When she was a kid, Leslie McCrorey Wells would sometimes ride the bus from school to the Clemmons’ farm. Then Lydia Clemmons would drive her and her friends to drama class in Burlington.
After class, McCrorey Wells would stay over at the Clemmons’ house, and eat supper made by Lydia.
“One of my favorite dishes that she would cook was chili and these delicious little cornbread fingers," McCrorey Wells says. "You know you just dipped them in the chili, and I loved it.”
McCrorey Wells, who is now a co-owner of several Burlington restaurants and on the board of directors for Clemmons Family Farm, says the Clemmons household was a kind of refuge while she was growing up in one of the few Black families in Charlotte.
"It felt like home when I was there, because I felt like I could just be myself," she says.
And after McCrorey Wells’ mom experienced a life-altering brain injury, she says Lydia Clemmons stepped in to counsel and coach her.
"I always felt like I had someone — just another, you know, mother, and specifically a Black mother — in my court," McCrorey Wells says.
Providing welcome, guidance and connection to African American culture is something Lydia Clemmons did over and over throughout her life.
Lydia was born in 1923 in Louisiana. She grew up in Arkansas, and excelled as a student in a one-room, segregated schoolhouse.
Right before Lydia entered high school, her family moved to Illinois. They joined the Great Migration of Black Americans escaping racial violence and discriminatory Jim Crow laws in the South for economic and educational opportunities to the north and west. During this period, Black Americans, including Lydia’s parents, lost millions of acres of farmland to racist policies, banks and government officials, as well as white people who lynched their neighbors.
In the Midwest, Lydia earned a nursing degree from Loyola University in Chicago and then married her husband, Jack Clemmons, in 1952. A decade later, the couple bought their nearly-150-acre farm in Charlotte when Jack, a doctor, was offered a position at the University of Vermont.
While maintaining the farm’s large garden and raising five children, newspaper articles show Lydia becoming involved in her new community. She helped establish the local 4-H chapter and the Charlotte chapter of the Vermont League of Women Voters.
"She was just a joy to have as a neighbor," says Joan Braun, who lived next door to Lydia for 45 years. Braun remembers Lydia as a spiritual, fun, kind person who loved to laugh, who knew all the jazz greats from her time in Chicago, and who was good at pretty much everything.
"She taught me how to make a slipcover ... she taught me how to do that, which takes a lot of patience!" Braun says.
Lydia had a knack for teaching. Whether that was demonstrating a mock operation on Big Bird during her time as a nurse anesthetist at the University of Vermont Medical Center, or sharing stories about the people, travel and culture attached to the art she sold through her shop, Authentica African Imports.
"She was just very anxious to share her, her history," Braun says.
Celebrating African American heritage with the wider community is what the Clemmonses ultimately decided to do with their property. A nonprofit — led by their daughter — purchased it last year, preserving one of the few African American-owned farms in Vermont and across the country.
Lydia Clemmons explained why they wanted this to be their legacy in a video made by the Vermont Historical Society and MyChamplainValley in 2018.
“It’s very important that all people of all races are recognized and respected," she said. "And the only way you’re going to get some recognition and respect, is to have done something positive. From that standpoint, it’s very important that we have this in Vermont and in the United States.”
Margaret Bass, who joined the board at Clemmons Family Farm after she moved to Vermont in 2016, says she has incredible admiration and respect for what the Clemmonses have accomplished.
"For those of us who, who grew under Jim Crow, I mean, you can't have done that and go to Clemmons Family Farm and not be awestruck," she says.
Like Lydia Clemmons, Bass spent part of her childhood in a racially segregated South. Then she went on to work in predominantly white-led institutions — and even then, she says the lack of belonging she felt in Vermont came as a shock.
Bass says that’s why the place that Lydia helped create feels so significant.
"It's one of the few spaces in Vermont — maybe only — where there's never a moment that I feel like an outsider," Bass says. "There's never that feeling, I still get it: you know, eyes closed, 'Oh my God, am I gonna be the only Black person there.' Right? That 'Oh, my God,' feeling, 'Oh Jesus.' And then anticipating the questions and blah, blah — I never, none of that. When I go to the farm, I go to the farm and walk around like, 'Yeah, this is my place.' 'Cause it is my place. I mean, it is my place! Because that was their intention."
Bass says she only met Lydia a couple times, but is grieving the loss of the rare Black elder in Vermont.
"The most striking thing about her — with that long braid hanging over her shoulder, was she just the epitome of grace and dignity," Bass says. "This is a face I don't know, but this is a face and a way of being that I know very well. And so it also felt like belonging in ways that nothing else has felt here."
Lydia Clemmons died on Aug. 16. She was 101 years old.
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