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.”
[O]ne bright day in 1835, Nathaniel Hawthorne stepped over the gunnels of the small skiff and onto the shore at Burlington, having sailed that morning from the New York side of Lake Champlain.
As he stood at the water’s edge, he surveyed the landscape enveloping him. “The highlands of the coast behind us stretched north and south, in a double range of bold, blue peaks, gazing over each other’s shoulders at the Green Mountains of Vermont,” he later wrote. “The latter are far the loftiest, and, from the opposite side of the lake, had displayed a more striking outline.”
Hawthorne is just one of many celebrate Americans to pass through Vermont during the 19th century and leave behind their impressions of the state. Not surprisingly, most of those recording their thoughts and feelings were writers. Their descriptions, like all good travel writing, offer us views of what struck outsiders most about Vermont. They also, perhaps unintentionally, tell us much about the authors themselves.
Hawthorne was interested in more than just the landscape. “The painted light-house, on a small green island, the wharves and warehouses, with sloops and schooners moored alongside, or at anchor, or spreading their canvass to the wind, and boats rowing…” all reminded him of fishing villages along the New England seacoast.
But Hawthorne wasn’t entirely pleased with what he experienced in Burlington. His illusion of being on the ocean was shattered by the appearance of the lake’s water smooth surface and “a faint, but unpleasant and sickly smell, forever steaming up in the sunshine.”
He was also put off by the presence in Burlington of a large Irish population, displaying a deep-set prejudice that was then common.
“(T)hey swarm in huts and mean dwellings near the lake, lounge about the wharves, and elbow the native citizens entirely out of competition in their own line,” he wrote. With so many Irish in town, he continued, “it is difficult to conceive how a third part of them should earn even a daily glass of whiskey, which is doubtless their first necessary of life—daily bread being only the second.”
He also took a jab at the British, since British-controlled Canada was just to the north. Hawthorne noted how widely Canadian currency was used in the city. “British and American coin are jumbled into the same pocket, the effigies of the king of England being made to kiss those of the goddess of liberty,” he joked.
Hawthorne marveled at the diversity of characters he meets in the city square: Scots, Irish, French Canadians, “Montreal merchants” and Southerners. Among them the he spotted “Green Mountain boys” who were “true Yankees in aspect, and looking superlatively so, by contrast with such a variety of foreigners.”
In contrast, Charles Dickens had disappointingly little to say about Vermont. Like Hawthorne, Dickens arrived in Burlington, which was a thriving transportation hub when he visited in 1842. Dickens was on a tour of North America when his steamship, the Burlington, docked briefly at the eponymous city. In his travelogue, “American Notes,” Dickens described Burlington simply as “a pretty town.” He might not even have set foot on dry land since the Burlington docked only for an hour as part of its route.
Henry David Thoreau, fortunately, had more time to contemplate the state. He traveled through Vermont in 1850 on his way between Boston and Montreal. Railroading in the state was in its infancy — the first rail line having been completed just the year before — and the slow train ride offered the author an excellent view of Vermont.
Not surprisingly, Thoreau, who would publish his contemplative “Walden; or a Life in the Woods” four years later, was struck by Vermont’s natural beauty. In a letter to a friend, the poet William Ellery Channing, Thoreau wrote of the gentle mountain landscape: “not rugged and stupendous, but such as you could easily ramble over—long, narrow mountain vales through which to see the horizon.”
In the distance, he could see mountains, among them, he believed, was Killington Peak. Below the high embankments along which the train passed, Thoreau described seeing “scared horses in the valley (that) appear diminished to hounds.”
Most of all, he was struck by the trees — spruce, sugar maple, beech, birch, hemlock, butternut and ash — that moved past his window. He was fortunate, it was September and the leaves were starting to turn.
“All the hills blush,” he wrote ecstatically. “I think that autumn must be the best season to journey even the Green Mountains. You frequently exclaim to yourself, what red maples! … The butternut, which is a remarkably spreading tree, is turned completely yellow, thus proving its relation to the hickories. I was also struck by the bright yellow tints of the yellow birch. The sugar-maple is remarkable for its clean ankle. The groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their branches stopping at a uniform height, four or five feet from the ground, like eaves, as if they had been trimmed by art, so that you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy canopy, as under a tent whose curtain is raised.”
Twenty years later, in 1870, it was novelist Henry James who visited Vermont. Like Hawthorne and Dickens before him, James’ visit was to Burlington. Also like Dickens, he stayed only briefly in the city. But he made the most of it, hoofing it up the hill to the University of Vermont and then back down through the city’s neighborhoods.
Admiring the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains that border Lake Champlain, he wrote that “(t)he vast reach of the lake and this double mountain view go far to make Burlington a supremely beautiful town.”
As he strolled up the hill and crossed the (now long-since filled-in) ravine that bisected Burlington, James found he had left behind “the ugly poorness of the commercial quarter” by the harbor. At the top of the hill, he reached UVM. “The university is a plain red building, with a cupola of beaten tin, shining like a Greek church, modestly embowered in scholastic shade—shade as modest as the number of its last batch of graduates, which I wouldn’t for the world repeat,” wrote James, who at the age of 27 was apparently already jaded by his extensive travels.
Still, he found the college’s common to be “full of civic greenness and stillness and sweetness.”
Walking back down the hill, he passed through a neighborhood full of “the pleasant, solid American homes, with their blooming breadth of garden, sacred with peace and summer and twilight.”
“One of them there was—but of it I shall say nothing. I reserve it for its proper immortality in the first chapter of the great American novel,” he wrote enigmatically.
Despite the Americanness he had encountered in the city, he also noted, as Hawthorne had before him, that New England was not the monolithic culture some believed it to be.
“(A)s I wandered back to my hotel in the dusk,” he wrote, “I heard repeatedly, as the home-faring laborers passed me in couples, the sound of a tongue of other than Yankee inflections. It was Canadian French.”
