the roller mills are there, and it it's just an extraordinary structure and and just a really cool place to visit.
Speaker 1:What time is it open?
Speaker 3:Monday through Saturday, 11 to 4 this time of year. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we open 7 days a week. We open at 10 instead of 11, and we add Sundays to it because people come from so far to shop there because, again, it's we have the work of about 85 Vermont artists and crafters and many, many one of a kind pieces, and it's Vermont. It's not something that we're importing from overseas. This is all all Vermont, and so people come to shop there at the holidays.
Speaker 3:It it's crazy busy.
Speaker 1:You also asked I'm sorry. You also asked, you you mentioned office space for rent.
Speaker 3:Oh, we have there's one little section that is rented by the village water district office.
Speaker 2:I know the person that works there.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. So there there's a little bit of space there, but the rest of the building is all, all used. The first floor is all used by the historical society. And then the upstairs at this point is storage.
Speaker 3:At some point, we would love to use that space, because it's a big, huge open area there that at one point when it was, when Skip Bennett and Harold Rose had it, when it was, you know, for the the auto shop was downstairs, there was a basketball court on the second story. There was a rifle range up there, not simultaneously because that would give new meaning to the term shooting hoops. But sorry. I couldn't help myself with that one.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, you kept talking about the fascination of the building and the floors and all that, and we're like, well, we don't get to see the other floors. It'd be nice at some point if, you know Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that is that is
Speaker 2:a new has a has a chance to really fix it so we can actually go
Speaker 3:see it. Yeah. And we'd love to do that. There would have to be a a probably an elevator put in, but there's grant money to do that. But we the foundation is our our primary focus first.
Speaker 3:We've gotta get that stabilized so they could and and rebuilt so they can and then the riverbank done. And then we can focus on some of those projects. Because we've talked about, using that second story part of it maybe for artist studios, for some of our our artists and craftspeople because the light up there is beautiful. There's a lot of different things we could do with that space, but it has to be, electricity has to be run. It has to be insulated and and a heat source.
Speaker 3:And, you know, there's a there'd be a and, again, the the stairs configured differently and probably an elevator for to meet, ADA and requirements and and just for safety's sake. But, so it would take a lot, but it's something that down the road, we would love to be able to to turn that into more usable space.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:we kind of already tied everything in. Right? The one thing I'm I'm curious, though, is who else in the family now is gonna replace your would you call it taken on the role of historian of the family? Is there someone coming up? What will happen?
Speaker 2:I mean, you know, it's it is unique that you have that relation and what you can bring to it now. Is there anything what what's what's coming for that?
Speaker 3:That's a good question. I get asked that a lot, and I don't have any children. I have nieces and nephews, but none of them live in Vermont. They're in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, same with the grand niece and nephews, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. I do have some cousins here, some Bentley cousins here in Vermont, but they're all busy with their lives.
Speaker 3:And and, so far as of this point, no one has stepped stepped up and said, hey. Teach me more about this. Tell me more about this. So a lot of, the stories I have have that I've been sharing with you folks, we've been recorded, you know, videos and different things. And that may be the only the only way that it carries on past me is through video recordings of the stories.
Speaker 2:Well, that's that's good that you are doing that. Mhmm. Writing down as much as you know, recording it, and having it available. I mean Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, you know important. Who knows in another 10 or 20 or 50 years where any of us are gonna be, and and I won't be here in another 50 years. I can guarantee you that. But
Speaker 2:someone else in
Speaker 3:the family might step up. Somebody will somebody in the family will step up. And, you know, while I was living in other parts of the country before coming back here, the historical society over the years has had many, many wonderful people who have been involved, who have done who have taken the time to learn about Snowflake Bentley and gone out and done presentations to schools and different things. So even if it's, you know, it's it's neat that being a family member that I'm able to be here for this time period and and share my stories because it's a very personal thing. And a lot of the visitors really just love the fact that, you know, there's a family member here that that knows this history.
