(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[S]couring maps of Vermont, which he did regularly in his work, James Whitelaw must have looked disapprovingly on these slender slivers of land, squeezed as they were between adjoining towns. Hardly anyone else would have even noticed them. To most people, they were just small, irregularly shaped tracts speckling the map, but they irritated Whitelaw.
These odd parcels were “gores,” bits of land left over when surveyors plotted boundary lines between neighboring towns but couldn’t quite make them meet.
Surveying was tricky business in Whitelaw’s day. Surveyors like him worked in teams of four or five men who would haul their equipment, including posts and a 66-foot length of chain, into the roadless wilderness, where they would plot town lines by day and camp by night.
Whitelaw, a recent Scottish immigrant, was considered one of the best. That’s why in 1787 the Vermont Legislature named him the state’s second surveyor general, replacing the rather error-prone Ira Allen.
Given the challenges of the day, it is little wonder surveying expeditions gave birth to gores, those geographical orphans, which Whitelaw explained were “the result of man’s frustrating attempt to lay out right-angled plots of land upon a spherical earth’s surface.”
In the taxonomy of Vermont, gores are among the rarest of creatures today. The state is divided into 14 counties, nine cities, 237 towns and 40 incorporated villages (which are political subsets of towns). Vermont also has three townships, Averill, Ferdinand and Lewis, all of which are in Essex County. Townships are entities that have never had a large enough population to win a legislative charter to make the transition from a land grant to a town.
Next come the so-called unorganized towns, which are communities that were once towns but have since lost so much population that they have also lost their designation as towns. Vermont has only two unorganized towns: Glastenbury, in Bennington County, and Somerset, in Windham County, which in the year 2010 had populations of eight and three, respectively.
Now we come to that strange anomaly, the gore. At one point, more than 60 gores pockmarked the face of Vermont. Only three remain.
Gores may have started as accidents, but they soon became useful to the Legislature, which doled them out almost like consolation prizes to people petitioning the state for land.
Unfortunately for the petitioners, the land often wasn’t particularly good.
Many of the state’s early gores are linked to Samuel Avery, of Westminster, who moved to Vermont from Connecticut before the American Revolution. Trained as a lawyer, Avery worked here as a deputy sheriff and jailer.
Avery was also a land speculator. Before the war, he had obtained a large grant from Massachusetts for land in what is now western Vermont, and he later obtained a patent for the same land from the colony of New York. The colonies, and later states, surrounding Vermont argued hotly over which one had the right to grant land titles here.
Avery had failed to obtain a land grant from New Hampshire, which after the Revolution was the type of grant recognized by the new Vermont government. But when Avery presented his Massachusetts and New York grants to the Vermont Legislature, lawmakers sympathized with him. It didn’t hurt that Avery had fought on the right side of the Revolution and was a prominent citizen of Westminster.
But the Legislature was in a bind. Even in the 1790s, Vermont was already so thickly chartered, if not yet so thickly settled, that no suitably tract remained. To find enough land to compensate Avery for his losses, the Legislature over the course of five years granted him eight separate tracts, totaling 52,000 acres.
The land, however, was scattered around the state. That might not have bothered Avery too much. He wasn’t planning to live on all that land; instead he hoped to sell it for a profit. Avery never made much money on his Vermont lands, but later did make a killing on land in Ohio.
To confuse matters, most of Avery’s Vermont tracts were known at some point as Averys Gore or Averys Grant. The tracts proved too small, rural and rocky to become independent farming towns. Most were eventually subsumed by large neighboring towns, which was the fate of most gores.
Only one of Avery’s gores remains today. Located in Essex County, it is of course named Averys Gore. As of the year 2010, it boasted a population of exactly zero.
The largest remaining gore, by population, is Buels Gore in Chittenden County, which had a population of 30 in the latest U.S. census. The gore is named in honor of Maj. Elias Buel, who came to Vermont from Coventry, Connecticut, in about 1780.
In search of land, Buel and a group of other men, including Ira Allen, successfully petitioned the Legislature for a grant for a town named Coventry, to be located a little south of Middlebury.
The problem was that there was not enough contiguous land to be found south of Middlebury. So four years later the group again filed a successful petition with the Legislature. This one converted their standard land grant into a so-called flying grant, which gave the petitioners the right to find an appropriately sized parcel of unchartered land (about 23,000 acres, the size of a typical Vermont town) and lay claim to it.
They ended up claiming three separate parcels that together were about town sized. Two were in Orleans County. One they named Coventry and the other Coventry Leg, because of its shape. The latter was later annexed to Newport, but Coventry remains a separate town.
The third parcel was named Buels Gore, despite Buel’s suggestion that it be given the exotic-sounding name Montzoar. The gore never proved a major draw for people, though for a time it drew its share of farm animals. In 1840, the gore was home to only 18 people but a whopping 35,000 sheep, notes author Esther Swift in her “Vermont Place-Names.”
The last remaining gore, Warren’s Gore in Essex County, was created by the Legislature as a way of compensating the founders of the town of Warren. That group of men received a grant for the town of Warren (in today’s Washington County) in 1780. But the next step, having the Legislature upgrade the parcel from a land grant to a chartered town, didn’t happen for nine years.
Swift theorizes that the delay was either the result of the grantees’ having trouble paying the granting fees or, perhaps more intriguingly, dealing with the fact that their grant was smaller than the usual town grant. It seems they too may have won a flying grant from the Legislature, which ultimately chartered the town of Warren in two pieces — the main one in central Vermont and a smaller one far away in the Northeast Kingdom.
By chartering this 6,000-acre gore, the Legislative might have made the math work, but the grantees of Warren were left with an undersized town and a parcel in the wilderness. The remoteness of Warren’s Gore is borne out by population statistics. Not until the 1970 census was anyone recorded living there. Lately, things have been booming in Warren’s Gore: The 2010 census showed the population had ballooned to four.
It also is worth mentioning Vermont’s one grant, Warners Grant, which has sometimes been called Warners Gore. The grant represents the Legislature’s sympathetic, if slow, response to a plea for help from Hester Warner, widow of Revolutionary War hero Seth Warner.
As a captain in the Green Mountain Boys, under his cousin Ethan Allen, Warner led the capture of the British fort at Crown Point on the same May day in 1775 that Allen directed the capture of Fort Ticonderoga. When the Continental Congress organized the Green Mountain Boys as a militia regiment, Vermont settlers chose Warner over Ethan Allen as their commander. Warner led this force at the Battle of Hubbardton and the Battle of Bennington.
The war took a toll on Warner, who retired to Connecticut in 1780 and died there several years later at the age of 41.
Hester Warner, who had three children to raise, was destitute and petitioned the Legislature for help. It came in the form of 2,000 acres in the Northeast Kingdom. But Warners Grant is considered by some the most inaccessible tract in Vermont. Hopefully Hester Warner found some way for the land to benefit her family. Perhaps she sold it. She certainly never lived there. According to census records, nobody ever has.
