Every year, we travel all around Vermont to find the stories behind the road signs – and in this case, lake names – that have been submitted and voted on by you, our audience. Even with several years of investigations under our seatbelts, we’re still finding plenty of surprises.
You can find all our other brief histories of Vermont road names here:
- Brave Little State’s 6th Annual Brief History Of Vermont Road Names (2023): Tigertown Road, Hateful HIll Road and Gerts Knob Road
- Brave Little State’s 5th Annual Brief History of Vermont Road Names (2022): Iranistan Road, Jericho grab bag and Vermont’s punny highway signs
- Brave Little State’s 4th Annual Brief History of Vermont Road Names (2021): Cow Path 40, Agony Hill Road, and Texas Falls.
- Brave Little State’s 3rd Annual Brief History Of Vermont Road Names (2020): Devil’s Washbowl, Popple Dungeon Road, Lost Nation Road, Smuggler’s Notch
- A(nother) Brief History of Vermont Road Names (2019): Mad Tom River Road, Hi-Lo Biddy Road, Star Pudding Farm Road, Sawnee Bean Road
- A Brief History of Vermont Road Names (2018): States Prison Hollow Road, Poor Farm Road, Lime Kiln Road, Kelley Stand Road
Note: Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.
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Lake Willoughby or Willoughby Lake?
By Adiah Gholston and Sabine Poux
Sabine Poux: Road name or place name questions, they usually go something like this: “Hi, my name is so-and-so, and I want to know why this road is called this.” Investigation ensues.
And this investigation started off like any other. Producer Adiah Gholston and I were assigned a question about Lake Willoughby in Westmore, in the Northeast Kingdom. Question-asker Beverly Decker wrote in: “I have lived all 75 years of my life at Willoughby Lake. When and why did it become Lake Willoughby?”
Adiah Gholston: So we started down the usual pathways, calling people with businesses around the lake to see what they knew.
Business owner: Yeah, I don’t know.
Sabine Poux: I thought you might know since your business name sort of plays on Willoughby.
Business owner: Yeah, well, I don’t. (Laughter).
Adiah Gholston: No one we called had a concrete answer. But we pieced together a few different stories from some Vermont history books. And the gist is this.
Sabine Poux: There was a guy — or two guys, or a woman — whose first name, or last name, was Willoughby. And either this Willoughby held the first title to lake shore property, or they fell through the ice when they were transporting lumber across the lake. Or, they were just really well-loved around town.
Adiah Gholston: Yeah, we couldn’t really hone in on one theory.
So, we visited the question asker, Beverly, at her home in Westmore to see if she had any other leads.
Sabine Poux: And turns out:
Beverly Decker: So, how did you take it?
Sabine Poux: I thought you wanted to know what the name Willoughby is from.
Beverly Decker: Isn't that interesting? I can't even figure out how you would think that from this. (laughter) I really can’t.
Sabine Poux: We were asking the wrong questions.
Beverly Decker: It's fascinating, yeah, syntax and everything.
Adiah Gholston: Beverly doesn’t care about the “Willoughby” part of the phrase, but about the order of the words “lake” and “Willoughby.” You’ll hear it if you listen closely to her question again: when and why “Willoughby Lake” became “Lake Willoughby.” It’s a question about syntax.
Sabine Poux: Which never even occurred to us. Because, why does it matter whether some people say one or the other?
Adiah Gholston: Well, it matters to Beverly.
Beverly Decker: To me and my family members and most of the locals here — there aren't many of us left — it's Willoughby Lake. And then I see it now transitioning back to Lake Willoughby.
Sabine Poux: When Beverly calls herself a local, she really means it. Beverly’s family is the Perkins family. And the road she lives on? It’s called Perkins Lane. It’s just up the hill from the lake.
Beverly Decker: My parents owned cottages and we had a lakefront. And during spring, summer, fall, my siblings and I lived at the lake. We would go out right after breakfast, be dragged up at lunchtime and go back down and then be dragged up at 5 o'clock. So we literally lived in the water.
Adiah Gholston: Beverly says the lake has become a lot more crowded, and she doesn’t like going down there anymore.
