A LESSER OREGON
Even today Kingdom County is an out-of-the-way and little-known fragment of a much earlier rural America. Forty years ago, when I was a boy growing up there on my grandparents’ farm, it was still something of a true frontier. Sequestered from the rest of New England by the Green Mountains to the west and the White Mountains to the east, and further isolated by its notorious seven-month winters and poor dirt roads, the Kingdom during the late 1940s and well on into the 1950s was just the sort of remote, unspoiled enclave Thoreau must have had in mind one hundred years before, when he characterized interior northern Maine and other tracts of overlooked territory east of the Rockies as lesser Oregons.
From my grandparents’ place at the end of Lost Nation Hollow, you could strike out ten miles and more through big woods in three directions without crossing a single road, other than a few disused old logging traces. Their farmhouse was situated less than a mile south of the Line, as everyone in the Kingdom called the international boundary between Vermont and Canada. Unguarded and for the most part unvisited, the Line north of our place passed through some of the last authentically wild and undeveloped terrain in the state. And with its two-hundred-year history as the site of countless skirmishes between the Abenaki, French, and English, its tradition of whiskey smuggling and legends of huge yellow panthers and savage gray wolves, and its vast stands of tall timber made nearly inaccessible by still vaster cedar bogs, the border imparted an additional frontier atmosphere to Kingdom County.
Yet it was not just the wild and mountainous terrain or the Canadian Line or the myths of marauding catamounts that defined the Kingdom of my boyhood as a frontier. It was also the terrifically independent-minded people who still lived there, enjoying, as they did, the essential elbowroom not only from outsiders but from each other as well, to develop unique styles of thinking and living.
Moreover, although the Great Depression had officially ended several years before I was born, few Kingdom natives seemed to realize it, any more than the Kingdom had ever acknowledged the Depression when it arrived. The fact of the matter is that Kingdom County had always been poor. During the Depression and its long, lingering aftermath throughout rural northern New England, my grandparents and their neighbor had, perhaps, somewhat less ready cash than usual—which is to say, next to none at all.
Still, with the passing of my boyhood, the era that had distinguished the Kingdom as a lesser Oregon was rapidly coming to a close, along with the lives of the generation, my grandparents’ generation, that sustained that era into the middle of the twentieth century. In fact, much of the drama and conflict inherent in the lives of the last traditional hill farmers derived from the sheer impossibility of preserving their special way of life in the face of inexorable progress and changes, such as Vermont’s bulk tank law prohibiting the shipping of milk in cans, the arrival of electricity, improved roads and cars and easier accessibility both to and from the outside world in general.
Fortunately for me, the world of my grandparents remained intact a little longer in the Kingdom than elsewhere. Long enough, at least, for me to live through its final years, as recorded in the following remembrances. All date from my boyhood with my Kittredge grandparents, from 1948, when I turned six, to 1960, when I was eighteen and my grandfather astounded me and the rest of the family by doing something so totally marvelous and unpredictable, even for him, that in a very real sense you could say that he put an end to the era of which I am writing himself. For the most part, I have selected recollections designed to record that world that no longer exists and I have arranged them more or less chronologically. Some describe single events during the twelve years I spent with my grandparents; others are more general; still others concentrate on one or more family members since this is, first and foremost, a family memoir.
These are the events and people that have stayed with me, undiminished in clarity, over the past four decades. They are as vivid in my mind and imagination today as the old family photographs in the albums in my grandparents’ attic, which as a boy I pored over for hours on end, and which I still keep on the shelves of my study. Often at night, just before falling asleep, they appear unbidden, image after image, photographs never taken, of my great and little aunts, my Uncle Rob, my cousins, and mutual ancestors whom I never knew but seemed to live with, through family stories, like near neighbors. Yet always my thoughts return to my grandparents themselves, whose fierce pride and diligence, not to mention sheer Kittredge cussedness, seemed to embody the spirit of Lost Nation Hollow and the Kingdom.
For twelve years, they were at the center of everything for me. They remain now, forty years later, at the center of that vanished world, that lesser Oregon, whose like will not be seen again, in Kingdom County or elsewhere.
Austen Kittredge III
Lost Nation Hollow, 1994