POST MILLS — When Charlie Buttrey attended the town’s Labor Day Parade last year, he was disappointed.
“There were not very many people involved in the parade or watching it,” Buttrey said.
Buttrey, 66, along with other longtime Thetford residents recall a flourishing parade from the past.
“It used to be classic fire trucks and a lot of kids riding bikes with pompom handles,” said 42-year-old Sophie Wood who grew up in Thetford. “It was very celebratory of the town. A lot of people came out for it.”
But instead of groveling in his disappointment, Buttrey resolved to do something about it.
“I decided we needed to bring it back,” he said in a phone interview earlier this month.
After retiring from practicing law earlier this year, Buttrey formed a committee of about eight people to bring the parade back to its glory days.
The committee posted to social media and the Listserv calling on residents to share their talents while marching, invited fire departments from seven surrounding towns to drive their trucks in the parade, booked the Mount Sinai Shriners based in Montpelier to drive tiny cars and secured the Dartmouth Hitchcock Advanced Response Team helicopter to land at the Post Mills airport.
“This year, the parade is back to where it should be,” Buttrey said.
‘Like it used to be’
It is rumored that the Thetford Labor Day parade, also known as the Post Mills Labor Day Parade, which starts at Kinne Fields just north of Baker’s Store in Post Mills and marches east along Route 244 to the fields beyond the Post Mills Airport, is the longest continuous Labor Day parade in Vermont.
However, it’s unclear from where that claim originated or exactly when the parade started.
Nate Pero, 76, grew up in Thetford. “I go by what the people before me have said,” he replied when asked how he knows the parade has gone longer than any other Labor Day parade in the state. Pero remembers the parade from when he was a kid, but didn’t know how long it had been going before then.
The Herald and News, a predecessor to the White River Valley Herald, wrote about a Labor Day parade in East Thetford in 1934.
“The Labor Day Spree at East Thetford was a huge success,” it said. “The weather was perfect and a large crowd attended…A parade headed by the band was held at 11 a.m.”
More recently, the parade has carried on in spite of changes in organizers — sometimes under tragic circumstances.
From 1960 until about a decade ago, the Thetford Volunteer Fire Department headed the parade followed by a chicken barbecue fundraiser. When the department decided to call it quits, Mike Pomeroy took over the parade and the Koasek Abenaki tribe of the Upper Valley adopted the chicken barbecue fundraiser.
“At one point, Mike was saddened by how many local little community fairs and events have fallen by the wayside because people are busy and there’s no energy,” Mary Pomeroy, Mike’s widow, said in a phone interview this week. “When the fire department bowed out of the chicken barbecue, it made Mike sad that we’d lose it.”
Mike Pomeroy along with a few friends kept the parade going for about seven years until he died of a heart attack in 2020.
The parade was canceled in 2020, but it resumed in 2021 even in spite of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the community’s grief over the death of the parade’s leader and town Selectboard member.
“That first year was a scramble,” Mary Pomeroy said. “I was in no shape to do it.”
Buttrey credited Thetford native Amy Vance with keeping the parade “on life support.”
“It was kind of just me and I have a full-time job so it always happened. It just wasn’t at the magnitudes that it was in the past,” Vance, a branch manager at Wells River Savings Bank, said. “I’m ecstatic to get it back to a big community event like it used to be.”
The Koasek Abenaki tribe stepped up to take over the Labor Day chicken barbecue as an opportunity to share its culture with the community.
“Holding this we get a lot of people coming up and saying, ‘Would you like to come into our church or school and talk?’ ” Pero, the tribe’s former chief, said.
In addition to half of a marinated chicken, the $15 meal comes with fire-roasted corn, homemade corn bread, baked beans and a traditional vegetable dish called Three Sisters, which is comprised of beans, corn and squash.
“This is what kept us here on the East Coast fed through the winter,” Pero said.
‘Being a part of something’
The expectations for this year’s parade are high. From baton twirlers, to horse-drawn carriage drivers to creative floats, when the organizing committee put out a call for talented community members, Thetford residents answered.
On the Wednesday afternoon before the parade, eight girls in grades kindergarten to sixth grade gathered in the Thetford Elementary School gymnasium after school to review their baton twirling routine with Sunny Martinson.
Martinson, 75, is a retired teacher and baton twirler herself. She taught free baton twirling classes in New York for decades, but stopped when she moved to Thetford in 2009 and became a registered nurse.
This summer, she taught several hour-long baton twirling classes through the town’s recreation department. She didn’t expect the kids to showcase what they learned, but Rachael Cook, the recreation director, suggested they march in the parade.
“Usually for kids to get ready for a parade and to learn the things that these kids learn, it would take a whole school year,” Martinson said. “These little guys honestly had five days. They’ll be in the parade, but don’t expect perfection. They got a speed course.”
Martinson suggested the group meet Wednesday through Friday in the week leading up to the parade to prepare.
The oldest of the group, Makaya Martin, 11, decided to try twirling this summer because she’s never done it and it seemed “interesting and fun,” she said.
Makaya doesn’t remember ever watching the Labor Day parade, but she’s excited to be in it and is “not nervous at all,” she said.
“Perfect. Almost perfect,” Martinson said after the girls ran the routine for the final time in Wednesday’s practice session. “By Friday, it’ll be perfect.”
To give Thetford’s new 4-H club some exposure, Sarah Freeman, the club’s leader, plans to drive a cart pulled by her pony Sundance in the parade.
While Sundance doesn’t like to be ridden, “he is the most amazing, tolerant, bomb-proof pony” when it comes to driving, Freeman said.
Thetford’s 4-H club began meeting weekly this spring. There are about 10 members ages 5 to 11.
Freeman plans to have the kids decorate the cart in 4-H green and walk beside it. “The parade helps give the kids something to look forward to,” she said. “I’m hoping the children overall in 4-H get a feeling of participating in the community and being a part of something.”
‘Pausing life as we know it’
Sophie Wood grew up watching the parade, but hadn’t seen it in a few decades until last year when she and her friend Margaret Perry decided to march with their young kids. They dressed up in fun costumes, brought instruments and created a “racket band,” Wood said.
Although Wood enjoyed marching, the state of the parade saddened her.
“It was sort of startling,” she said in a phone interview earlier this month. “I was like this isn’t here anymore. When I heard Charlie was trying to make it big again, that was exciting to me.”
This year, Wood and Perry are taking it up a notch from last year by creating a float shaped like a dragon made of materials “from the rot-able world” such as cardboard, recycled wood and flowers.
Wood has an extensive background in parading and performance art. She spent 15 years with the Royal Frog Ballet, a performance art group that tours around Western Mass.; took part in a radical brass band festival in Boston; worked at an annual art festival called “Parade the Circle” in Cleveland, Ohio; and interned at Bread & Puppet Theatre in Glover, Vt., a children’s theater which often incorporates parades in its performances.
“Parading is a really old art form,” she said. “It’s based in ritual and I think it’s about pausing life as we know it and noticing something or celebrating something or speaking up about something. Any opportunity to close the street and walk in the street, or dance and play music together, and notice each other is a great opportunity to make connection.”
Through rain or shine, the parade will go on, Buttrey said.
The Thetford Labor Day Parade kicks off at 11 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 1 at Kinne’s Fields and runs along Route 244 to the fields beyond the Post Mills Airport where the Koasek chicken barbecue fundraiser will be held after the parade.