Speaker 3:But even if there's not a family member to carry it on, you know, hopefully, there'll be somebody that will care enough about it and step up and, and learn the stories so that they can share them, you know, somebody next generation can carry this on. Because that's, you know, that's always been the dream is to keep this this amazing story alive because he truly was an extraordinary man.
Speaker 1:Very much so.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm very much intrigued by by the things you're saying.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And that he's right here.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm talking right here.
Speaker 1:And it's more than just snowflakes still.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing that a lot of people didn't didn't realize that that he was fascinated with, you know, rain. Any kind of weather phenomena intrigued him.
Speaker 1:He wasn't a one trip pony.
Speaker 3:That's for sure. He was not. And, you know, weather patterns changing the way they are today, who knows? We may get to a point where we don't have a whole lot of snow. It's certainly a very different winter now than when I was a kid growing up.
Speaker 3:I mean, weather has always run-in cycles, and I you know, the winter of 1931. Like I said, by 7th December, there hadn't been a single snowstorm. I can remember I have a photograph of my grandparents taken in 1964 on Christmas Day when it was, like, 60 degrees, and my grandfather is in his shirt sleeves. You know? So there's always been variants varying weather patterns.
Speaker 3:But with what's going on today, who knows what's gonna happen 10 50 or a 100 years from now if if, we have any winter here at all. Maybe people won't know what snow is a 100 years
Speaker 2:from now. I'm sure it's not going anywhere. No. So, I mean, do you have any more questions? I have just a couple more wrap up things.
Speaker 1:I mean, I have a whole lot more questions, but I need to go down to the to the mill and look at it and
Speaker 2:That's right. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's beautiful.
Speaker 2:I've been. Have you been?
Speaker 1:I've never been.
Speaker 2:Well, there you go. Now you're intrigued.
Speaker 1:That's an assignment for me.
Speaker 2:And that's why we have talk of the town to introduce it to people who don't know about it. So I would wanna ask you a couple things. 1st, what would you say to people like himself or even if even if, I've been, and he hasn't? So to all the different audiences, what what would be the one thing to take away from this conversation that you would want us to hear?
Speaker 3:First of all, if you grew up knowing that no no 2 snowflakes are alike, but didn't know how you how we knew that, it was Snowflake Bentley that taught that to the world. And I just think I've always been a a fan of history. I've always loved history probably because my grandmother, you know, growing up, was was so proud of her history and and instilled that in me. But I think so many people today, we get so busy with our lives that we don't stop and think about where we came from. And I've always kind of genealogy research has been my passion for many years.
Speaker 3:And because I've always been kind of a believer that if you don't know where you came from, how do you truly know who you are? But history needs to be preserved. So much in this country today, people are trying to rewrite history and destroy history. But if you forget your history, you're destined to repeat it. Come on.
Speaker 3:The good, the bad, and otherwise. But Vermont has just such a, I mean, this was New England was where it all started when the when the first when the pilgrims came in 16/20 on the Mayflower and from Massachusetts, they migrated up here. I know the Bentley family, the first Bentley is here in in the colonies. We're in we're here by 1645. So we all have a history.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. But it's important to remember that history and honor those ancestors because who you are today is because of them. I have a Mayflower ancestor who was washed overboard on the Mayflower and got tangled or caught hold of a rope and was pulled back in. John Howland, one of the the Wow. And if they if he hadn't have gone overboard, if he hadn't have been saved when he went overboard, I wouldn't be here today.
Speaker 3:Right. None of us would be here today if it were not for our ancestors. And learning their history gives us a better a better understanding of who we are and where certain strengths and trait family traits come from. So I just think history is fascinating, but learning your personal history is just an extraordinary thing.
