This article by John P. Gregg was originally published in the Valley News.
SOUTH ROYALTON — Former state Rep. David Ainsworth, a fifth-generation dairy farmer and civic fixture in Royalton, died on Friday at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center after a series of health problems. He was 64.
“He was fighting right up to the end. He had plans for us to do on the farm that we are doing our best to make sure they happen,” his wife Peggy Ainsworth said on Saturday morning. “It was just these last two weeks that he went downhill very quickly.”
A graduate of South Royalton High School and the University of Vermont, Ainsworth served as town moderator for 25 years and was one of the last working dairy farmers in the Vermont House, where he served three terms.
A traditional Vermont Republican who represented Royalton and Tunbridge, Ainsworth struggled to hold his seat as the old farm-town district became more progressive.
House Agriculture Chair Carolyn Partridge, D-Windham, said Ainsworth could appear to have a gruff demeanor to those who didn’t know him, but underneath lurked a “heart of gold” and a passion for preserving Vermont’s dairy industry.
“There are a number of people who come from more urban areas who don’t understand what farm life is all about, and David was a really strong voice for the farmers,” Partridge said.
And former House Natural Resources Chair David Deen, a Westminster Democrat, said that while he and Ainsworth differed on many issues, he was a well-intentioned legislator. “David always wanted to get to some level of resolution,” Deen said.
While respected by his colleagues, Ainsworth also struggled to hold his seat as the old farm-town district became more progressive.
He served two terms in the Vermont House after winning election in 2006, lost the seat by one vote in 2010, but then narrowly won it back in 2016 from Rep. Sarah Buxton, D-Tunbridge, on a 1,005-1,003 tally.
Ainsworth, who served on the House Agriculture Committee and then the House Committee on Natural Resources, Fish, and Wildlife, underwent a kidney transplant in 2016, later was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder known as chronic inflammatory demyelinatingpolyneuropathy, then developed a staph infection that had him hospitalized and in rehab centers for three months.
Still, he made it back for some votes in Montpelier and also onto his tractor, though the Ainsworths also rely on a farmhand who tends to the herd. Members of the Central Vermont Tractor Club last spring also helped till their cornfields, a sign of the unity and regard for the family in the White River Valley.
He lost the seat in 2018 to Tunbridge Democrat John O’Brien, who won by a comfortable margin.
More recently, Ainsworth was undergoing chemotherapy for skin cancer, but also was a presence at the farm, which includes a farmstand along Route 14 selling corn and tomatoes, and in helping Peggy raise two school-age granddaughters.
Other survivors include a son, Luther, named for a Civil War ancestor; a daughter, Graidi, and a grandson.
Peggy Ainsworth, herself a former selectwoman in Royalton, said funeral arrangements are incomplete, and that her husband had shown signs of his old self before his final downturn.
“For awhile I thought he was doing well,” she said. “He started talking politics and water quality.”