Pownal
Commonly chosen routes for getting north are the cemented highays, U.S. 7 on the west.…known as the Ethan Allen Highway, and for all its length it has associations with the Green Mountain Boys and the early history of Vermont. The gateway is at Pownal.…and after a lung-filling and eye-filling view from the Pownal road you are soon in Bennington.
Charles Edward Crane, “Let Me Show You Vermont”
One sunny morning last week, I found myself driving across the southern border of Vermont, thinking about how my nineteen year old son would soon be walking across the same state line with a forty pound pack on his back. I had just dropped him off at the start of the Long Trail in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he was setting off for a three week, 270 mile trek along the ridge of the Green Mountains all the way to Canada. The Long Trail is the oldest long-distance hiking path in the U.S., and was the inspiration for the Appalachian Trail.
Like so many Vermont enterprises, the Long Trail was conceived, built and maintained by visionary volunteers. The original dreamer was James P. Taylor, who one morning in 1910, while waiting for the mist to clear from the top of Stratton Mountain, had the crazy idea of a path running through the Greens from the top to the bottom of Vermont.
The state's peaks had been largely unappreciated and unused for recreation until Taylor decided to help "make the Vermont mountains play a larger part in the life of the people." His dream took its first step towards reality at a small gathering of outdoor enthusiasts in Burlington, the first of a hundred years of meetings (and trail clearings) by the Green Mountain Club.
So while my son began his adventure ten miles behind and a thousand feet above me, I drove into the Pownal valley, and as usual when coming back to Vermont felt myself slip back in time.
When I used to drive from Washington D.C. to Lake Champlain for summer vacations, I usually crossed into Vermont on Route 7, and I remembered the area for the creepy, huge greyhound race track that was visible from the road. It became vacant some years ago when dog racing blessedly went out of fashion, and then burned in a mysterious fire. The charred hulk of the grandstands looks even creepier when I drive by it today.
When I get on the back roads of Pownal, I see vestiges of the tourism industry of our grandparent's time: the little roadhouses that are settled in clusters along riverbanks, and look too impossibly tiny to sleep two. I covet one of these for my back acres, where it could be a retreat for solitary mini-vacations at home.
Pownal has a long and complicated history, settled first by native Americans eons ago, then claimed by the Dutch in the late 1600's, and finally passing later that century into English hands. By the Revolutionary War, settlers began arriving to the town (named for the head of the Massachusetts Bay Colony) from the more crowded Southern parts of New England.
Their claims set the stage for a war brewing with wealthy New Yorkers who thought they'd been granted the same Vermont acres by England. The simmer came to a full boil during the Revolutionary War, when towns like Pownal split between Tories and Green Mountain Boys. Guess who won! (Hint: it wasn’t the Tories.)
An itinerant minister was less than impressed with free and independent Pownal when he came over the mountain for a visit in 1789: “Pawnal ye first town, poor land – very unpleasant – very uneven – miserable set of inhabitants – no religion..." By the 1900's Pownal did have churches, plus ten schools, textile mills (a Lewis Hine image of “Anemic Little Spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill" helped inspire the first child labor law) and a Berkshires to Bennington electric railroad. The mills are gone forever, but maybe, just maybe, the train will someday be back.
Until then, to visit the town of Pownal take a short detour from Route 7 to Route 346—which will also allow you to see North Pownal (look sharp or you'll end up in New York) and, best of all, drive the lovely back roads to Bennington.