These Dark Mountains These Dark Mountains

“There she lay in the parlor, her face as calm as if she had never known the harshness of brutal guardians, the agony of poison, the terrible pangs of dissolution. Death had at last given her peace, the peace which passeth understanding.”

Lina Foster started awake. A scream had roused her, a girl crying for her mother. She thought of her own daughter, who was ill, but the cry came again from outside the house and a horse and carriage clattered onto Barber’s Bridge.

An old man died and left two children, a boy and a girl. No one wanted them. Their father settled them on the town and the town sent them to the poor farm. 

December 11, 1899 dawned gray and cold, rain blowing in waves with the winds up Cherry Street. Agnes Willis spent the day at work as a “scrub woman,” or cleaner, before meeting up with Gilbert Farmer and returning with him to her Cherry Street tenement. They took supper with the neighbors. A blade was needed to cut the chicken and Gilbert offered up his knife, a folding dirk. Its edge glittered.

Sources:

Guyette, Elise A. Discovering Black Vermont: African American Farmers in Hinesburgh, 1790-1890. University Press of New England, 2010.


Williamson, Jane. “African Americans in Addison County, Charlotte, and Hinesburgh, Vermont, 1790–1860.” Vermont History Vol. 78 No. 1: 15-42, 2010.


Whitfield, Harvey Amani. “African Americans in Burlington, Vermont, 1880–1900.” Vermont History Vol. 75, No. 2: 101-123, 2007.

It’s early afternoon, not yet two o’clock on October 23, 1879, when Luman Smith returns to his farm in Williston. His little girl runs out to meet him and they go to the barn together, talking of this or that, then turning at the sound of footsteps, his father-in-law coming over.

October 6, 1875. Wednesday morning in St. Albans and Aldis Brainerd is reading the paper. He’s at his house on North Main Street or at his offices in the Brainerd Block. He’s taking breakfast, perhaps, or sitting at his desk when he unfolds The Daily Messenger to its second page, a headline reading:

Another New Hampshire Horror
A School Girl Outraged & Murdered