The confluence of last week's devastating floods and this week's cover story about the revitalization of St. Johnsbury is a reminder that the rivers and streams that have powered Vermont through the ages also hold the potential to destroy it.
Before the American Revolution, European settlers put down roots alongside waterways to harness the hydro energy for local fabrication. They built sawmills, gristmills, woolen mills. While many of those industries have died out or moved elsewhere, the human settlements remain — in some cases, precariously close to the liquid life force that first enticed their predecessors.
Anyone who crossed the bridge from Burlington to Winooski last week — over raging rapids and falls — had a clear view of Vermont's love-hate relationship with water power. Hopefully, too, they took a moment to give thanks for the little city's elevation. Modern occupants of the old mill buildings perched over the water must have gotten quite a show.
The shire town of St. Johnsbury was also built on a hill — over the Passumpsic River — and its boom-and-bust history is classic Vermont. Native sons Thaddeus and Erastus Fairbanks invented a platform scale and successfully manufactured it there for more than a century. During that time, the civic-minded Fairbanks family and their employees constructed some of the most stunning private homes and public buildings in the burg, including the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum and the Fairbanks Museum.
Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, the Fairbanks family lost control of the company in the mid-20th century, and most of its manufacturing moved to Mississippi; the executive offices went to Kansas City, Mo. Like Springfield, once a bright spot on the manufacturing map, St. Johnsbury slowly faded.
The town was officially down-at-the-heels when I became aware of it in 1983. Eight years earlier, Jay Craven of Barnet had founded Catamount Arts, which presented performing arts events in and around the area. By the early '80s, he was booking performing artists at the newly opened Flynn, where I worked, and selling out almost every show. He used the proceeds from ticket sales to build his arts org back in the Northeast Kingdom.
Tirelessly creative, Craven was the main driver of St. Johnsbury's first renaissance. He gave up running Catamount in 1991 to focus on filmmaking, teaching and other arts presenting, but not before cofounding Circus Smirkus and the GRACE project for older visual artists. I wasn't surprised to learn he's also involved in the town's more recent commercial comeback — specifically, in helping to establish a food co-op. This week's "Turnaround Town" shows how a new generation of creative entrepreneurs and businesspeople in St. Johnsbury is building on Craven's work.
A critical mass of caring, hardworking individuals can change a place for the better. But the rest of us have a role, too: to lift a finger, get off the couch, do our part. While St. Johnsbury survived, Lyndonville is swamped. Montpelier stayed dry this time, but Barre didn't. All these places, including Burlington, need your business right now. If you were spared last week, channel your flood survivor's guilt into local economic action. Go see a show, eat at a new restaurant, take an acquisitive stroll down Church Street or buy something on the local Amazon alternative, Myti.
People power has potential, too.