(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[T]he land was rife with rumors. And if you believed them, the land was equally littered with treasure.
Silas Hamilton, one of the founders of the town of Whitingham, was one of the believers. Fascinated by the stories, he kept track in his journal of the various reports of buried treasure that came his way. He heard stories about fortunes buried in the region that stretches from New York state to Maine. In all, Hamilton tallied 32 treasures purportedly stashed in 22 different towns, a handful of them in Vermont. His list was far from complete.
A treasure-hunting fad hit the northeastern United States during the 18th and early 19th centuries. It fed on people’s dreams that their hardships could be made less hard, if they just knew where to look. They believed that real treasure was out there, and that perhaps they were the only ones brave enough, smart enough or lucky enough to find it.
The impulse is still with us, of course, causing people to buy lottery tickets and fall for internet scams.
Starting during colonial times, stories circulated about unimaginable riches stashed in the wilderness. In these reports, a pirate, often Captain Kidd himself, was said to have buried a chest of coins or jewels. Or a group of Spanish explorers had discovered a mine full of gold or silver but hadn’t had time to extract it. Robbers had been forced to bury their ill-gotten gains. Revolutionary War payrolls had gone missing in the backwoods.
In each case, the people who lost the treasures had intended to return to claim them, but invariably fate had gotten in the way.
The hunt for treasure became a mania. Benjamin Franklin commented from Philadelphia in 1729 that, “(y)ou can hardly walk half a mile out of Town on any side, without observing several Pits dug with that Design.” Treasure hunters in Maine dug a pit 80 feet deep, and others cleared away a 100-foot-long gravel mound, all to no avail.
Vermonters were hardly immune to the contagion. A visitor noted in the late 19th century that treasure hunters had been so industrious in Bristol that the face of Bristol Notch was “literally honeycombed with holes a few feet in depth, where generation after generation of money-diggers have worked their superstitious energies.”
The hopeful used a variety of mystical means to locate their treasures: dreams, visions, astrology, divining rods, even cat sacrifices. They also used seer stones, magic rocks tossed in a hat that the seer would stare at for minutes or hours before conjuring up a revelation.
Alan Taylor, in his essay “The Early Republic’s Supernatural Economy: Treasure Seeking in The American Northeast, 1780-1830,” documented treasure hunts in 10 Vermont communities: Rutland, Whitingham, Middletown (now Middletown Springs), Poultney, Wells, Waitsfield, Essex, Tunbridge, Bristol and Braintree.
The epidemic might have spread further than that. A newspaper in Windsor reported in 1825 that, “We could name, if we pleased, at least five hundred respectable men who do in the simplicity and sincerity of their hearts believe that immense treasures lie concealed upon our Green Mountains, many of whom have been for a number of years industriously and perseveringly engaged in digging it up.”
Stories abounded about treasure that had eluded its seekers. Legend had it that the Spaniards or pirates, or whoever had buried the treasure, had protected their loot by conjuring spirits who would protect it. To counter this spell, the seekers would often spill animal blood on the ground, which was said to fix the spirits in place and prevent them from moving the treasure.
Silence was also said to be essential. A word could cause the treasure to shift position or drop toward the underworld. Worse, voices could unleash the evil spirits guarding the treasure.
Diggers in Middletown, during a celebrated episode of intense treasure hunting, were said to have been near a secret cache when their silence was broken. When in a fury to get the treasure, one digger had his foot stepped on, he snapped, “Get off my toes!” With this, another man shouted: “The money is gone, flee for you lives!” Which they promptly did.
Hamilton thought he knew how to keep hidden loot from moving. In a journal entry, complete with an illustration on the back, he spelled out the precise way to create a magic circle that would ensure a treasure would stay put.
Using his idiosyncratic spelling and grammar, he wrote: “tak nine Steel Rods about ten or twelve inches in Length Sharp or Piked to Perce into the Erth, and let them be Besmeared with fresh blood from a hen mixed with hogdung. Then mak two surkles round the hid Treasure one of Sd surkles a Little Larger in Surcumference than the hid Treasure lays in the Erth the other Surkel Sum Larger still, and as the hid treasure is wont to move to the North or South, East or West Place your Rods as is Discribed on the other Sid of this leaf.”
Perhaps this desire to hit pay dirt speaks to the difficulty of scratching out a living that folks faced. Frustrated farmers might have felt that toiling in Vermont’s rock-infested fields wasn’t their true lot in life. Surely they were destined for something greater.
They hungered for stories like the one about the piles of Spanish gold guarded by hundreds of rattlesnakes in a Fair Haven cave; or about how a mysterious Englishman had left an old sea chest at a home in Middlesex, which decades later was opened to reveal a map to a pirate’s treasure in Maine; or about the silver deposit that Spanish explorers had discovered but never mined on the side of Camels Hump; or about three businessmen from Boston who ventured north to the new state of Vermont, along the way losing the trunk full of foreign coins they had brought to fund their investments.
Over time, digging for mythical treasures lost its allure. The road to prosperity, Vermonters realized, wasn’t going to be paved in silver or gold, but rather in more prosaic materials like marble or granite.
