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PO Box 472 Cavendish, VT 05142
802-226-7807 margocaulfield@icloud.com
Winter 2026 Vol. 21, Issue 1
UPCOMING ACTIVITIES
To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Cavendish Historical Society (CHS) will be featuring a number of workshops relating to that theme.
This is the beginning calendar for 2026. Many more events will be added in the months to come. We will once again be participating in the Friday Proctorsville Farmers Market-Fridays on the Green- and will have all new dishes for “taste of history,” focusing on the late 18th century.
All of 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 [www.facebook.com/cavendishvt].
February 13 (Friday): Workshops at CTES for 5th grade (18th century Valentines) and 6th grade (Spying and Valentines)
February 28 (Saturday): In keeping with Black History Month, this workshop will include screening portions of Ken Burns’ American Revolution series on the role of black patriots, loyalists, the Ethiopian Army, and two Cavendish patriots-Peter Tumbo and Prince Robinson-who had been enslaved and made their way to Cavendish after the war. 1-2:30 pm at the Cavendish Library. Recommended ages 12 and up.
March 14 (Saturday): Celebrating Women’s History month, this workshop will discuss the role of women in the American Revolution and will include screening segments of the American Revolution series. This workshop will include a “taste of history,” where “Liberty Tea” will be served. 1 pm Recommended ages 12 and up.
June 7 (Sunday): Museum opens for the season 2-4 pm
June 20 (Saturday): Annual Cavendish Ghost Walk for Summer Solstice, meet at 8 pm at the Museum, wearing walking shoes, and bring a flashlight.
July 4 (Saturday): 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence
July 25 (Saturday): Cavendish Town Wide Tag Sale
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.
TASTING HISTORY: HOT DRINKS OF THE 18TH CENTURY
With temps hovering around 0, we wondered what people were drinking in 1776, when it was even colder then today and for longer periods of time. Tea was a popular option, as were hot chocolate. coffee and alcohol. The latter was thought to have a variety of healing properties and included such drinks as: Flip (ale, rum, and spices heated with a hot poker). hot buttered rum, mulled wine, cider or a hot toddy (hot water, whiskey or brandy, sugar).
Salmon Dutton, the founder of Cavendish Village, set up a tavern after moving here in 1781. Painted on the side porch was a picture “representing the good dame of the house presenting a ‘mug of flip’ to a thirsty traveler.”
Chocolate was first introduced to the colonies by the British for medicinal use. Its benefits were thought to include: digestive aid; longevity; lung ailment cure; and a cough suppressant. During the Revolution, medics believed hot chocolate accelerated the rate at which soldiers could recover from wounds, illness, or exhaustion. The Continental Congress included chocolate in soldier rations as a high-energy, non-spoiling food.
Chocolate was obtained from the local apothecary shop and grated into warm milk, hot water, or brandy, along with spices (cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg) and sugar. This was often served at breakfast.
Interestingly, in 1785, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams The superiority of chocolate (hot chocolate), both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain. George Washington often drank hot chocolate at breakfast.
It’s been commonly thought that coffee became America’s drink after the 1773 Tea Act, which led to the Boston Tea Party. While tea was viewed as the drink of the enemy, and unpatriotic to drink, colonists already had a long history with their favorite cup of Joe.
On July 31, 1777, Abigail wrote to her husband John, I have nothing new to entertain you with, unless it is an account of a New Set of Mobility which have lately taken the Lead in B[osto]n. You must know that there is a great Scarcity of Sugar and Coffe, articles which the Female part of the State are very loth to give up, expecially whilst they consider the Scarcity occasiond by the merchants having secreted a large Quantity. There has been much rout and Noise in the Town for several weeks. Some Stores had been opend by a number of people and the Coffe and Sugar carried into the Market and dealt out by pounds. It was rumourd that an eminent, wealthy, stingy Merchant (who is a Batchelor) had a Hogshead of Coffe in his Store which he refused to sell to the committee under 6 shillings per pound. A Number of Females some say a hundred, some say more assembled with a cart and trucks, marchd down to the Ware House and demanded the keys, which he refused to deliver, upon which one of them seazd him by his Neck and tossd him into the cart. Upon his finding no Quarter he deliverd the keys, when they tipd up the cart and dischargd him, then opend the Warehouse, Hoisted out the Coffe themselves, put it into the trucks and drove off.
Originating in Ethiopia, coffee made its way through Europe in the mid 16th century, and eventually to the colonies in the early 1600s. In 1670, Dorothy Jones became the first person to obtain a coffee license in Boston and it wasn’t long before coffee houses were established throughout the colonies.
