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The Vermont Country Store, Nine Surprising Facts

You can’t have missed the catalog for the Vermont Country Store in your mailbox, and you may well have visited one of its two actual locations.

Inside the store in 1946.

And even if you haven’t set foot in the store, you know what it’s like: the quintessential country store, with a pot-bellied stove, bolts of calico and glass jars filled with licorice whips and smarties.

The Vermont Country Store carries foods that have disappeared from modern store shelves, including Indian pudding, maple sugar, dandelion greens, balsam soap, yellow eye beans, dried apples and common crackers. The store also peddles a little retro nostalgia, selling Lifebuoy soap, Jubilee kitchen wax, Turkish taffy, Postum and Fuller Brush brooms.

But the history of the store and the people who founded it is probably not quite what you think.

The Vermont Country Store

For starters, the Vermont Country Store began as a mail order catalog, not as a general store. And the physical structure was originally an inn that founders Vrest and Mildred Orton restored as a replica of his father’s country store in North Calais.

Vrest Orton had a long career as a writer, publisher and editor before founding his country store. About his career change he wrote, “I have done all I could to influence men’s minds and nothing much came of it. Now I have decided to influence their stomachs.”

Here are nine other things you may not know about the Vermont Country Store and its founders:

1. A Chase & Sanborn Coffee ad inspired Vrest Orton to open the Vermont Country Store. During World War II, he worked as a speechwriter and propagandist for the Pentagon when he saw the ad: Four old men sitting around a checkerboard on a barrel near a potbellied stove as a shopkeeper pouring sugar onto a scale. After seeing the ad, he vowed to go back to Vermont full-time and revive an old-fashioned, authentic country store.

2. Vrest, a proponent of enlightened rural living, wrote an article in 1929 arguing that Vermont should secede from the United States. It should also squash everything ‘unVermontish,’ including ‘summer camps and hot dog stands,’ ‘tourists who patronize natives’ and ‘factories belching smoke.’ He wanted to forbid foreigners to buy land in Vermont unless they grew food on it.

3. The Saturday Evening Post gave the Vermont Country Store a huge boost when it ran a story in 1952 called The Happy Storekeeper of the Green Mountains. It brought so much traffic they had to add to the back of the original building. And they eventually opened a second location in Rockingham, Vt.

4. Vrest maintained a warm friendship with Robert Frost for 25 years. He published a book of poems and remembrances after Frost died, called Vermont Afternoons with Robert Frost.

The Vermont Country Store.

36 Items

5. Mildred’s Christmas card list formed the basis for their first mail-order catalog in 1945, as soon as the war ended. They printed it on newsprint on the printing press in the garage and mailed it to about a thousand people. It had 12 pages and advertised 36 items. Mildred and Vrest wrapped products in brown paper and tied them with twine. Today 50 million store catalogs go out a year.

6. The Ortons were also friends with horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft came to visit the Ortons at their primitive farm near Brattleboro. Though a city boy who’d lived in Providence and New York, Lovecraft loved the experience. He learned to build a fire and round up cows. During his visit, the Brattleboro Reformer reported A Weird Writer Is In Our Midst.

7. As a young man, Vrest Orton worked for H.L. Mencken in New York City. He co-founded The Colophon, a book collector’s magazine, as well as the Stephen Daye Press in Brattleboro, Vt. He also co-founded Vermont Life magazine.

8. Vrest and Mildred together wrote a pioneering cookbook about wholegrain cookery in 1947, well before healthy eating became fashionable. Cooking with Whole Grains, still in print, includes recipes for regional foods such as Southern Johnnycake and Vermont Indian Pudding.

9. The National Register of Historic Places lists the Vermont Country Store as the first restored and operational rural general store in America.

Store interior: By The Vermont Country Store – The Vermont Country Store, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5372687. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Story of How Hebrew Almost Became the Official U.S. Language

Just after the American Revolution, an English essayist named William Gifford reported that some Americans planned to substitute Hebrew as the official language of the United States.

Ezra Stiles

Gifford got the story from an aide to Comte de Rochambeau, Marquis de Chastellux, who had traveled in America in 1780.

“In the rebellion of the Colonies, a member of that state seriously proposed to Congress the putting down of the English language by law, and decreeing the universal adoption of Hebrew in its stead,” Gifford wrote.

There were good reasons to believe his story. For one, some people believed a linguistic separation would follow the political separation of the United States from Great Britain.

For another, the New England Puritans brought with them a prejudice toward the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament.

