The Cavendish Historical Society Newsletter
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PO Box 472 Cavendish, VT 05142
802-226-7807 margocaulfield@icloud.com
Spring 2026 Vol. 21, Issue 2
UPCOMING ACTIVITIES
All of the Cavendish Historical Society (CHS) events are free, unless noted otherwise. Donations are always welcome and appreciated. In the event of last minute changes due to weather, or another issue, information will be posted to the Cavendish Facebook page.
May 20 (Wednesday): 5th and 6th grade students lay flags on veterans graves
May 23 (Friday): Early bird annual plant sale, 5-7 pm in front of the Museum
May 24 (Saturday): Annual plant sale continues 9-noon
May 27 (Wednesday): Young Historians trip to Ft. Ticonderoga for 5th/6th grades
June 7 (Sunday): Museum opens for the season 2-4 pm
June 14 (Sunday): Flag day talk at the Cavendish Stone Church, 2 pm. The amazing life of Betsy Ross. Learn how to make a five pointed star in just one snip.
June 20 (Saturday): Annual Cavendish Ghost Walk for Summer Solstice, meet at 8 pm at the Museum, wear walking shoes, and bring a flashlight.
July 4 (Saturday): 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence
July 12 (Sunday): Depending on weather, Dr. Charis Boke. herbalist and medical anthropologist from Dartmouth, will lead a medicinal plant walk at Greven Field. Meet at the Museum at 2pm. Wear comfortable shoes and bring bug spray and a water bottle. In the event of very hot weather, Dr. Boke will offer a program at the Museum.
July 25 (Saturday): Cavendish Town Wide Tag Sale. CHS will be set up by the Gazebo on the Proctorsville Green.
September 12 (Sunday): Phineas Gage Walk and Talk, meet at the Museum at 2 pm. The walk includes the site of the Gage accident. It’s approximately three quarters of a mile from the Museum.
October 11 (Sunday): Last day the Museum is open for the season.
ANNUAL PLANT SALE
Have plants you’d like to donate to the Annual Plant Sale? We have people planting rain gardens, to control stormwater, so perennials are ideal. There are pots available at the Museum. Need help transplanting or need plants picked up? Give us a call 802-226-7807. If you’d like a salad bucket this year, please order in advance by e-mailing margocaulfield@icloud.com The sale starts Friday night (May 23) from 5-7 in front of the Museum and continues on Saturday (May 24) from 9-noon.
50th ANNIVERSARY OF SOLZHENITSYN’S MOVING TO CAVENDISH
It seems fitting that Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize winning writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, moved to Cavendish the same year the country was celebrating their 200th birthday. Below is an excerpt from “Between Two Millstones: Sketches of Exile 1974-1978” about his arrival in Cavendish.
I settled in at Five Brooks [the name he gave to his Cavendish property] on a stormy night, the eve of the united States Bicentennial, the country entering its third century while I was entering an unknown period, my life in Vermont. Listening to the radio the following day, I heard them praise themselves in truly effusive and excessive terms. It was yet a new surprise.
In the meantime I had to live here hidden in a small cottage some distance from the building site, away from all the hammering, and also so that the workers would not realize who the actual owner was, having only dealt with Alex Vinogradov. In Russia we imagine the Americans to be champions of work, so I was expecting fantastic speed and meticulous construction. But in the evenings, leaving my cottage by the pond at the lower end of my property where the streams meet, and heading up the steep hill to see how work was progressing, I was amazed at how slowly it was going.
The house we had bought-a wooden summer house, only large enough for a small family-had to be expanded, and we even built a separate brick house, with a large basement, that was to have a number of rooms where all my archives could be stored securely and indefinitely…….
But regardless of the amount of money I ended up squandering due to my inexperience and lack of involvement, the spacious house that was to be the result of all this rewarded me with many years of productive work. Even that summer in the cottage by the pond I wrote my entire Stolypin-Bogrov cycle. Some things are priceless.
