The trivia questions in this month's Fletcher Newsletter were essentially picked at random, but their very real connectedness has been weighing on my mind for a while.

1. How many acres did each original landholder have to clear to retain property rights?
2. How many school districts did Fletcher have in 1880?
3. When did Fletcher first get electricity?

They all boil down to one word: community.

1. Answer: 5 acres (plus build a modest house) within 3 years (more or less after the Revolution).

I found that requirement to be very interesting.  The State granted land to people, but they had to do actually something with it. D Gregory Sandford (VT Historical Society) wrote:

Rather than promoting settlements of unfettered individuals creating farms in isolation across the landscape, early charters envisioned town centers, built around public meetinghouses, churches, and, in a very few cases, a town common…Private ownership and use of land were bundled with civic obligations to the community…The idea that civic rights and obligations followed private ownership of the landscape remained within all subsequent town charters…The scope of these obligations changed with time, though each offered a vision of community.

Note that civic obligation to community, which is right in line with our constitution's Declaration of Rights:

Article 9th: That every member of society hath a right to be protected in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and therefore is bound to contribute the member's proportion towards the expense of that protection, and yield personal service, when necessary, or an equivalent thereto, but no part of any person's property can be justly taken, or applied to public uses, without the person's own consent, or that of the Representative Body.

Liberty comes not from unfettered freedom, but rather from rights and responsibilities within society.  That fundamental combination is explicitly codified in our founding documents.

2. Answer: 10 districts in a town of about 1000 people!

There was quite a lot of discussion last year about school consolidation, with Fletcher possibly no longer having its lone school any more in favor of merging with neighboring Fairfax.  While we ultimately rejected that option, it would've only been practical in this modern age of buses and carpools.  Consider this excerpt from A History of Fletcher Vermont:

The Beers Franklin County Atlas (1871) shows ten districts with a school in each.  For reasons unknown, there is no District 10, but there is District 11 in the northeast part of town…The buildings were so spaced throughout the town that no child, theoretically, would need to walk more than two miles to school, one way…Consolidation of schools gradually took place from the early 1930s, the Great Depression, through the next three decades until the new school was constructed ¼ mile south of Binghamville in 1962.

From the beginning of our Republic, education has been extremely important, as Ira Allen noted in hisHistory of Vermont:

The greatest legislators from Lycurgus down to John Lock, have laid down a moral and scientific system of education as the very foundation and cement of a State ; the Yermontese are sensible of this, and for this purpose they have planted several public schools, and have established a university, and endowed it with funds, and academic rewards, to draw forth and foster talents.

So it should come as no surprise that this, too, is codified in our constitution:

Section 68: [A] competent number of schools ought to be maintained in each town unless the general assembly permits other provisions for the convenient instruction of youth.

Our town decided a few decades ago that we no longer needed 10 districts, and more recently decided that we still valued having one school for “convenient instruction.”  We were able to make an informed collective decision thanks to our School Board's due diligence, and these community members continue to work with our veteran principal and experienced school staff to tackle difficult issues in these difficult times.

3. Answer: East Fairfield got electricity in 1923; East Fletcher in 1939, Metcalf Pond in 1940, Buck Hollow in 1941.

I think the important takeaway from this trivial fact is that with the exception of East Fairfield, where PELCO (now part of CVPS) provided service from the Fairfax Falls generating station it built, most of Fletcher didn't get electricity from a for-profit company.  History of Fletcher again:

Other parts of town received their first electric service from Vermont Electric Cooperative, Inc. which was initially financed by a federal agency, the Rural Electrification Administration.

Private interests bypassed us because we weren't “worth it,”  but FDR saw the value of universal electrification, as did Vermont Governor George Aiken.  The latter was, fittingly, a Republican not only in terms of party affiliation but also in the original sense of the word.  Gordon Wood wrote in The Creation of the American Republic:

Republicanism, with its emphasis on devotion to the transcendent public good, logically presumed a legislature in which various groups in the society would realize 'the necessary dependence and connection' each had upon the others…each man must somehow be persuaded to submerge his personal wants into the greater good of the whole. This willingness of the individual to sacrifice his private interests for the good of the community the eighteenth century termed ‘public virtue.’

Roosevelt and Aiken recognized it was often necessary to consider the common good, so went to great lengths to make sure even rural communities such as ours had electricity.  Of course Aiken was educated in Vermont where our constitution's section on schools begins:

Laws for the encouragement of virtue…ought to be constantly kept in force…

Education and civic virtue are intrinsically linked, and are the foundation of our success as a community.  That is most assuredly not a trivial thing.

ntodd

PS–I plan on serializing this over the summer in the Newsletter.