The Dutch, French and eventually British, started coffee planting in the early 1700s in the Caribbean. The combination of good growing conditions, as well as a heavy enslaved population (estimates are that 90% of the population was enslaved) for labor, by 1788, Saint Domingue alone supplied half the world’s coffee. Note that coffee does not grow in the continental USA.
Tea was imported from China, legally via the East India Trading Company, but more commonly illegally through the Dutch East India Company.
Coffee Houses: Inns and taverns served travelers, while it was the coffee house where serious business took place. Serving food, as well as other beverages beside coffee, this was where people went for news, to discuss trade and even served as banks prior to the establishment of such institutions. The seeds of Revolution were planted in the coffee houses of the day.
The strongest stimulant offered was conversation: such talk as was the natural and obvious precursor to early modern revolutions, social, political, scientific, and intellectual.
Still, coffeehouses had their critics. Almost from the start of the English coffee craze, which dates from 1651, coffeehouses were pilloried by churchmen who suspected they were occasions of sin, by women who weren’t allowed inside, by tavern-keeps who resented the competition, and by the establishment who saw them as nurseries of murmuring and sedition. “Coffeehouses, The Penny Universities” by Mike Olmert,
Thomas Jefferson noted the connection between coffee houses and bold thinking, calling it "the favorite drink of the civilized world."
Salmon Dutton’s will indicates how popular coffee was to his tavern as listed were three small coffee pots, one large coffee pot and a coffee grinder. Not listed though was a coffee roaster, so it’s possible they were still roasting green coffee over a hot pan.
Today, coffee is once again being roasted in Cavendish, by Super Roasted www.superroasted.com in Proctorsville. Just like the coffee houses of yore, it’s become a gathering space where everything is discussed from local politics to tips for avoiding frostbite. Located at 78 Depot St., hours are Thursday-Sunday from 7ish- 11ish
PATRIOTS BURIED IN CAVENDISH CEMETERIES
Below is a list of Revolutionary War veterans and patriots buried in Cavendish cemeteries. It is thought that soldiers who died while traveling on the Crown Point Road are buried in un marked graves in both the Coffeen and Old Revolutionary Cemeteries.
Baltimore Cemetery: Note that Baltimore was once part of Cavendish. Amos Bemis; Col Joshua Martin; Noah D. Piper;
Cavendish Village Cemetery: Timothy Adams; Jonathan Atherton; Salmon Dutton; Isaac Green; Capt. Aaron Parker; Capt. John Parker; Benjamin Spaulding; Jesse Spaulding; Samuel Spear; Samuel Stearns; Capt Asa Wheeler; Col Samuel Wyman
Center Rd Cemetery: Joel Davis; Abner Jackman; Joshua D. Parker; Daniel Peck; Elnathan Reed; Timothy Stone
Coffeen Cemetery: Pvt Abel Baldwin Sr.; Isaac Baldwin; Thomas Baldwin; Sgt Isaac Baldwin; Capt. John Coffeen
Farr Cemetery: Family Cemetery Nathaniel Farr
Old Revolutionary War Cemetery: Capt. Benjamin Adams; Deacon Noah Adam; Samuel Ames; Lieut Eliphalet Chapman; David Chubb; Caleb Felch; Thomas Gleason
Sgt William Kendall; Hannah Petty Lovell; John Peack; Henry Proctor; William Spaulding Jr; Corp William Spaulding Sr.; Pvt Edmund Tarbell Sr.; Capt Thomas Tarbell V; Peter Tumbo (unmaked grave); Deacon Jonathan Wheelock
Pest House Cemetery: Capt Jonathan Wheelock
Proctor Cemetery: Capt Leonard Proctor Jr
Smokeshire: This area was once part of Cavendish. ComforT D Hill; Joseph D. Holden; Ephraim Payne
Twenty Mile Stream Cemetery: Samuel Hutchinson Jr.; Jacob Stiles; Lincoln Stiles: Jonathan Whitcomb; Oliver Whitney
Wheelock Cemetery: Jonathan Wheelock
SOLZHENITSYN: LIFE IN CAVENDISH
Many people visit Cavendish to learn about the place where the Nobel Prize winner and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived for 18 of the 20 years he was in exile from Russia. A frequent question is what was it like for his family? Where did the kids go to school?
