Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
1762 was a year of firsts. Six-year-old musical prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played for the first time at royal courts in Vienna and Munich. Catherine the Great began her rule of Russia. John Montagu, the 4th earl of Sandwich, invented what would become an international culinary standard when he ordered bread with his meat, so he could keep his fingers from getting greasy while he playing cards at his club.
And in Bennington, residents gathered at the tavern that John Fassett operated out of his home, and held the first town meeting in what would become the state of Vermont.
It is hard to imagine Vermont without town meeting. The tradition here predates the state by a decade and a half.
That first-ever gathering in Bennington came fully 23 years after the town was chartered by New Hampshire Gov. Benning Wentworth. That’s because chartering and settling were two different things. Until the year before that first meeting, nobody had dared settle Bennington because a series of bloody conflicts known collectively as the French and Indian Wars had made frontier life a dangerous proposition. But now a handful of Massachusetts families, comprising 40 or 50 people, had settled the town.
The first order of business that day in March 1762 was the election of town officers. Residents picked Samuel Montague to be Vermont’s first town moderator. The other town offices were filled entirely by men. (Women wouldn’t get to vote on any local issues until 1880, when tax-paying women were allowed to participate in school elections. And they wouldn’t gain the right to vote in municipal elections until 1917.)
Wanting to see the town prosper, Bennington’s first settlers decided they needed some basic infrastructure. Accordingly, they agreed to give five acres and $40 to anyone willing to set up a gristmill by Aug. 1 of that year. They made a similar offer to anyone building a sawmill by Sept. 1. The enticement worked. By fall, Bennington had a pair of mills operating. And the town flourished, partly due to the voters’ original decision to invest in the economy; by the time Vermont joined the Union three decades later, in 1791, Bennington was the new state’s second-largest town, with a population of nearly 2,400.
Early town meetings wielded considerable authority compared to the reduced role they have been relegated to today as power has shifted from the towns to the state and federal governments. During the late 1700s, the town meeting was perhaps the most powerful political entity operating in Vermont. New York and New Hampshire were busy arguing over who had jurisdiction over the region, but in reality neither had much control over daily life here. Vermont’s settlers lived in a wilderness far from the colonial, and later the state, centers of power. They had no government to rely on except the one they formed at town meeting.
New York colonial officials rejected the idea that people living under a New Hampshire land grant could form a government. The issue flared at Dummerston’s first town meeting in 1774. Some residents with Yorker sympathies convinced their fellow townsmen that they had no right to elect trustees — indeed, no right to govern themselves at all. Only the New York colonial government had that right, they claimed, because to them this was not Dummerston, New Hampshire, but part of Cumberland County, New York. The men of Dummerston accepted the argument, deciding not to elect officers and adjourning the meeting.
But Dr. Solomon Harvey would not let that decision stand. Harvey and other local residents firmly believed in the validity of their New Hampshire land grants and therefore their right to form a government. Harvey didn’t mince words. New York Gov. William Tryon and “his imps, and the minions of the British tyrant” (George the Third), Harvey said, “overpersuaded” the “honest people of this town” into leaving local offices vacant. Harvey and supporters arranged a special election and Dummerston voters picked town officers.
As conflict grew between the Colonies and Britain, New England town meetings took on a vital role opposing British actions. In 1774, the British Parliament passed the Coercive Acts in response to the Boston Tea Party — an event the British blamed on town meetings in Boston. Among other things, the acts closed Boston Harbor until the tea destroyed during the Tea Party was paid for, and replaced elected officials in Massachusetts with ones appointed by the Crown. At a subsequent town meeting in Boston, moderated by Sam Adams, residents protested the acts by voting to boycott British goods.
The people of Chester, in what would eventually become Vermont, supported the so-called Non-Importation Agreement. The decision had the effect of halting construction of the town’s new jail, which was largely complete. It just needed a roof, but that would require buying British nails, since none were made in the Colonies. Sticking to their word, the people of Chester voted to leave the jail unfinished and instead reinforced the walls of the old one.
About 30 miles to the south of Chester, the people of Marlboro met in their earliest recorded town meeting in 1775. There they voted to side with the Colonies and their Continental Congress in the conflict with Britain. Perhaps not yet realizing that the conflict had moved irretrievably from a political clash to outright war—this was just weeks after the battles of Lexington and Concord — Marlboro voters passed a resolution opposing British taxation: “Resolved, we will, each of us, at the expense of our lives and fortunes, to the last extremity, unite and oppose the last cruel unjust and arbitrary acts of the British Parliament passed for the sole purpose of raising a revenue.”
These early town meetings were usually held at private homes. But towns quickly moved to building their own meeting houses, which often also hosted religious services. Townspeople were expected to provide the building materials at a price approved by voters.
Many aspects of daily life were determined at Vermont’s meeting houses. There, townspeople decided which destitute people to house and feed, and which to declare were not the town’s responsibility; they also established the boundaries of school districts (towns sometimes having a dozen or more tiny districts, since schools had to be within easy traveling distance), hired a preacher, required every man to give a day’s labor to clearing a town burying ground, set the dates during which pigs were not allowed to roam freely, even determined how to comport oneself at a town meeting. (Enosburg voters decided that anyone showing up drunk and disruptive at town meeting, or any other public function, would be required to remove a tree stump from the dooryard of the local tavern.)
Sometimes town meeting, or the desire to host one, lead to the creation of a town. Residents of the southern part of Athens and the western part of Putney were remote from the meeting houses of their respective towns. “(T)he settlers grew dissatisfied with the lack of political rights as townsmen, inconvenient to the town meetings in the neighboring towns and none of their own,” wrote one historian, so they petitioned the Vermont Legislature to create a new town. Thus, in 1794, was born the town of Brookline.
The town would eventually expand, thanks to town meeting. One March, a group of men from the neighboring town of Newfane set off for their town meeting. These men lived in a section of town that was separated from the rest of Newfane by the West River. To reach the meeting house, they walked across the icy river, there being no convenient bridge. When they returned to the river after the meeting, they discovered to their chagrin that the ice had gone out, cutting them off from their homes. Their families spent a sleepless night worrying what could have happened to them.
The incident proved so traumatizing that the Newfane residents on the “wrong” side of the West River vowed never to have it happen again. They decided to ask Brookline voters whether they would annex this sliver of Newfane. At their next town meeting, Brookline voters agreed. It had proved easier to build new connections with neighbors than a bridge across a river.