Speaker 2:And that's a great segue into, you know, thus, go visit historical societies. Mhmm. And it's fascinating no matter if it's your town, your other towns, if you're in another state, there's always something we can learn from history.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So that's really cool. And so with that said, how can people where should they go to get information if they wanted to talk to you for some reason, like, it's a teacher or somebody listening that could participate in a program or have needs ideas or whatever. Mhmm. How might they get in touch with you, and then where can they go to find out more?
Speaker 3:Okay. The, they can call the old red male, 802-899-3225. If I'm not there, they can leave me a message, and I will absolutely get back to them. They can go to our website, jericohistoricalsociety.org, and there's a link there where they can email directly to the historical society. And I do get those emails, and I do respond to them.
Speaker 3:I get a lot of emails from people whose family lived here a 100 years ago, or they're trying to trace their roots and where their family lived. And I'm able to help them with a lot of it, because this Jericho were were very fortunate because they kept really good records. And there's land records and and births and deaths and marriages and everything that the records here are very good as they are in a lot of Vermont and a lot of New England. But, yeah, through our website, stop in and see us. I love doing programs with with groups.
Speaker 3:I actually do a program in the wintertime with various historical societies around the state and organizations to program about Snowflake Bentley, his life and work. And I have a amazing slideshow that that goes along with it. I have one scheduled already for this year, in October in with the Johnson Historical Society. So reach out through the website. Reach out by phone, and or stop by and see us.
Speaker 1:And what what kind of groups?
Speaker 3:Church groups, school groups, senior communities. I've I the wonderful right up the road here, with, Jerry Hill, the senior living community. Mhmm. I've done a pre a presentation for them and then had a group of them down at the mill. And the neat thing is because I'm there a lot of the time that we're open, but but I may be the only one there at that time because we are staffed by volunteers.
Speaker 3:So the best thing if you have a group, you know, a family group or or whatever kind of group and you wanna come in for a tour is to call me or email, and we'll schedule a time when I have a volunteer staff member there as well so I have time and can be away from this you know, and can take the time to really take you through the exhibit. There you go.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's my pleasure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It it's just really nice to meet you and to kinda get a little bit of taste and touch the history because someone is live that's all connected with that. So, just thank you for that time. Really appreciate that.
Speaker 3:It's absolutely my pleasure to meet both of you, and I thank you for for having me today. As you can tell, I'm kinda shy and quiet and don't like to talk much.
Speaker 1:I know it's not
Speaker 2:right now.
Speaker 3:But, I would I as I said, you know, anybody that would love to learn more about the about Snowflake Bentley or about the mill, you know, come on in and see us. Call us, email us, and and, arrange a tour. Love to have you.
Speaker 2:Welcome back. Well, you know, I really appreciate Sue and all that she brings to this. It is it has been awesome to hear her talk.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm I'm almost sad that it brings an end to this 2 part series on on Twitter history. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, because it's like sitting in the living room, and you hear your grandfather or your great grandfather or grandmother, you know, and they're telling about the stories back in the day. You know? And that's what this was like. I felt like we were sitting in the living room and just revisiting our heritage.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That they she was sharing stories about, you know, family dinners and and sitting around the kitchen table and and those kinds of things. Just what an incredible legacy he left behind and how cool that it is right here in our own backyard.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And,
Speaker 2:of course, we're referring to Snowflake Bentley. Right. But Jericho in itself is its own, you know, historical story.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And, it's the the with the mill and and all that, you know, the industry that it brought in, Yeah. It's played a vital role.
Speaker 1:Yep. So I wanna thank Sue and the Jericho Historical Society for being a part of this. This has been so much fun.
Speaker 2:Thank you
Speaker 1:for joining us.
Speaker 2:Yep. And check the show notes, to, you know, to get in touch with them if you have any questions. We would love to hear what you have to say. So go ahead. Send us an email, talk of the town vtpodcast@gmail.com, or you can leave us a message at 802-858-5534.
Speaker 2:Let us know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thanks for listening, everyone. And as always, stay informed, stay connected, and we'll catch you on the next episode of Talk of the Town.
Speaker 2:We'll see you soon.
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