And she thinks how people refer to the lake — it could be tied to whether they're a tourist or a local.
Beverly Decker: And in talking with my sister, she said, “Oh, I used to get so cranky when people from out of state would call it "Lake Willoughby.’” She'd say, “It's ‘Willoughby Lake.’” (laughter)
Sabine Poux: Beverly’s already started looking for clues about the lake’s name. She pulls out a photo album full of painted postcards of Willoughby in muted blue-green hues.
Beverly Decker: So you can look through these and see.
Sabine Poux: Wow.
Sabine Poux: From postcard to postcard, year to year, we see both names.
Beverly Decker: 1941. Yep, 1941 and its Willoughby Lake. Let’s see…
Adiah Gholston: Even more puzzling: Beverly pulls out a business card for a lakeside retreat. On the front side of the card, it says Lake Willoughby. And on the back—
Sabine Poux: Willoughby Lake. Lake Willoughby. So funny.
Beverly Decker: On the same card.
Sabine Poux: All this variation — it doesn’t mean people don’t have their favorites.
A historian we reached out to early in our reporting posted a thread in a Northeast Kingdom Facebook group, asking for information about “the name Lake Willoughby.”
Adiah Gholston: And — oof. The blowback was intense. Commenters were up in arms about the order of the words, with one even writing, “Blasphemy.”
Sabine Poux: Adiah’s never seen the lake. So we head down to the south shore to take a look.
Sabine Poux: How would you describe this lake?
Adiah Gholston: It’s so much grander than I thought it was going to be.
Sabine Poux: Willoughby’s crystal-clear waters are sandwiched between two massive mountains — Mount Pisgah and Mount Hor, giving the impression of a fjord. The mountains are wooded most of the way up with some stretches of exposed rock near the top. Some boats bob in the shallow cove.
This used to be the more secluded end of the lake. The state has since expanded parking access here, and there’s more development these days. But, to these two outsiders, it all looks pretty similar to how it did in Beverly’s antique postcards.
Adiah Gholston: I don’t know, it’s really beautiful.
Sabine Poux: On our way out, we stop some tourists who are putting on sunscreen in the parking lot.
Sabine Poux: Can we ask you guys if you call it “Lake Willoughby,” or “Willoughby Lake”?
Visitor: We call it Lake Willoughby.
Sabine Poux: You call it Lake Willoughby?
Visitor: Yep. It’s my first time.
Adiah Gholston: And we catch a pack of motorcyclists at the Willoughby Lake Store.
Jamie Parrotte: We’re from New York so we say lake first. (Laughter).
Sabine Poux: Is that a thing?
Jamie Parrotte: Lake Eerie, Lake Champlain, Lake George.
Adiah Gholston: Though we didn’t start off caring — or even noticing — which word came first in the lake’s name, we started seeing it everywhere. And found even the state-made signs couldn’t make up their mind.
Sabine Poux: This one says Willoughby Lake. “Willoughby Lake Shoreland Restoration.” But this says Lake Willoughby. What the hell?
Kimball Johnson: Lake Willoughby, you know, almost gives that country club feeling.
Adiah Gholston: This is Beverly’s nephew, Kimball Johnson.
Kimball Johnson: But the Willoughby Lake, the sound and feel of that is like that old slipper that you keep going back to, even though you bought the new pair and they sit in your closet. (laughter). I don’t know if I’m making sense saying it that way.
Sabine Poux: Kimball says he thinks the name has always ebbed and flowed. But he remembers that sometime in the 1990s, the state of Vermont wanted to standardize names of places for tourists — and they picked Lake Willoughby.
By the way, we haven’t been able to confirm this with the state. Though we do know the lake’s official state and federal name is Lake Willoughby, according to a federal database of geographic names.
Adiah Gholston: The standardization — it wasn’t popular with everyone, and it didn't really stick. Kimball worked for the local chamber of commerce and remembers when he made up some signs for the chamber to welcome people into Westmore.
Kimball Johnson: It said, “Welcome to Westmore, home to Lake Willoughby.” And I took some heat from that one. I'm not going to lie.
Sabine Poux: Kimball says the state went with Lake Willoughby because of the lake’s size.
