A memoir of 50 years since moving to the Upper Valley raises a lot of questions. Where did I come from, why did I come here and how have things worked out for me? But forget that for now. There’s not much drama in it anyhow. Let’s start instead with another, fresher yawner that tells the whole story of a half-century here in the old bed of glacial Lake Hitchcock: the results of the 2020 census.
If news is either change or conflict — or both, if the media happens to be so lucky — then recent reportage on the those numbers makes for a weak cup of morning coffee. But, ah, my friends, stay for a second cup, as there’s a story to be told, the same one that’s been between the lines in every census report since the 1970 head count.
Simply put, this area is a strange outlier, very strange indeed.
The numbers on the bottom line add up to the dull-as-dishwater realization that nothing is very much different here than when I arrived in the summer of 1971, except that we’re a whole lot better off than we were then. Most remarkably, widespread improvement in the quality of life has been without much physical growth, the kind of disorienting explosive sprawl that has remade much of the rest of America.
The long story is pretty simple. Over 2½ centuries the (European) Upper Valley has experienced two great epochs, first settlement/farming, then railroads/industrialization, each of which lasted for about a hundred years. We’re now almost 60 years into the third, the “Interstate Era.” To many residents, the present day may mean Route 120 commuter traffic and the shopping plazas, but to me it’s more like West Newbury, Canaan Street and Cornish Flat. The Upper Valley presents itself far more as an outdoor museum of its past than as any hub of commerce and commotion.
I call it paradise, and perhaps it’s time you enjoyed it even more for what hasn’t happened here than what has. Less has been very much more for almost everybody.
First, though, proving my point that the recent past has been a period of more of the same requires deconstructing Era One and Two, each of which radically transformed the region as the current one has not.
For that, a quick trip north to the Plains of Abraham, outside Quebec City, is required. There, the Brits defeated the French in 1759 and — voilà — this part of Colonial “new” England (then a frontier) was open to development. There was the Fort at No. 4 in Charlestown, but a fort against whom? Black flies along the Connecticut River? No, against the French and their First Nation and Native American allies, who had notably used the river valley as a route from New France for kidnap-for-ransom expeditions to the Massachusetts Colony.
Now, with the end of the French and Indian War, northwestern New England is wide open and Connecticut investor groups move north, bringing their hometown names with them: Hartford, Pomfret, Lebanon, Woodstock, Lyme — you get the picture.
The accessible bottom lands were snagged first, with late-comers heading for the well-drained hills. Clearing the land with bonfires that burned night and day for decades, Amazon rainforest-style, it was boom time for the next half-century.
Artifacts of the those most fertile riverside lands are the nearby Federal-style homes up and down the valley. Artifacts of the stonier uplands are a hundred town roads with “hill” in their names. Those changes could not have been more radical. Before the Revolution, Vermont’s non-Native population was near zero; by 1840 it reached 300,000. The Upper Valley portion of Grafton County grew at about the same rate.
Some people saw the second era coming. Daniel Webster was one of them. “It is altogether new. The world has seen nothing like it before.” He was speaking to crowd of about 1,200 people in Lebanon who had come to celebrate the opening of the Northern Railroad. Festivities took place on almost the exact spot where, 149 years later, a group of about 30 volunteers met to begin work on converting that same rail corridor to Concord into a recreation trail.
What Webster could probably not have foreseen was how the agricultural world would be so quickly and enormously remade by modern, city-based industry. As Dartmouth College geology professor James Walter Goldthwait reported so eloquently 80 years later, the town of Lyme “went downhill” from the backcountry to the village. (Thanks to Valley News staff writer Liz Sauchelli for “The story of Lyme in the numbers,” Aug. 22.)
Canaan moved itself to the steel railroad, leaving Canaan Street on the old dirt turnpike behind. Lebanon, Springfield, Claremont, Windsor and Randolph became manufacturing centers, attracting immigrant workers by the thousand, many from, you guessed it, Quebec. (Artifact: Catholic churches.) Once the railroad crossed the Connecticut, it made a place that really didn’t exist into a major someplace for the next hundred years — White River Junction.
In the five decades after Webster spoke, Lebanon’s population doubled, Springfield’s rose by 70% and kept on going, until by 1920 it had grown by 350% into a heavy industry powerhouse with immigrant workers from around the world. (Artifact: the Polish Open, a golf tournament that was played for many years at Crown Point Country Club in North Springfield.) The era peaked in the three-shifts-a-day years of World War II into the 1950s.
But by the time surveyors were headed north to sketch out the route of the interstates in the early 1960s, factory jobs were headed south, in both senses of the word. Rural poverty was then the norm anywhere outside Hanover, Lebanon and Woodstock. Read the late poet Donald Hall’s evocative A String Too Short to Be Saved for the definitive backwoods New England of the Depression and the 30 years after. In the late 1950s, I would see plenty of threadbare New Hampshire from the back seat of a Buick along Route 4 and 4A on the drive north from Concord to Camp Pinnacle on Post Pond in Lyme.
So what did the Interstate Era bring to the Upper Valley? Money, but very few people. Lebanon’s population doubled during the industrial buildup after the Civil War, but it grew by only a third after 1960.
During the same period, the head counts of most other towns, particularly those in both Windsor and Orange counties on the Vermont side, was static. In the 2010 census, some towns there had lost residents over the previous 10 years.
But once the paving was done and the region connected to the real world outside, the balance of payments — money in vs. money out — began to grow rapidly on the positive side. Lately it’s ballooned, perhaps on par with a Persian Gulf emirate on an in-vs.-out percentage. Before the hospital moved to Lebanon, I used to envision a giant funnel in the sky over the Dartmouth campus flooding the valley north, south and every which way with alumni donations, tuition payments, hospital fees, federal research grants, tourist spending, private investment and hundreds of millions of other imported dollars. These days, I imagine a great udder with many teats under which the entire region drinks milk and honey from around the world.
According to Business NH Magazine, the Upper Valley’s Big Three — Dartmouth College, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic physicians group — alone total nearly $4 billion in revenue a year. Add in all other sources and what have you got? An economic curiosity that provides continuous improvement in the quality of life hereabouts, without the unsettling physical changes that we ruefully see in the places we came from. The Upper Valley is a strange outlier, indeed.
Oh, about me. The Interstate Era brought me here to build a franchised motel in uptown White River Junction, and later a hotel, followed more recently by investment in Rail Road Row office buildings downtown. I got married, had kids, got into women’s hoops and took out a guest borrower card at Baker Library. There I found the 974.2 shelves, and put the local lore I found there together with a newly invented “mountain bike” lent to me by a Dartmouth player friend. The rest is, well, history.
Dick Mackay, of Hanover, is the author of Adventures in Paradise: Exploring the Upper Connecticut Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire (On a Bicycle!).