New World Israelites

William Bradford

The New England Puritans identified with the Israelites who escaped Pharoah’s oppression by crossing the sea. They viewed the Scriptures as the ultimate authority, and they took their laws from the Old Testament.

William Bradford taught himself Hebrew because he wanted to read the Scriptures in their original language. His gravestone says, in Hebrew, “The Lord is the help of my life.”

And, of course, the Puritans didn’t celebrate Christmas.

Appropriately, Plymouth’s Jewish community in 1913 built a synagogue three blocks from Plymouth Rock.

Newport

Newport, R.I., became a center of Jewish settlement in the late 17^th century. George Washington in 1790 wrote a letter to the congregation of Newport’s Touro Synagogue. In it, he pledged ‘no assistance to persecution.’

Clement C. Moore, a Hebrew scholar, spent summers at his home in Newport. He wasn’t happy that his reputation rested on his poem A Visit From St. Nicholas. Moore put more store in his first American Hebrew dictionary, which he published in 1809.

Clement Moore

Ezra Stiles served as pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Newport before he became president of Yale College. He befriended Rabbi Haim Isaac Carigal, who helped him improve his Hebrew.

Stiles sometimes gets credit for proposing that Hebrew replace English as the official language of the United States of America.

Hebrew Schools

As Yale president, Stiles made a course in Hebrew a freshman requirement. By then, the Hebrew words Urim and Thummim (the oracular will of God) were already on the Yale seal, along with the Latin Lux et Veritas (light and truth).

Harvard also taught Hebrew since the 1720s, and so did William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. Columbia College in New York required all teachers to know Hebrew.

Noah Webster

During the American Revolution, feelings against the English ran high. As part of a new nation some Americans wanted to establish a separate identity from England.

“The passion for complete political independence of England bred a general hostility to all English authority,” wrote H.L. Mencken.

Mencken believed that the Englishman William Gifford, as editor of the Quarterly Review, started the story. Gifford hated the United States and, Mencken thought, wanted to mock the new country by claiming it supported Hebrew as its official language.

The story persisted, though, and appeared in The Cambridge History of American Language.

In the end, Noah Webster helped create a uniquely American language. He set the standard for American English with his blue-backed speller and dictionary.

Wrote Mencken,

Webster harbored no fantastic notion of abandoning English altogether, but he was eager to set up American as a distinct and independent dialect.

This story about Hebrew replacing English as the official U.S. language was updated in 2022. You may also want to read about the oldest synagogues in New England each state here.

Image of Touro Synagogue By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58527504.

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Was Fannie Farmer a Good Cook?

When Fannie Farmer approached Little, Brown & Co., to publish her cookbook in 1896, the company made her pay for printing the first 3,000 copies. They didn’t think the cookbook would sell.

Little, Brown’s skepticism about the enormously popular Boston Cooking-School Cookbook made Fannie Farmer rich, because she kept the copyright.

Fannie Farmer, ca. 1900. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook succeeded because its recipes were easy to follow with standard, precise measurements – ‘half cups’ and ‘teaspoons’ instead of ‘handfuls’ and ‘pinches.’ It also covered a lot of ground with more than 1,200 clearly written, dependable recipes. Good old Yankee favorites like Boston Brown Bread and Fish Chowder were included, along with exotic-sounding continental dishes like Turkish Pilaf and Halibut a la Poulette.

During Fannie Farmer’s lifetime, 21 editions and 360,000 copies of the book were sold. By 1990, four million copies sold, making The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook one of the best-selling cookbooks ever.

What made Fannie Farmer’s achievement extraordinary was that she had contracted polio at 16, dropped out of high school and struggled for years to learn to walk again. She never lost her limp. Later in life, she suffered a stroke. Ten days before her death, she gave a lecture from a wheelchair.

But could she cook?

Fannie Farmer

Fannie Farmer was born on March 23, 1857 in Boston. Her father, a printer whose business didn’t do too well, moved the family to Medford, Mass. Fannie was attending Medford High School when she contracted polio. She spent years in bed. While she slowly recovered, she took up cooking and turned her family’s home into a boardinghouse.

At 31, she entered the Boston Cooking School. After graduating a year later she stayed on as assistant principal. Five years later she was running the school and publishing the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook

By her own admission, she was more of a promoter and a businesswoman than a great cook.

She transformed the Boston Cooking School from a struggling philanthropic venture teaching poor women to cook into a popular cooking school for middle- and upper-class housewives.