Copies of “Between Two Millstones” are available to borrow from CHS by contacting us at the address above.
HOW CAVENDISH CELEBRATED THE 200TH
In 1976, Cavendish celebrated the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence by hosting a combination Old Home Day and Bicentennial on July 10th. The article below was by Barney Crosler of the Rutland Herald.
Cavendish bloomed with its biggest parade in 54 years Saturday as the whole town turned out for a procession that wended its way more than two miles from the gravel bank east of Duttonsville [Cavendish Village] to Greven Field in Proctorsville
It was the biggest affair the town had seen since 1911 when the town celebrated the 150th anniversary with a home grown boy, Gov. Allen M. Fletcher, as the day’s principal speaker.
There were more than 60 units in the long procession that included six bands and numerous floats. Harold Lawrence was in charge of the big event with its antique automobiles, fire engines from Cavendish, Proctorsville, Ludlow and Bellows Falls, and politicians riding in convertibles…..
There were clowns from the Shrin’s Cairo Temple and bands from high schools in Ludlow and Chester, as well as the Proctorsville Drum & Bugle Corps and two bugle corps from Connecticut.
One of the outstanding floats was a replica of Cavendish done by the local Historical Society. [These models can still be seen at the CHS Museum]. Another that drew a lot of attention was the Boston Tea Party depicted by the Jaycees and one by the Cavendish Homemakers Club, showing three generations of homemakers.
The parade lasted an hour and 20 minutes, disbanding at Greven Field, where an all-day fair was in progress. It seemed all of Cavendish’s church fraternal and service organizations were represented in booths at the fair. [Note: Cavendish today has just two churches-Cavendish Baptist and St. James Methodist]….
An afternoon program at Greven Field had Atty. Matthew Birmingham, town counsel, as the keynote speaker. He was the only speaker who mentioned the bitter battle Cavendish is waging to keep Springfield from flooding 500 to 600 acres along the Black River for a hydroelectric reservoir.
Commending the citizens on their stand, he noted it is easy to stand up and unite in opposition to something, but they must also be willing to commit themselves in a positive way.
Birmingham noted the nation wasn’t celebrating the burning of Tory homes this year, but rather the positive actions of the revolution. He said there is a duty on the part of Cavendish citizens to improve their condition, and improvement is done best at the local level….
Rep. William Am Hunter D-Weasthersfield, advised the Cavendish people to ask themselves if they would have been willing to give up so much security and prosperity as the signers of the Declaration of Independence gave up because of their beliefs.
The afternoon program had deep religious tones, with a lot of gospel singing, and the religious tone was carried into some of the speeches…..
There were times when the afternoon bicentennial program took on the feverish tone of an old fashioned gospel sing, and there was a succession of hymns done by the Rev. Gary L. Hodgeman and his family of the Assembly of God Church.
The reporter must have left at 4:30 that day as another paper carried the following:
About 4:30 the crowd began to leave. Some west to the Drum Corp Hall [Opera Hall building on Depot St. now the home of SuperRoasted] where slides were shown of the “Hypotenuse to History” trip made early this spring.
A Street dance in front of the hall completed a day to be remembered and recorded for history
HOW CAVENDISH HAS CHANGED IN THE LAST 50 YEARS
Since the arrival of Solzhenitsyn and the country’s 200th in 1976, a lot has changed in Cavendish. While the population has increased-according to the US Census-there were 1,264 residents in 1970 compared to 1,392 residents in 2020-the biggest change has been in the population mix. Today roughly 25% of the population is 65 and up and the 18 and under is closer to 17%.
In 1974 the Cavendish Town Elementary School (CTES) population was 183 students while the projected enrollment for September 2026 is 57. A variety of factors contributed to this significant reduction. The expansion of Okemo Resort in the 80s and 90s, made Cavendish’s proximity to the mountain ideal for second homeowners; Act 60 also known as the Equal Educational Opportunity Act, became law in 1996, which required "substantially equal access" to education for all Vermont students. Cavendish was not impacted by the bill initially, but in subsequent years, particularly with the growing second home owner population, residents felt like they were being “taxed” out. Lack of rental housing became another issue, as the year round rental market dried up, with a number of properties converting to AirBnBs. However, the overriding change is the national declining birthrate.
