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.”
[T]hink of it as the precursor of those old bumper stickers you might occasionally still see: “Welcome to Vermont. Now go home.”
In the state’s earliest days, new arrivals often received that message, or at least the legal equivalent of it. It came delivered by the sheriff or town constable and ordered a new arrival to leave town. The Welcome Wagon this was not.
It was called a “warning out.” As inhospitable as it might seem, it was mostly a legal technicality to keep towns solvent. Towns often didn’t care if the person actually moved on.
Let me explain. By warning someone out of town, the selectmen in the late 18th- and early 19th-century could ensure that the community would never be legally required to support that person. In those days, human services (or overseers of the poor, as they would have said) were funded and administered at the local level in Vermont – as they were to some extent into the 1960s.
One February day in 1779, the state Legislature mandated that towns care for their own. That same day, the Legislature passed another law excluding certain transients from receiving such aid. Towns, the law stated, could withhold help from any newcomer who was “not of a quiet and peaceable behavior” or who, in the selectmen’s opinion, was likely to “be chargeable (i.e. become a financial burden) to such town.” But the town first had to warn newcomers that they were ineligible for aid.
That same year, the selectmen of Windsor warned out 18 of the town’s residents on New Year’s Eve. Warnings out usually gave newcomers 30 days to leave town, though it often wasn’t enforced. It certainly wasn’t in the case of Amos Currier, who was one of those in Windsor warned in 1779. Twenty-five years later, Currier was still living in town.
In 1804, the Windsor selectmen decided they had had enough of Currier. They sent him south in the custody of Samuel Russell, a town constable or deputy, to Haverhill, Massachusetts, where Currier had previously lived.
Windsor selectmen received a surprising letter in return from Haverhill’s overseers of the poor, saying they wanted no part of Currier. It read: “The Pauper you have endeavoured to throw upon us, we now return to you and hope he may reach you in as good condition as he left … The person who brought him is in custody, and as he cannot get bail (he) must be committed to Prison to answer the law of our state …”
Russell didn’t linger long in Haverhill’s jail. A note elsewhere in the same letter reported he had been released, having somehow scraped together the $14.25 for bail.
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By passing the 1779 law, Vermont legislators were merely putting into words what was already law in many New England communities. Before Vermont’s constitution was written in 1777, early settlers – who were mostly from southern New England – generally used the English laws they had known in their former communities.
In colonial Massachusetts, the laws had been used both to exclude the poor and to keep out other “undesirables,” including people of the wrong religion. But by the time the laws were implemented in Vermont, they were used mostly to bar people who might be a financial drain on the community. That was the case at least as early as July 1769, when Rockingham voters agreed that “all Strangers who Com to Inhabit in said town Not being Freeholders (i.e. property owners), be warned out of town.”
The tricky business was defining who was a legal settler, and who was not. The 1779 law offered various avenues for attaining “legal settlement.” You were in, for example, if you had real estate worth $100, had rented a place for at least $20 a year for two years, or had paid taxes for two years. If you were a newcomer worried about being warned out, you could secure residency by holding town office for at least one year.
The Legislature tweaked the requirements in 1787, before almost entirely abandoning them in 1801, thereby making it easier for towns to limit who got community aid. That year, lawmakers essentially voted to leave it to selectmen to decide who was settled and who was transient.
With passage of the 1801 law, towns started wheeling out the Unwelcome Wagon in earnest. Sharp selectmen used the law to limit their towns’ liability by handing out warnings willy-nilly. Even prominent lawyers and clergy who moved to town were greeted with a writ, just in case they fell on hard times.
These blanket warnings continued for the next 16 years, until the Legislature reclaimed control over defining legal settlers and ended the practice of warning out.
The use of warnings varied from town to town, depending on the selectmen’s comfort with the practice, says researcher Alden Rollins in his book “Vermont Warnings Out.” When new selectmen joined the board, Rollins found, a town’s use of warnings often changed.
Warnings out managed to make one town office particularly desirable. Since constables were paid for delivering the writs, many towns found they no longer had to pay people a salary to take the position. Instead, the job went to the highest bidder, who assumed he could recoup the money with the fees he’d earn.
Though towns could no longer warn out undesirables after 1817, they continued to fight over who had to care for the poor. (In fact, during World War II, Vermont selectboards wondered who would be responsible for caring for refugees from southern New England in the event of a Nazi invasion.)
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Though the Legislature had banned the practice of warning out, towns continued to fight over who would care for the poor. Nineteenth-century historian Abby Hemenway wrote of one early inter-town fight in her Vermont Historical Gazetteer. She told of the unfortunate Downer family, which became the subject of a fierce struggle between Middlesex and Worcester. A carpenter named Downer moved with his wife and four or five children to Worcester sometime between 1825 and 1830. One winter, Downer returned to Canada while the rest of his family remained in Worcester and received support from the community.
Downer’s wife and children visited Danforth Stiles, a friend in neighboring Middlesex, apparently for a number of days. When they tried to return home, a group of men from Worcester met them near the town line and ordered the family back to Middlesex.
The Downers tried again to return home, this time with Stiles and Stephen Herrick, Middlesex’s overseer of the poor, but their way was blocked by two Worcester men, who were cutting trees to block the path.
Herrick gathered 22 men from Middlesex. They headed off immediately, armed with axes, bars and levers to clear the way. Sixteen Worcester men met the Downer party. They too had axes and began felling more trees, “as fully resolved to prevent any further tax to support the Downers as the Boston ‘tea party’ were to avoid paying the 3 cents on tea.”
When Herrick saw that the Middlesex men would be able to cut a path around the Worcester group, he ran ahead to make sure no one destroyed the Downers’ house. As Herrick lit a fire to warm the home, a Worcester man, William Hutchinson, broke in with a piece of burning wood, intending to burn the house down.
Herrick and Hutchinson tussled until Herrick and another man were able to throw Hutchinson out. Soon afterwards, as dawn broke, the Downers reached the home and were escorted in by the Middlesex men under the glares of the men from Worcester.
Like so many real-life dramas, the dispute ended up in court, where Herrick was acquitted of a charge brought by Worcester residents, illegally removing the Downers from Middlesex.
But the Downers apparently didn’t last long in Worcester. Hemenway reports that they were driven north by someone from Worcester in the back half of a double sled. When they reached the Canadian border, the driver swung an axe and cut the Downers’ sled free, leaving them stranded in the road and forcing them to rely on the mercies of the Canadian people.