Kimball Johnson: They wanted to give a little bit of a more of a nuance as to, if someone was seeing it on a map, what, what that the size of that lake might be.
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Adiah Gholston: The idea that bigger lakes should be called “lake” then “name,” is not just a Willoughby thing. A few years ago, scientists in Quebec and Virginia wrote a paper. It’s called, “Lake Name or Name Lake? The etymology of lake nomenclature in the United States.” Bingo.
Sabine Poux: Like us, the authors were puzzled by the variability in lake names in the U.S. And they found that lakes with larger surface area tend to be called lake then name. Think Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, Lake Powell in Arizona or Lake Tahoe in California.
Adiah Gholston: The paper said that’s because those lakes appear more impressive and imposing from the shore — and for whatever reason, like Kimball, people see lake then name as a more fitting order.
Sabine Poux: But that’s not a hard and fast rule. Because language and settlement patterns play a role, too. The vast majority of lakes in England, for example, they have the word lake after the name. And that holds true for New England, too, which was settled by English colonists.
Adiah Gholston: But Vermont has a lot of lakes that go the other way. Which could have something to do with the migration of people from Quebec to Vermont. When referring to lakes in French, whether in Quebec or in France, the name follows the word lake. Like, Lake Champlain.
So, the overlapping settlement patterns of French and English settlers with different naming conventions could be why there’s not one, but two, names for the lake.
Sabine Poux: And all this says nothing of the lake’s Abenaki name — which, by the way, we weren’t able to track down. What we do know is Mt. Pisgah, next to Willoughby? It’s also called Mt. Annance, after an Abenaki chief who spent time in the area.
Adiah Gholston: Beverly wanted to know if those names were used more in one time period or another, and whether that might track with patterns in tourism.
But according to Scott Wheeler, there aren’t clear trends. Scott’s the historian who posted about the name on Facebook. He also writes about Kingdom history for his publication, Vermont’s Northland Journal.
Scott Wheeler: You know, I have found no consistency in the name and of the lake, from 1850 I found it, and it's — both names are used interchangeably and almost equally. Even in our own household, my late wife, who grew up not far from Lake Willoughby, she referred to it as, Willoughby Lake. And she used to say to me, “Why do you call it Lake Willoughby and not Willoughby Lake?”
I have concluded I think it's more your relationship with the lake. If you're intimate with it, it seems to be Willoughby Lake. If you're a bit further removed, such as myself, it's Lake Willoughby.
Sabine Poux: Scott thinks people get used to using one name or the other, and from there, they sort of perpetuate among certain circles. Some people dig their heels in.
Scott Wheeler: We're creatures of habit. My wife didn't break me of the habit of calling it Lake Willoughby in our 40 years of marriage.
Adiah Gholston: And people make sure their way gets passed down. Like Kimball Johnson, Beverly’s nephew who worked at the chamber of commerce.
Kimball Johnson: I’ve got a 6-year-old granddaughter. In our household, it still referenced Willoughby Lake. So there's a 6 year old that'll grow up with that, that name in mind. She'll be making the funny face at someone when they call it Lake Willoughby. (laughter)
Hells Peak Road
By Burgess Brown
Burgess Brown: Sarah Hazelton doesn’t live in Londonderry. She’s a few towns over, in Manchester. But her family’s from there and she finds herself passing through often. And when she comes into town on Route 11, there’s one road that she clocks every time.
Snaking down a hill, right into the heart of town, is the ominously named: Hells Peak Road.
Sarah Hazelton: And it's really actually quite a lovely road to drive along. And so it just seemed so odd to me that such a pretty road, not that Vermont is short of them, was called Hells Peak.
You just have beautiful houses, kind of sweeping fields. You have some farms up there. It's just, it's really quite idyllic. I don't know how anyone could ever confuse it for hell, when it feels like heaven.
Burgess Brown: I can assure you that Sarah does not work for the Londonderry tourism office. It’s just a really pretty road.
So, Sarah wants to know — why the disconnect? How did such a heavenly place get such a hellish name?
Sarah Hazelton: My only thought and just from, you know, driving up and down there is, it's quite a steep road, so I thought that maybe it's just because it would be kind of so hard to get up and down there, you know, by foot, by horseback, or even by car.
