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At the time, the little village was a small-scale industrial dynamo. By the 1850s it had a tannery, a “wool-pulling shop” and a slaughterhouse, all in service to Vermont’s huge sheep and wool industry. It also had three sawmills and at least one enterprise that made barrels and tubs.
Lillie was known around the village as General Lillie. It was said that he built the lodging house for his old troops after returning from the war. But much about early American life has been inflated, and a later account takes a bit of the bloom off the Lillie.
“We know that he was for four years town representative and that he served in the War of 1812 in Captain Bingham’s company of Col. James Williams’ regiment; but we suspect his title of general was of peace-time origin,” wrote Wilmond W. Parker, then president of the White River Valley Historical Society, in 1941.
Whatever his rank, Lillie did leave his mark on the landscape. The hamlet of Lilliesville bears his name, and the brook that powered all of that 19th-century industry is now called Lilliesville Brook.
As with “General” Lillie, the village’s status couldn’t last. “It thrived and became the rival of Bethel itself, if legend can be trusted,” Parker wrote. But then the railroad came through Bethel village in 1840, industry became more centralized and Lilliesville’s “half dozen or more enterprises faded, one by one, leaving at the close of the century, a slowly decaying rural hamlet.”
As the oldest corner of the nation, New England has seen waves of transformation. Forests gave way to fields, which then grew back up into woods. Industries have come and gone and population has waxed and waned. Lilliesville was an example of New England’s picturesque poverty 75 years ago, but is now just another quiet, leafy precinct of Vermont.
“By the time I came along, there wasn’t anything in Lilliesville other than just people,” said Bill Stoddard, on the road to Bethel from South Royalton. Stoddard grew up in Samuel Lillie’s house and his paternal grandfather, Dan Stoddard, ran a store out of the ground floor of the former boarding house next door. Bill Stoddard’s father, Willis “Buster” Stoddard, ran a lumber and pulp business out of Lilliesville. (Bill and I met because my son and his granddaughter have been friends since their day care days. We got talking recently about Lilliesville and he offered to take me on a tour.)
We stopped first at Bethel Public Library. Hanging on a back wall of the library is a set of eight woodblock prints of scenes in Lilliesville. Artist August Cook spent most of his professional life in South Carolina, but thanks to a grant from the Carnegie Foundation he spent the summers of 1947 and ’48 on a farm in Lilliesville, what had been the Thayer place. Over the next few years he made woodcuts from sketches of Lilliesville homes and scenery.
With the help of other Bethel residents, Lilliesville residents Gary and Joanne Wood tracked down Cook and collected information about him in a binder under the title August Cook, Artist, and the Bethel Library Wood Prints, which Hill handed off for us to look at.
One of Cook’s prints is labeled as the “Dan Stoddard place.” Another was labeled The House of Spencer, which was Cook’s title for it.
“I think that’s gone,” Stoddard said. “I’m sure it is, but we’ll go by there.”
Lisa Hill was sitting at the librarian’s desk and had printed out for us two copies of Parker’s 1941 article from the Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society.
“You know, it’s just a lovely little community,” said Hill, who lives in Lilliesville. She cited Tropical Storm Irene, which cut Lilliesville off completely in August 2011. After a few days without power, everyone got together to cook what was in their freezers before it all went bad. “We had this huge potluck in the middle of the road,” she said.
To get to Lilliesville, we took Peavine Boulevard, which follows the route of the old Peavine Railroad, a narrow-gauge line that carried processed talc from Rochester to the depot in Bethel.
“My father used to go to school in Bethel,” Stoddard said. He’d walk down Lilliesville Brook to the tracks. “The train used to slow down so he could jump on the end of it.”
Lilliesville Road winds along the brook, past a succession of homes and camps. Driving along, Stoddard pointed out a section of the road his father had built, a favored swimming hole under a bridge, now filled in, and a set of stone steps set into a stone wall that led up to a house long gone.
If Lilliesville has a center, it’s at the intersection of Brink Hill Road, marked by a flagpole, the successor to the one first put up by Bill and Buster Stoddard. Lillie’s house is on one side of Brink Hill Road, the boarding house on the other.
Through sixth grade, Stoddard attended the Lympus schoolhouse, in the adjacent hamlet of Lympus, before going to the new central school in Bethel village. The nearby Bethel Lympus Church dates to 1841, and was originally a Methodist church. The two small hamlets are so close together that it seems odd to write about one and not the other. The title of Parker’s 1941 article is Lympus and Lilliesville in 1855.
Lilliesville’s last traces of industry faded out in the mid-20th century. The remains of what Stoddard recalled as an old stagecoach inn, and which was a chickenhouse when he was living in Lilliesville, consist of an old stone wall and a scattering of bricks.
The house Stoddard grew up in — his family moved to a house elsewhere in Bethel when he was a student in the highway engineering program at Vermont Technical College in Randolph Center — looks spruce in yellow paint with white trim. The boarding house is in the care of John Hubble, the longtime facilities manager at the Bethel schools. Thanks to Hubble’s efforts, the building likely looks more highly polished than at any point in its long history. A sign on the house bears the date it was built: 1820.
Hubble (“Like the telescope,” he said.) was working in his yard when we stopped by Saturday morning.
“I’ve heard quite a bit about you,” he told Stoddard after they’d introduced themselves. He confirmed what Stoddard said about the store. “When we moved in (25 years ago) … prices of different commodities were listed in pencil right on the wall.”
Behind the house Stoddard grew up in is a garage where he and his father worked on the company’s trucks. Stoddard used to ride along, taking pulp logs to paper plants in Ticonderoga and Corinth, N.Y. He worked for the Vermont Agency of Transportation for 40 years, designing bridges and overseeing construction projects. Now he splits time between Arizona and South Royalton.
Standing by the flagpole, the primary sound was of the rushing brook. The Lilliesville of today is so peaceful that it’s hard to imagine the bustle of the 1850s and the mills with their water-powered, up-and-down saws.
Aside from the quiet, two things struck me about our visit to Lilliesville. The first is how easy it is to go back in time with someone who knows what it was like. From today, the 1950s can feel like an eternity ago, and someone who lived at a particular crossroads back then will have talked to people who remembered what it was like in the late 1800s. If you have a chance to spend a morning with someone like Bill Stoddard, take it, and bring a notebook.
That’s more or less what Bill told me, which is the second point. He remembers a lot about growing up in Lilliesville, but he wishes he had learned more. “So many things from years ago that I wish I had been more interested in,” he said, though he said it matter-of-factly and without more than a trace of wistfulness. “Now, all the people you want to ask questions are gone.”
If there’s anything you want to know more about, ask now.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