Starting to decline in the 1970s, the birth rate has steadily dropped through the decades, picking up speed after the “great recession” in 2007-2009. Vermont has the lowest birth rate in the country with a fertility rate of 41.5 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, which is well behind the national average of 53.
The impact of the Internet age is still unfolding, but it has afforded more people an opportunity to work from home. While it took a while for the town to have high speed Internet, this option made it possible for many second homeowners to live here during the Covid pandemic in 2020.
Matt Birmingham questioned Cavendish’s ability to “commit in a positive way” and stressed the “duty of Cavendish citizens to improve their condition,” Cavendish has consistently done that over the last 50 years. Not only was Springfield defeated in their effort to flood Cavendish, but a major quarry effort was successfully fought in the early 2000s. The town has shown its resiliency by recovering from two devastating floods in 2011 and again in 2023, as well as weathering the Covid pandemic.
Of the five churches that existed in 1976, only two (St. James Methodist and the Cavendish Baptist) are still functioning. The Baptist Church has become the location of the town shelter, which has been called on for both flood recovery as well as a place to go when there are extended power outages, particularly in the winter.
Mack Molding, which replaced Gay Brothers in 1962, is still operating and runs multiple shifts. Singleton’s opened in 1978 and is known worldwide for their bacon and other foods. A new town library was built in 1990. The Proctorsville Green was created 1996-1998 and is now the home of summer concerts, a Friday night Farmer’s Market, is surrounded by two eateries-Murdoch’s and Outer Limits-as well as various new housing options. There is a public access TV station-Okemo Valley TV-which is in the process of adding a radio station for the area. While they film school and town board meetings, a Zoom option makes greater community participation possible.
During the 2011 flooding, the Cavendish Select Board chair, Jim Ballentine, stopped by the shelter and said, “Cavendish always comes together.” Many people from other towns have made similar comments during flood recoveries as well as the Covid pandemic. Cavendish is still a town where people roll up their sleeves and go about getting the job done and taking care of one another in the process.
THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
The Declaration of Independence calls for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” While life and liberty are understandable, what the founders meant by “happiness” is not as clearly understood 250 years after it was adopted.
According to the National Constitution Center, At its core, the Founders viewed the pursuit of happiness as a lifelong quest for character improvement, which requires a commitment to practicing the daily habits that lead to self-regulation, emotional intelligence, flourishing, and growth. Understood in these terms, happiness is always something to be pursued rather than obtained—a quest rather than a destination.
Inspired by ancient philosophers, they described this quest as a dramatic struggle between reason and passion. The Greek words for reason and emotion are logos and pathos, respectively, so for the Founders, passion was a synonym for emotion. The Founders believed not that we should lack emotion, only that we should manage our emotions in productive ways.
“The due Government of the passions has been considered in all ages as a most valuable acquisition,” Abigail Adams warned her son John Quincy Adams, emphasizing, in particular, the importance of using reason to subdue “the passion of Anger.” Her conclusion: “Having once obtained this self government, you will find a foundation laid for happiness to yourself and usefulness to Mankind.”
In his writings on happiness, Plato argued that we should use our faculty of reason, located in the head, to moderate and temper our faculties of passion, located near the heart, and appetite, in the stomach. When all three faculties of the soul were in harmony, Plato maintained, the state that resulted was called “temperance,” but, as Adam Smith noted, it might be better translated as “good temper, or sobriety and moderation of mind.” Drawing on Smith’s “faculty psychology,” the Founders held that the goal of education was to strengthen our powers of reason so we could control our turbulent emotions, achieving the calm self-mastery and tranquility of mind that was key to personal and political happiness.