Burgess Brown: This sounds plausible to me. We’ve investigated our share of treacherous roads over the years — Hateful Hill Road, Agony Hill Road. Steep roads get scary names.
Sarah’s dad, who grew up in town, says there are probably some old-timers in town that can corroborate this theory.
Sarah Hazelton: So it's possible that, you know, a farmer or two out there knows the answer.
Now I'm wondering if I just, you know, kind of asked my father, like, you know, a great uncle up there, or something, that they might know the answer before I even submitted this question.
Burgess Brown: And deny us the fun of a proper radio investigation? I don't think so.
I put lines out with the town clerk and the Londonderry Arts and Historical Society. No one knows any Hells Peak lore, but they say they’ll ask around. Over the next few days, texts start rolling in with names of people who might know the history: names like Don Hazeleton, Deb Hazelton, Robert Hazelton.
The keen-eared among you will remember our question asker Sarah’s last name: Hazelton. Turns out this might indeed be a family affair.
I get in touch with Robert, who goes by Bob and also happens to be Sarah’s grandfather. Bob’s got the scoop and agrees to meet up. He gives me directions: Head about a mile up Hells Peak road, take a left and drive to the end of Pitchfork Lane.
Burgess Brown: Have I found the right place?
Bob Hazelton: You’re up in the woods.
Burgess Brown: Bob lives in these woods, in a little cabin he built himself. But we’re meeting up next door, at his brother Don’s place.
Bob Hazelton: There’s cookies on the table if you want some.
Burgess Brown: There’s also books and maps and newspaper clippings. From these and from an oral history that’s been passed down through the family, Bob’s pieced together a pretty clear story of Hells Peak Road.
It’s a story that starts with his grandfather.
Bob Hazelton: His name was Walter. Walter Merrill Hazelton.
He was, he was an interesting individual. He made moonshine. That was his biggest claim to fame. He'd been caught a few times, and paid his dues and went along his way.
Burgess Brown: In 1927, Walter Hazleton bought a farm at the top of this hill we’re meeting on, from a guy named Albert Douglas. And there was some debate about what to call the place.
Bob Hazelton: And the story goes, from my grandfather, that he was down visiting the next door neighbor whose name was Walter West. And Mr. West says, “Well, how's everything up on Sunny View?” He said, “That's what Douglas calls it.” He said, “Old lady Lethenwell called it Hells Peak because the wind blew 366 days a year!” My grandfather had heard enough. He said, “By God, it's going to be Hells Peak.” And that's what it's been.
Burgess Brown: Hells Peak was hellish not because of the steepness of the road, but because of the wind. Walter found that moniker the most fitting and it stuck. Bob says from then on, people in town started calling our road in question “the road to Hell’s Peak Farm” and then that slowly morphed into just, “Hells Peak Road.” The farm part way up the hill joined in on the fun and started going by “Halfway to Hell.”
Burgess Brown: And what about Pitchfork Lane? How did Pitchfork Lane get named?
Bob Hazelton: When they were naming roads, Don and Deb's two daughters, they sat at the kitchen table here and said that “We've got to come up with a name for our road.” And the girls piped up and said, “Let's call it Pitchfork Lane.”
Burgess Brown: Bob pulls out a small, yellowed square of paper.
Bob Hazelton: That's a syrup label that my dad made.
Burgess Brown: It says “made by W.M. Hazelton and Son, Hell’s Peak Farm.” And there’s two sort of grinning devils holding their pitchforks.
Like Sarah, I’ve found Hells Peak Road to be a totally idyllic place. Certainly not hellish. But Bob says that’s because the landscape has completely changed since he was a kid.
Burgess Brown: Could we take a drive?
Bob Hazelton: Sure.
Burgess Brown: So I can see some of the stuff you've been telling me about.
Bob Hazelton: Sure, be glad to.
Burgess Brown: I displace the tool boxes and drills and reciprocating saw that typically occupy Bob’s passenger seat and we set off.
Bob Hazelton: One time I was able to take a sled, and get on the sled in front of my house and I was able to slide all the way to school.
