VTVermont Famous People

Both Vermont presidents reached the office because someone died

Chester Arthur was born at Fairfield in 1829, the son of a Baptist preacher, and was sworn in at his own house on Lexington Avenue in New York at around two in the morning on September 20, 1881, after James Garfield finally died of the wound he had taken in July. Political opponents spent years pushing the claim that Arthur had in fact been born across the line at Dunham, Quebec, which would have made him constitutionally ineligible; the story was never substantiated and never quite went away. Calvin Coolidge was born on July 4, 1872, in the rooms behind his father's store at Plymouth Notch, the only president born on Independence Day. He was visiting the homestead in August 1923 when a messenger arrived with word that Warren Harding had died in San Francisco. There was no telephone in the house, so his father, a notary public, administered the oath by the light of a kerosene lamp at 2:47 in the morning on August 3. Coolidge went on to win the 1924 election outright, which Arthur never got the chance to do. The Republicans refused him the nomination in 1884.

A religion that began in two Vermont villages

Joseph Smith was born at Sharon on December 23, 1805. Brigham Young was born at Whitingham on June 1, 1801. Young's family moved west into New York while he was still a toddler; Smith's left after the failed harvests of 1816, the year without a summer, and settled near Palmyra. Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830 and was killed by a mob at Carthage, Illinois, in 1844. Young took over the migration and brought the first company into the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847, then governed Utah Territory. At Smith's birthplace in Sharon there is a granite obelisk quarried at Barre and raised in 1905, thirty-eight and a half feet tall, one foot for each year he lived.

Vermonters who built machines

John Deere was born in Rutland in 1804, apprenticed to a blacksmith in Middlebury, and left for Illinois in 1836 with creditors behind him. The following year he made a plough with a polished steel mouldboard that shed the heavy prairie soil instead of clogging in it. Elisha Otis, born at Halifax in 1811, invented the safety brake that catches an elevator when the hoist rope parts, and proved it in 1854 at the New York Crystal Palace by standing on a raised platform and having the rope cut. Henry Wells of Thetford co-founded American Express and then, in 1852, Wells Fargo. Thaddeus Fairbanks patented the platform scale at St. Johnsbury in 1831, which is what made it possible to weigh a loaded wagon in one go. Justin Morrill of Strafford, in Congress and later the Senate, wrote the 1862 land-grant act that created dozens of state universities.

Arguments Vermonters turned up in

Stephen A. Douglas was born at Brandon in 1813 and left for Illinois at twenty. By 1858 he was the sitting senator debating Abraham Lincoln across that state, and in 1860 he lost the presidency to the same man. George Dewey, born at Montpelier in 1837, destroyed the Spanish squadron at Manila Bay on May 1, 1898, without losing a ship. George Perkins Marsh of Woodstock published Man and Nature in 1864, an argument that stripping forests could ruin a civilisation, generally treated as the first work of American conservation. Consuelo Northrop Bailey was elected lieutenant governor in 1954 and became the first woman anywhere in the country to hold that office. Jody Williams, born at Brattleboro in 1950, shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for the campaign that produced the treaty banning anti-personnel landmines.

The ones Vermont adopted

Ethan Allen came from Litchfield, Connecticut, and took Fort Ticonderoga at dawn on May 10, 1775 with the Green Mountain Boys. Rudyard Kipling married an American, built a house outside Brattleboro, and wrote The Jungle Book there between 1892 and 1896 before a public feud with his brother-in-law drove him off. Norman Rockwell moved to Arlington in 1939 and used his neighbours as the models for the Four Freedoms paintings in 1943. Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, farmed in Shaftsbury and Ripton, and was named Vermont's poet laureate in 1961. Bernie Sanders was born in Brooklyn and won the Burlington mayoralty in 1981 by ten votes. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield grew up on Long Island, split a five dollar correspondence course in ice cream making, and opened in a converted Burlington petrol station in 1978.

Winter medals from a state of 650,000

Andrea Mead Lawrence was born at Rutland in 1932 and won both the slalom and the giant slalom at Oslo in 1952; no American alpine skier has taken two golds at a single Games since. Bill Koch of Brattleboro won silver in the thirty kilometre cross-country race at Innsbruck in 1976, the first Olympic medal the United States had ever won in the sport. At Salt Lake City in 2002, Ross Powers of South Londonderry won the men's halfpipe and Kelly Clark of West Dover won the women's, both on the same mountain within two days. Hannah Kearney of Norwich took the moguls gold at Vancouver in 2010. That is a considerable haul from a state with fewer than seven hundred thousand residents and no city larger than Burlington.

Famous people from other New England states

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