Our History
When you dig a hole on our property, you encounter two things: roots and gravel. There are almost no large rocks in the soil. It’s some of the easiest digging (minus the roots) you can find. The reason for this? We sit on an ancient lake bed!
About 15,000 years ago, when the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated northward, meltwater pooled behind a moraine dam near Rocky Hill, CT, forming a 200-mile long massive lake called Lake Hitchcock. The adjacent map shows roughly what it would have looked like. About two-thousand years later, the dam gave way and the lake drained, leaving behind what is now the CT River.
The lake left behind a corridor of dark earth, broad meadows, and a river winding south through the heart of it. Then people came. For thousands of years, the Abenaki — the Wôbanakiak, "People of the Dawnland" — lived in and around Southern VT. They hunted in the uplands, tended fields of corn, beans, and squash, and gathered each spring at the great falls of the Connecticut, what we now call Bellows Falls, where the shad and salmon ran thick enough to feed whole villages.
The petroglyphs they carved into the rocks at the falls are still there, looking out over the river. Descendants of these original people are still here, and we shouldn’t forget those who tended this beautiful land with so much care for so many years.
In 1971, Gramma hired a surveyor to research and map the property. What they found was quite fascinating. Around the time of the Revolutionary War, a former Colonel in the British army named James Rogers owned a parcel of land that included some of ours. When the war broke out, Rogers stayed loyal to the Crown. He commanded a troop in General Burgoyne's invading army, and after their defeat at Saratoga in 1777 he fled north to Upper Canada, where he lived out his days.
Rogers' Rockingham holdings — including Lot 11 in the 4th Range, the heart of what is now our property — were confiscated "due to his treasonable conduct" and sold off by the state on June 22, 1779, the proceeds going to finance the Green Mountain Boys. In a small way, our acres helped pay for the militia that fought to keep the state independent!
The land changed hands many times in the century that followed, settling eventually into pastures and a homestead beside a year-round spring. The house there belonged to a man named Frederick Read. The house is long gone, but its foundation remains not far from his spring which, remarkably, is still our water source today.
That brings us to 1967, when Gramma told her son Bill and his wife Edo that she wanted to buy a camp in Vermont for her family to enjoy. They didn’t hesitate. Edo spotted an ad in the paper that looked promising. They followed up on it but knew it wasn’t right. The owner told them about friends of his, the Fontanes, who were about to list their property in Rockingham. As soon as they drove up to the little red hunting cabin, with the amazing view and pristine woods, they realized immediately they had found a true gem . In November of that year, for the price of $17,000, Gramma purchased the building and 120 acres (according to the survey). The rest is history.
Frederick Read Road
