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Middle Branch also has the distinction of being one of only 37 remaining active grange chapters in Vermont and one of two granges profiled in an hour-long documentary Rooted: Cultivating Community in the Vermont Grange, which will be screened on Friday, April 6 at the Riverside Grange in West Topsham and on Saturday, April 14 in East Bethel. The documentary is a co-production of Historic New England, in Boston, and the Vermont Folklife Center, in Middlebury.
Charlotte Barrett, the community preservation manager for Historic New England, grew up in the suburban Midwest but went to Dartmouth College. She’s long been, she said, “drawn to grange halls as icons of New England villages.”
After speaking to members of grange chapters across the state she realized, she said, that in the communities where granges still operate they are more than relics of an agrarian past. They are seen as important contributors to the fabric of town life. (Statewide the membership is around 1,100, Barrett wrote in an email.)
The question was: which granges were still vital enough, with a large enough membership, to rate inclusion in the film?
“Riverside and Middle Branch were a nice pairing in a story about two very different granges that have remained very active in very different ways,” Barrett said in a phone interview from her office in Burlington. A former resident of the Upper Valley, she was the editor of Here in Hanover magazine (now Upper Valley Image) from 1998 to 2000.
Rooted: Cultivating Community in the Vermont Grange is the sixth film produced in the Everyone’s History series by Historic New England. Previous films include documentaries about the shopping district of Haverhill, Mass.; the Haymarket, the location of Faneuil Hall, in Boston; the history of the H.W. Carter and Sons building, now AVA Gallery and Art Center, in Lebanon; a history of Berlin, N.H.; and a history of Norwich’s one-room schoolhouses.
Middle Branch is a traditional grange, Barrett said. It has more than 100 members, the focus is on agriculture and it serves generations of farm families. It’s one of only two granges in Vermont that still has a junior grange for children ages 5 to 15.
Riverside, in West Topsham, takes a slightly different approach, Barrett said. Its membership consists of dairy farmers and a handful of vegetable farmers who ask the community what it would like them to provide.
The local food shelf is in the basement of the grange hall, for example, and the hall is open for community events. Riverside also started its own farmers market. And it is keyed into such rural issues as broadband development, energy efficiency and clean water.
The Grange Movement was an outgrowth of a trip that Oliver Kelley, an employee in the federal Bureau of Agriculture made to the South after the Civil War at the behest of then-President Andrew Johnson to assess the condition of farmland, said Steve Taylor, a Meriden resident who is a former commissioner of Agriculture in New Hampshire.
Taylor, who tours New Hampshire giving a talk on the Grange movement for the state’s Humanities Council, also participated in the documentary.
Kelley, who was a Mason, thought that a similar fraternal order in which farmers came together in a national organization might give them a voice and power that they had previously lacked. The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry was founded in 1867 and moved quickly to take on the railroad monopolies and to advocate for agricultural education through land-grant colleges and universities.
Granges were about more than policy; they also were a way for farmers to pool resources and share costs, and offered a place for companionship and commiseration, Taylor said.
Kelley had a niece, Taylor said, “who convinced him to include women in the hierarchy of the Grange, who would influence the Grange in terms of its policy positions. That didn’t feminize the Grange but it gave women a voice.”
Part of the idea behind the film, Barrett said, “is to expose an organization that people have never really understood. Some people think of it as a secret society.”
The peak period for the Grange Movement nationally was from the 1880s through World War I. In New Hampshire, Taylor said, its peak was from 1890 through World War I, roughly, when there were about 320 active grange chapters. Now there are 67 active chapters left in New Hampshire. There are no specific statistics on the peak number of grange chapters in Vermont, Barrett said. But Taylor said he thought that by 1900, it would have been around 260.
The Grange Movement nationally and in New Hampshire was “closely aligned with the Progressive era,” Taylor said.
The improvement of roads, the initiation of child labor laws, advocating for free public libraries and, in the 1930s, the move toward rural electrification were all initiatives that “had grange fingerprints all over them,” Taylor added.
The documentary’s objective, Barrett said, is to draw attention to the significance of granges in Vermont communities. Towns throughout the state have approached her about screening the documentary and in return they will, she said, “share the lives of their granges” through oral histories that will be archived at both the Vermont Folklife Center and Historic New England.
“People think about collecting artifacts and objects, but once stories are gone they’re gone forever,” Barrett said.
Free screenings of
For more information go to historicnewengland.org or vermontfolklifecenter.org or email Charlotte Barrett at cbarrett@historicnewengland.org.
Nicola Smith can be reached at mail@nicolasmith.org.