To our left here, that used to be a field, pasture, and my dad used to summer young cattle there.
Burgess Brown: And it's dense now.
Bob Hazelton: Oh, gosh, yeah.
Burgess Brown: When Bob was growing up, these hills were a bare patchwork of pastures and fields, first dotted with sheep and then dairy cows. There were a handful of other farms here. And without all the trees, it was much more exposed and windy up here — the sort of conditions that could inspire such a brutal name.
And the original family farm sat across 150 acres at the top of the hill
Bob Hazelton: When we were in college, mom and dad sold some of the land for tuition. And so when we got through, there probably was only 20 … 50 acres left.
Burgess Brown: After college, Bob took up the family business. But like a lot of dairy farmers at the time, he couldn’t turn a profit. So he sold the cattle and became a contractor.
Today, he still helps his brother keep a small herd, and they still tap trees come spring. They’re the only ones farming on the hill, now — and some of the only ones living there full-time. Many of the properties have become second homes and short term rentals that do big business, thanks to their proximity to ski resorts like Stratton and Magic Mountain and Bromley.
Bob helps his brother and sister in law take care of 60 properties in the area.
Bob Hazelton: It's been a big change. However, I'm glad to see it. I'm glad to see it because they provide work for my brother and sister-in-law. And those people that have purchased these houses literally pay us to mow their fields, even though we're getting the crops off the field to feed the beef cattle.
Burgess Brown: And the wind? It’s not nearly as bad as it used to be.
Bob Hazelton: (laughter) We used to slide off the roof of the house, onto the porch, onto the snow. I mean, it drifted like crazy.
I can remember going out in the morning to take care of the calves, and I thought I was going to be blown away. There's nothing to stop it.
Hurricane Hazel, was that 1956, ’57? I thought it was going to tear the house out.
Burgess Brown: What'd it sound like?
Bob Hazelton: Like a freight train. I mean, just unrelenting wind, and you could feel the house sort of pick up and sit down.
It was a hell of a place (laughter) a hell of a place to live, yeah.
Pumpkin Harbor Road
By Samantha Watson
Samantha Watson: Oh wow.
John Finlay: You can’t stand up and play these, you have to sit down.
So, the reason why it’s difficult for me to play them for you is that it takes several minutes for the pipes to settle down and get in tune.
Samantha Watson: This is John Finlay. I’m in his living room in Underhill.
(John playing bagpipes)
He plays the bagpipes. The kind you press to inflate with your arm, called Uilleann pipes.
That’s one thing I want you to know about John. The other thing I want you to know about John is that when his road name won the Brave Little State voting round, people he’d never met before started approaching his wife around town.
John Finlay: And said, “Hey! Are you John Finlay’s wife?” And she said, “Yeah, why?” “Well, we’ve always known about Pumpkin Harbor.”
Samantha Watson: Pumpkin Harbor Road, in Cambridge. It’s got John perplexed.
John Finlay: It’s a very strange name. I mean pumpkin, you can kind of understand, you know, pumpkins, it’s agricultural and all that stuff. But harbor — where does harbor come from?
Samantha Watson: Pumpkin Harbor Road runs along the Lamoille River, just off of Wrong Way Bridge in Cambridge. (John also asked about “Wrong Way Bridge” when he sent in his question; we’ll get to that later.)
But both are about 200 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean and 20 miles away from Lake Champlain — there’s no harbor in sight. No inlet to dock a sailboat and certainly no shore to build a lighthouse.
But since he sent in his question, John’s heard another explanation, from all those people who’ve been talking to his wife in town. This one, it actually has to do with the river.
John Finlay: So some people have said, “Well we’ve heard that back, you know, many years ago, there was a gigantic flood, down the Lamoille River. And so this big flood flooded out this pumpkin patch of some farmer, which washed the pumpkins down the river until it got to this bend where there was kind of this eddy and the pumpkins kind of floated there and kind of gathered there, and so as a joke, the locals called it “Pumpkin Harbor.”
Samantha Watson: John isn’t sold on this story.
Samantha Watson: So, you’re saying you’re suspicious, you know, pumpkins can’t float on their own?
John Finlay: Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard.