Fannie Farmer also became a popular lecturer. She developed a program of diet and nutrition for convalescents, and the Harvard Medical School invited her to speak to medical students. In 1902, she left the Boston Cooking School to start Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery, which would operate until the 1940s.

A Prim Girl

Marjorie Mills, the Boston Herald’s longtime food editor, described Fannie Farmer as ‘limping briskly about her platform kitchen, teaching some 200 students. She was a prim girl with vibrant enthusiasm who arrived early at school laden with market supplies and was the last to leave at night.’

“Her bright blue eyes, red hair and vivacious personality made people overlook her plain face and the pince-nez she always wore,” said Elizabeth Schlesinger. “She was plump and had no interest in dress, but a maid who accompanied her on lecture trips saw that she always looked well. “

It was the maid who did much of the cooking. Fannie herself was ‘a great executive food detective, and gourmet, rather than a great cook herself,’ said her niece, Wilma Lord Perkins.

Christopher Kimball, of ‘America’s Test Kitchen’ Fame, told the Chicago Tribune that Fannie Farmer admitted she wasn’t the best cook. “She was a promoter, a businesswoman, a force of nature,” he said.

Or as one critic said ‘She was too apt to let the pots burn as she ran enthusiastically from one recipe to another.’

The Cookbook

Another little secret about Fannie Farmer: Her cookbook wasn’t entirely her own. Kimball writes that she certainly updated and rewrote a cookbook by her predecessor at the Boston Cooking School, Mary Lincoln, called Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book: What to Do and What Not to Do in Cooking.

But there’s no doubt the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook was an important book – reliable, comprehensive and easy to follow. Michael Field, in the New York Review of Books in 1965, wrote that ‘her procedures and recipes, tested over and over again in her classes and demonstrations, really worked.’

19th-century cooking class in Boston, courtesy Boston Public Library

After her death in 1915, though, some of the newer editions strayed from Fannie’s original formula — and even included questionable recipes.

H.L. Mencken reviewed a later edition and called it, ‘middle-class British notions of cookery.’ He was horrified by her recipe for soft-shell crabs, calling it ‘an obscenity almost beyond belief.’

Fiasco

Michael Field gave a scathing review of the 1965 edition, calling out recipes that wouldn’t work. The crabmeat Mornay recipe would end up a doughy mass, the cheese fondue inedible and the coquilles St. Jacques didn’t even include scallops!

Marion Cunningham revised the 1979 and 1990 editions of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and received much praise for her efforts.

Fannie Farmer herself described her goals for her cookbook on Jan. 7, 1896, the day the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook was published. In the preface, she wrote,

It is my wish that it may not only be looked upon as a compilation of tried and tested recipes, but that it may awaken an interest through its condensed scientific knowledge which will lead to deeper thought and broader study of what to eat.

At that, she most certainly succeeded.

Biscuits

Here is a comfort-food recipe from an early edition of Fannie Farmer’s cookbook:

Baking Powder Biscuits, adapted from The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook (1896)

Ingredients:

2 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon lard
3/4 cup milk and water in equal parts
1 tablespoon butter

Directions:

Mix dry ingredients and sift twice.

Work in butter and lard with tips of fingers; add the liquid gradually, mixing with a knife to a soft dough. It is impossible to determine the exact amount of liquid, owing to differences in flour. Toss on a floured board, pat, and roll lightly to one-half inch in thickness. Shape with a biscuit cutter. Place on a buttered pan, and bake in a hot oven (425 degrees) 12 to 15 minutes. If baked in too slow an oven, the gas will escape before it has done its work.

Mac and Cheese

This Baked Macaroni and Cheese recipe is adapted from the 1946 edition of Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking -School Cook Book.

Ingredients:

1 (8 ounce) package macaroni
4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons flour
1 cup milk
1 cup cream
1/2 teaspoon salt
fresh ground black pepper, to taste
2 cups cheddar cheese, shredded good quality
1/2 cup buttered breadcrumbs

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400°F. Cook and drain macaroni according to package directions; set aside. In a large saucepan melt butter. Add flour mixed with salt and pepper, using a whisk to stir until well blended. Pour milk and cream in gradually; stirring constantly. Bring to boiling point and boil 2 minutes (stirring constantly). Reduce heat and cook, stirring constantly, 10 minutes. Add shredded cheddar little by little and simmer another 5 minutes, or until cheese melts. Take off heat. Add macaroni to the saucepan and toss to coat with the cheese sauce. Transfer macaroni to a buttered baking dish. Sprinkle with breadcrumbs. Bake 20 minutes until the top is golden brown.

