The Towns That Built a Country

By Loralee Tester (Executive Director of the NEK Chamber of Commerce)

On July 18, Kirby will celebrate America's 250th anniversary.

Kirby is a town of fewer than 500 people. It does not have a downtown. It does not have a traffic light. What it has is a town hall, a road crew, a church, a cemetery, a few farms, a few hundred neighbors, and a deep sense of itself.

And this summer, it will mark the 250th anniversary of the United States.

Somewhere in the national imagination, the 250th will be observed mostly through big events –fireworks shows in big cities, network broadcasts, presidential speeches, monuments draped in bunting. Those things will happen, and many will be lovely. But the truer celebration of this country, in my opinion, is the one happening in places like Kirby.

Small towns are where America was actually built.

Not in the abstract, but in the practical, daily work of people deciding to take care of a place together. A volunteer fire department. A town clerk who has held the job for twenty years. The selectboard that meets on Monday nights. The historical society that keeps the records. The neighbors who plow each other out before anyone asks. A road crew that has the route ready before the parade steps off. The family that has lived on the same farm for four generations, and the family that arrived last year and is already pitching in.

That is the work of self-government. It does not look like much from a distance, but up close, it is everything.

The Northeast Kingdom is full of towns like Kirby: small communities, mostly without stoplights, run by people who do the work without compensation, or close to it, because someone has to and they happen to live there. When you drive through Vermont in July and see a flag on a porch, a parade lining up on Main Street, a chicken barbecue at the church, or a historical society opening its doors for the afternoon, you are not seeing nostalgia. You are seeing the country actually functioning at the scale where it began.

This July, the Northeast Kingdom will offer many of those moments.

Kirby's town celebration and Lyndon's Stars and Stripes Parade on July 18. The Lyndon Historical Society's ice cream social on July 26. Island Pond's Fourth of July, which has always carried a special kind of energy. Town band concerts on the green in St. Johnsbury and Lyndonville. Farmers markets in nearly every town. None of these will make the national news. All of them are the country, doing what the country does.

There is something worth noting here, because it can be easy to forget.

For 250 years, this experiment in self-government has held together not because of the grand speeches but because of the unglamorous work. Town meeting. The school board seat no one else would take. The planning commission. The library volunteer, the food shelf, the rescue squad, the church supper committee. The person standing in the road at six in the morning to direct parade traffic. The pies, the burgers, the lemonade, and the welcome signs that turn a town gathering into a tradition.

That is stewardship.

And stewardship is what the 250th should actually be about–not just remembering what was built, but recommitting to the work of building it.

It is tempting, in a year like this one, to argue about the country at the level of headlines. There is no shortage of things to argue about. But headlines are not where the country lives. The country lives where people still know each other's names, where the parade still gets organized, where the church supper still gets cooked, where someone still stands in the rain at a Memorial Day ceremony to honor people most of the country has forgotten. It lives in Kirby. It lives in Newport, Lyndon, Island Pond, Hardwick, Danville, Greensboro, Barton, Canaan, Craftsbury, Peacham, and Groton. It lives in towns whose names will never be famous and whose work will never stop being essential.

A 250th anniversary is also a question. What kind of country do we want the next 250 years to be?

I do not think the answer comes from Washington. I think it comes from us–from whether we run for the local seat, volunteer for the committee, show up for the supper and the parade and the funeral. From whether we mentor the young person who is wondering whether to stay or leave, welcome the new family, keep the historical society open and the cemetery mowed and the town hall painted and the road crew thanked.

That is what people did in 1776 and 1826 and 1876 and 1926, and it is what people are still doing in 2026, in small towns across this country.

It is what people will do in Kirby on July 18.

If you have the chance this month, go. Drive to a town celebration that is not your own. Stand for the parade in a place where you do not know anyone. Buy the ice cream at the social and thank the volunteer who handed it to you. The 250th is not happening somewhere else. It is happening here, in a town of fewer than 500 people, with no stoplight, marking the anniversary of a country built by exactly that kind of place.

— Loralee Tester is Executive Director of the Northeast Kingdom Chamber of Commerce, serving Caledonia, Essex, and Orleans counties.