Samantha Watson: I wasn’t sure if pumpkins floated either. I couldn’t find a pumpkin in the summer to test it out for myself, but upon some Google searching it turns out, they do. Pumpkins can float.
With that done, I just needed to place this flood — the one that swept up the pumpkins and pooled them in some type of make-shift harbor next to the road.
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I emailed residents of Pumpkin Harbor Road, consulted local history texts and recent newspaper articles, and through all of them, this story that John heard seemed to check out. And many of the sources cited the great flood of 1927 as the weather event in question
George Kidder: The height of the water came through Waterbury in the night.
Samantha Watson: This is from an interview with George Kidder, for the Vermont Historical Society.
George Kidder: That made it particularly horrifying, I think, for the people that were involved. They talked about a house washing down the street with people screaming out of it because they didn’t know what was happening.
Samantha Watson: The Great Vermont Flood, as it came to be known, took place over the course of two days in November of 1927 and claimed 84 lives. While none of those deaths were in Cambridge, the damage there was great.
In the Cambridge area, the flood of 1927 seems to be the largest tragedy in modern memory.
When people talk about it, they talk about their grandfathers that lived through it and recall drowned herds of cattle. Some houses still have watermarks where the flood climbed almost a century ago.
Pumpkin Harbor Road had overlapping tales that all hold the 1927 flood at their center. It makes sense that a tragedy this significant could be the story behind the road.
Jen Bartlau: The stories have a kernel of truth to them. But, the details might be a little wonky. You know, why does this account say this, why does this account say that? The truth is somewhere in between. And that’s where I come in.
Samantha Watson: That’s Jen Bartlau. She’s part of the Cambridge Historical Society and has over 40 years of experience as a genealogist and researcher. And she’s any road name reporter’s holy grail. Seriously, she’s like the Einstein of town lore.
I meet her outside of the Varnum library in Jeffersonville. She brings a stack of printed newspaper clippings and town documents, and one black and white photograph.
Jen says about a year ago, the historical society came to her with this photo — something from their archives they couldn’t locate geographically.
Jen Bartlau: And they couldn’t figure out where it was because here’s this huge, looks like a body of water, almost like a pond.
Samantha Watson: The photograph was taken in 1890. It captures a rowboat with four monochrome passengers paddling on a pond. Behind them, a dirt road and a farmhouse.
Jen Bartlau: And luckily, there was writing on the back of the picture, so.
Samantha Watson: Jen says please remember to write on the back of your photos. It helps historians like her.
Jen Bartlau: I love it. “There was a pond left that contained frogs, caught for their legs.” Like, ooh!
Samantha Watson: In addition to some colorful details about the alleged pond, there are a few names listed on the back of the photo. Jen did some sleuthing and traced the property in the photo to a place on Pumpkin Harbor Road, about a mile up. Sure enough, there’s no pond on the property — just land that dips down into a shallow valley.
Jen Bartlau: I said, “That’s probably the harbor right there!” And everyone was like, “Oh wow! There really was a harbor.”
Samantha Watson: Today, the land is overgrown, with tall grass and brush. It gets swampy when it rains — although Jen says it hasn’t filled up with water, like it did in that photo, in a long time. But back in the days when it used to be farmed, the land sat like an empty cup on a low table.
Jen Bartlau: So it’ll just never look like that again. But it’s nice to have that picture to say, “Yeah, there it is. That’s Pumpkin Harbor.”
Samantha Watson: The photo Jen found – it predates the 1927 flood by more than 30 years. Jen says the Great Vermont Flood was likely just one of many that swept over the road since it was first created.
According to John Hayward’s 1849 Gazetteer, the first settler of Cambridge arrived in 1783. He planted two acres of corn, which were quote “overflown with water in the fall, and nearly all destroyed.”
Even the very beginning of the town’s recorded story involves flooding. Involves rebuilding.
Back then, floods were also called “freshets” and occurred in the area through all seasons of the year, either from rain or melted snow.
Jen Bartlau: I think there were freshets 1798, 1817, and 1828. So, you know, pick a date.