With thanks to Fannie’s Last Supper: Re-creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer’s 1896 Cookbook by Christopher Kimball. This story about Fannie Farmer was updated in 2022.

Image: Macaroni and cheese with breadcrumbs By Luigi Novi, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20984140. Macaroni and cheese plain By Pink Sherbet Photography from USA – Childhood Favorite Boxed Mac & Cheese, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37312383.

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Banned in Boston No Longer: H.L. Mencken Stands Up to the Censors

H.L. Mencken in 1926 fought back against the overzealous censorship that inspired the catchphrase ‘Banned in Boston.’ He did it by getting himself arrested on Boston Common.

His stunt worked. Boston’s chief censor wilted under the mockery the spectacle created.

The Watch and Ward Society logo

The city’s Watch and Ward Society, a puritanical group of private citizens, policed published works from 1878 to the 1920s. It made Boston a target of scorn and – unintentionally – heightened interest in the books and plays it banned.

It was founded as the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1878. Anyone who contributed $5 or more could belong, and one historian called its membership list “almost a roll call of Boston Brahmin aristocracy.” Soon after its formation, the group leveled obscenity charges against Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1882.

Banned in Boston

By the 1920s, the Society had evolved into a Jazz Age version of the Taliban. It censored hundreds of books and plays. It forced the Boston Public Library to keep banned books in locked rooms. Booksellers so feared the group that they refused to sell books on its list. Those who did were arrested, charged and fined. Plays deemed racy were performed in a sanitized Boston version.

Reading Room at McKim Building, Boston Public Library, 2013

Beginning in 1902, Watch and Ward Society’s Secretary J. Franklin Chase singlehandedly censored dozens of books in Boston. A humorless Methodist minister, he once said, ‘a whole high school class of unwedded mothers may be the result of a lascivious book.’ Mencken had little use for him.

When Chase banned the April 1926 edition of Mencken’s magazine American Mercury, the irrepressible journalist decided to take him on. “Between 1918 and 1926 … the Watch and Ward Society suppressed between 50 and 75 books in Boston,” wrote Mencken in a broadside against Chase.

H.L. Mencken

Chase had banned the magazine because of a story in it called Hatrack, a compassionate essay about a very thin small-town prostitute named Fanny Fewclothes. Chase found it “immoral” and “full of filthy and degrading descriptions.” Mencken believed Chase had gone too far.

A Peddler’s License

Mencken got Chase to agree to a public showdown on April 5, 1926. He traveled to Boston with copies of the banned magazine. Then he went to a police station and got a peddler’s license. The press and a large crowd of students awaited him at Brimstone Corner in front of the Park Street Church. When he arrived with his lawyers, the rowdy crowd cheered him on and called for Chase, who showed up late.

Park Street Church

Chase, who missed the humor in the situation, finally arrived with the captain of the vice squad and a plainclothes detective. He gave Mencken a 50-cent piece for the magazine, which Mencken bit for effect. Mencken put the magazine into his hand and Chase said, “I order this man’s arrest.” The police marched Mencken to the station, then let him out on bail.

Mencken went to trial the next day. He appeared nervous, as the judge didn’t let on which way he would rule. In the end, the judge acquitted Mencken because private citizens could not take the law into their own hands.

A jubilant Mencken went to lunch at Harvard University, where a crowd of a thousand greeted him with cheers.

Sex and the Co-ed, Cut

The battle hadn’t ended. Chase retaliated by banning the next month’s issue of American Mercury in the mail, which created a problem for Mencken: If one more month’s issue were banned in Boston, he’d lose his second-class mailing privileges. He capitulated and substituted a story about cello playing instead of one called Sex and the Co-ed.

Mencken then sued the Watch and Ward Society for restraint of trade. Again, a judge ruled that prosecutors, not private citizens, had the duty to censor literature.

Really?

Mencken’s real victory may have lain in ending Chase’s career as secretary of the Watch and Ward Society. The group ‘s influence would continue during the ‘30s, banning books such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Aldous Huxley’s Point Counterpoint and John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra. By 1948, it would change its focus to suppressing gambling.

If you liked this story, you may also like Banned in Hartford, Panned in Boston: Tough Crowds in Early American Theater.

With thanks to Babbitts and Bohemians: From the Great War to the Great Depression by Elizabeth Stevenson. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Boston Public Library reading room By Brian Johnson – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28851158. Park Street Church By Daderot – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39075427.

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