No wonder the state of Vermont is having a hard time settling on a fitting memorial to Romaine Tenney, who resisted to the death the march of progress across his beloved farm in Ascutney. After all, how do you memorialize a vanished way of life?
In September of 1964, hours after being served notice that the 75-acre farm where he was born in 1900 and where he had lived virtually his entire life was being taken by eminent domain for the construction of Interstate 91, Tenney let his animals loose, set his barns and house ablaze, and killed himself. This tragic act was the shocking culmination of the state’s offers of compensation for the land — offers that Tenney could, and did, refuse.
It was perhaps the simplicity of the way Tenney, a bachelor, lived that makes his last stand so vivid. According to a 2013 article in Yankee magazine by Howard Mansfield, his house had no electricity and he employed no gas-powered machinery on the farm. “He cut his firewood with an ax and a saw; cut his hay with workhorses. He didn’t own a tractor or drive a car,” Mansfield wrote. When he went to town, he walked, and he milked his cows by hand.
That way of life, and that Vermont, were already passing away by the time of his death. Professor Paul Searls of Northern Vermont University told Vermont Public Radio that the 1950s and ’60s were “kind of like a twilight period between what Vermont had been and the uncertainty of what it would become. The loss of farms, of course, was extraordinary: In 1945, there were over 26,000 farms. By 1964, there were about 9,200.”
The state’s evolution was accelerated by the construction of Interstate 91, which now passes over what was the Tenney farm, the last vestige of which is an ailing hundred-year old maple that, perhaps fittingly, towers over a commuter parking lot. The state of Vermont wants to cut it down on the grounds that falling limbs present a danger to people and automobiles using the lot. It proposes to erect some other appropriate memorial to Tenney and to the transformational role the interstate played in the making of modern Vermont.
This did not sit well with about 40 members of the community who gathered in Ascutney last month to hear about the Agency of Transportation’s plan to remove the dying tree. “It’s the last living reminder of what was here,” said John Arrison, a member of the Weathersfield Selectboard. “Let it die by itself rather than by chainsaw.”
And VTDigger reported that Dave Fuller, who lives in Perkinsville and was recently forced by economic circumstances to sell his cows, told the AOT that the quest to memorialize Tenney was in vain. “You can’t,” said Fuller. “I’m telling you as a farmer I felt the same way when my cows left. You can’t do it. And the town can’t do it. You took something from him.”
Several ideas were offered for a different kind of physical memorial. But maybe the best memorial to Romaine Tenney is for Vermonters to remember by way of his example that no matter how beneficial progress may be, it comes with a price that not everybody is willing to pay. This dynamic rarely ends in tragedy, as it did in Tenney’s case. But a sense of loss and deep regret is so often, for so many, the other side of change.