Solzhenitsyn writes about his life in Cavendish in the two part series “Between Two Millstones: Exile in America.” In Volume Two, he writes about his sons experience with school. There were four boys in the Solzhenitsyn household Dimitri, Yermolai, Ignat and Stepan.
Most of the private schools only start at fourteen or fifteen years of age, the last four years of a twelve year education. As it turned out, there was a private primary school is the area. At seventeen miles away, it was not a short trip to be making four times a day (there and back in the morning, and the same in the evening). What’s more, it stands high in the hills and conditions are frequently icy in winter. It’s a difficult road. To the rescue came fearless grandmother, a wonderful driver with many years’ experience….
The school in the town of Andover, on the East Hill above the village, turned out to be full of general good will, offered a considerable body of knowledge and taught through labor and practical skills (it even had their own dairy farm). There were several wonderful young teachers there. But we were surprised by its strident socialist spirit-or was in Mennonite, in keeping with the beliefs of its headmaster. The headmaster, ‘Dick’ (all were to address each other by first names only), established and embodied the school’s ascetic spirit, considered himself one with the poor, and liked to make ethical and political judgements, such as “Lenin was right to take bread away from the rich,” which drew a rebuke of Dimitri that “You’d have been the first target of the requisition Dick! Look at your eight hundred acres and three hundred sheep. People were sent to the tundra for having two cows and a tin roof.” Dick was taken aback and hardly believed any of it. He defended Stalin to, but ten year old Yermolai had the nerve to answer back. “But Stalin was a murderer.” When Regan was elected president, Dick was so distraught that he flew the school flag at half-staff in mourning. The older boys did manage two and a half years there (Stephan joining for the last half year), but the feeling was growing that this was a dead end, something unnatural, and we decided it time to switch the boys to the local six-year Cavendish Town Elementary School, which was right near us.
In February 1981, they went through an assessment at the Cavendish school and were placed: ten year old Yermolai directly to sixth grade, eight year old Ignat to their fifth. Stepan to second. After a semester, Yermolai went on to the next six-year school, a bit farther from us in Chester, Vermont, with a school bus collecting the children “from the hills” and delivering them to the school after an almost hour-long drive. The study there was more intense, but Yermolai made quick work of it, even though two years younger than his classmates. He also started to take karate lessons. A year later Ignat joined him in Chester, while Stepan received the full Cavendish school education. It was hard for him there at first. The academic part was easy as pie and besides, there wasn’t any homework here either. But Stepan, with his good nature, but no defense against the cruelty of pupils’ behavior at the school and was incapable of answering foul language in kind. His helplessness only provoked more aggression. And on top of that-he was foreign. During breaks that didn’t let him play, and called him “the Russian Negro,” made him eat grass, and even stuffed it into his mouth. Little Stepan was crushed, and told his mother there was “no escape from this life.” After the explosion at an American base in Beirut that killed two hundred marines, they began to hound Stepan as a “Russian spy.” In the school bus they would wrench his arms back, hit him, and keep chanting “Communist Spy!” (From the organizational point of view, those buses were splendid. But for about an hour the children were without supervision by school staff, and the driver couldn’t keep an eye on them all-and it was in the buses that the roughest, the most disgusting behavior occurred.) Later Stepan settled in nicely and had lots of friends in the school. But, even so, the children, had to pay a price for their father’s banishment from his homeland.
CHS has copies of “Between Two Millstones,” both volumes one and two, which can be borrowed, along with other books by Solzhenitsyn. These books are also available at Amazon can also be purchased at Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/Between-Two-Millstones-Book-Solzhenitsyn/dp/0268105014
BECOME A MEMBER, RENEW YOUR MEMBERSHIP, DONATE
If you have not joined the Cavendish Historical Society, need to renew your membership, and/or would like to be a volunteer, please complete the form below and sending a check, payable to CHS, to CHS, PO Box 472, Cavendish, VT 05142. All contributions are tax deductible.
Name: _______________________________________
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Phone Number: _____________________ E-Mail: ____________________________
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__ Individual Member $10 __ Senior Member 65+ $5 __ Sustaining Member $500
__ Household Member $15 ___ Contributing Member $250
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___ I would be interested in serving, as a volunteer .I would be interested in serving on the following committee(s):__ Program Planning __ Fundraising __ Building (Museum)
__Archives _ Budget –– Cemetery __ Carmine Guica Young Historians
Donations are always welcome and can be designated as follows:
__ For general purposes __ Young Historians __Publications
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__ Rankin Fund __ Williams Fund __ Solzhenitsyn Project
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