Samantha Watson: Jen doesn’t know exactly when the road was named. But she says the Pumpkin Harbor name, too, predates the Great Flood. According to the newspaper article and reference books, the road was known as the “harbor area,” or “harbor district” as far back as the early 1800s.
The first mention Jen found of a “Pumpkin Harbor” — it actually came in 1842, in the Lamoille Standard newspaper.
Jen Bartlau: “Great pumpkin! We have this year raised a pumpkin in a field of corn which weighs 40 pounds” and then, you know, they’re like, “Can anyone do better?” And then they say, “Can any of the dwellers in Pumpkin Harbor in Lamoille County?”
Samantha Watson: It feels obvious to say, this story has echoes of the present.
In the flooding earlier this summer, in 2024, Pumpkin Harbor road was impassable. Though the so-called harbor didn’t pool with water like it used to, it became marshy and soaked. Over the years, over centuries, the road’s inhabitants have dealt with house flooding, closed road access and the feeling of waiting in worry as the water creeps above the Lamoille’s lip.
Jen Bartlau: You know, when people talk about 100 year floods, it’s, I don’t know where they come up with that. Because they happen much more often than 100 years.
Samantha Watson: In 2019, the town raised part of the road in hope of mitigating the frequent road closures. But, within the same month of the project’s competition, the road flooded over — again.
And another effort to address flooding led to the creation of Wrong Way Bridge at the road’s base in the 1950s. Turns out, the bridge gets its mysterious name from an attempt to reroute the highway behind Cambridge into neighboring Jeffersonville. The state ran out of money before it could finish the project. But the bridge, which now “wrongly” curves to direct traffic up Pumpkin Harbor road towards Fletcher, remains.
I kept wondering why the flood of 1927 is so ingrained in everyone’s minds as the origin of the Pumpkin Harbor story.
And I returned to something Jen had told me, about when she does genealogical work.
Jen Bartlau: Telling factual truth that I found in records and such, I soften it. It’s like, you know what? Aunt so-and-so had, you know, she had the basic idea, and it’s true that these pumpkins you know, gathered in this area. But it wasn’t in the ’27 flood, and it wasn’t even in the 1870, it was here.”
Samantha Watson: In other words, collective memories can take on lives of their own. And we’re often protective of them.
1927 sits in this soft spot of history. It can be accessed by people who are still living through the memories of their grandparents, passed down delicately in kitchen table stories.
The flood of 1927 was a tragedy. And what followed was a harsh season of reckoning and rebuilding.
With something so big, it feels right to have something to validate it, to name it It’s a way of saying, “We lived through that.”
Now, it’s another season of more reckoning and rebuilding. While the “pumpkin” part of the name may be a memory of a specific event lost to time, the “harbor” part, the piece that sticks out as odd to question-asker John Finlay, it’s a link between the road’s past and present.
Because it’s an old Vermont story. One, as Pumpkin Harbor Road tells it, that’s been repeated and repeated. But it’s a name who’s very persistence tells of the reckoning and rebuilding that’s followed for just as long.
John Finlay: (John playing bagpipes). Anyway that’s—
Samantha Watson: That’s beautiful. Thank you so much.
P.S. That 1927 flood is what inspired then-president Calvin Coolidge to make his famous “brave little state” speech in 1928 — the speech this show is named for.
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Credits
Thanks to Beverly Decker, Sarah Hazleton and John Finlay for sending in such great place names.
This episode was reported, produced, edited and mixed by Adiah Gholston, Burgess Brown, Samantha Watson and Sabine Poux. Our managing editor and senior producer is Josh Crane and our executive producer is Angela Evancie. Ty Gibbons composed our theme music. Other music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Special thanks to: Sophie Stephens, Laura Nakasaka, Jack and Dave Delancey, Bud Courser, Deborah Simpson, Elaine Cashin, Louisa Dotoli, Beatrix Beisner, Suzie O’Bomsawin, Catherine Delneo, Niels Rinehart, Kelly Pajala, Allison Marino, Hilary Batchelor, Deb Hazelton, Andrew Hazelton, Kerry Alley, Peter Opstrup, Bill Morey, Cynthia Williamson, Aurora River, Aaron Calvin and Andrew Liptak.
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Brave Little State is a production of Vermont Public.
