brattleboro – Page 2 – Brattleboro Adventure

For only a couple of minutes this morning the fog turned a spectacular rosy pink.

Earlier this week, Nick Widomski became the third person to die on our nearby railroad tracks in the four+ years we’ve been in the area. This shrine sprang up by the footbridge near the Co-op.

Not even duct tape is going to help this poor bastard.

To add insult to injury, later on they gave him a parking ticket.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

We saw this over the weekend at the Latchis. Awesome production, and the whole idea of simulcast to a cinema… also awesome. It had Sherlock and even Mance Rayder in it, so I kind of expected every Tumblrista from within 100 miles to be there, but it didn’t look like that was true. Maybe those people are busy… like on Tumblr just for instance.

Hamlet – National Theatre Live

See that cloud? It just had the audacity to drop snowflakes on us! The leaves are really just starting to fall, that’s what that black speck is…

One of the local ski areas is opening in a week (on man made snow).

Whetstone by twilight

What a beautiful afternoon! Let’s go for a walk around town before it gets all dark and cold… for the next six months.

And so we did, and it really was nice. Then, we saw the bar, and remembered it was “goodbye to the patio” night. We dutifully stopped in for a half-price pint.

The First Person

This headstone marks the remains of Colonel John Sargent, or Sergeant as its spelled here. I found it this morning while looking for someone who is probably one of his descendants, Herbert Wells Sargent. The Locust Ridge Cemetery is still being actively used today, sandwiched on a narrow strip between the freeway and the site of an oil storage facility to be built soon (unless the citizens who are protesting the appearance of an oil storage facility on one of the main streets in town somehow thwart the project). As you walk from one end to the other, it abruptly goes from “relatively recent” to “very old.”

This photo is hard to read especially with the use of the long s, but it says that this stone is

Sacred to the memory of Colo. John Sergeant who departed this life July the 30th 1798 in the fixty fixth year of his age. Who now lies in the fame town he was born & was the first person Born in the ftate of Vermont.

The epitaph is stern:

lo where this filent marble weeps

A friend, a father & husband fleeps

He gave them good councel while he had his breath

Advising them to prepair for Death

By “first person” of course we understand that they meant “first European-descended person”, and while we feel bad for that casual disregard for the humanity of the many persons who lived and died here before, we are nonetheless intrigued… can this be true? There are other records and accounts that talk about John Sargent’s birth at Ft. Dummer in 1733. I know that Ft. Dummer (just down the road, although the original site is now flooded by the waters behind the Vernon Dam) was the first “permanent” white settlement in Vermont. However, I can’t easily find any other written account confirming Col. Sargent as the first.

Presto, I’m a historian!