The Circus and Legends
By Dylan Ford
The Circus Is Coming To The Barnet Library!
The Barnet Library Is welcoming the Silver Circus star, Andrew Silver. Saturday, September 12 at the Barnet School. Andrew will lead workshops for ages 8-14 ( or so, please inquire about other ages attending). We will learn basic circus arts and performance techniques. Andrew is a skilled and enthusiastic teacher and performer. This program is going to be lots of fun! Workshops are from 1-2pm, 2-3pm or if you're loving it, come from 1-3! Andrew will then put on a performance to dazzle and delight from 3:30-4:30. This is a free, fun-for-the-whole-community event thanks to our generous VT Humanities sponsorship for our One Foot Forward Resilience Programming.
Please email or call 802-633-4436 to register for workshops. No registration needed for the Circus performance!
Legends II
Legends II by Kathleen Monroe is hot off the presses and boy is she excited about Barnet town history. Legends I, published in 2020 is full of Barnet lore, both well-known and obscure. But, according to Kathleen, there were just so many more stories to tell.
After Monroe’s first book came out, she was approached constantly by people asking if next time she would include a history of schools, or they would speak passionately and nostalgically about their memories of the dance halls and music and festivities at the beach. Kathleen started looking into those themes and discovered a treasure trove of stories around Barnet recreation yet, “ There was nothing comprehensive yet; none of this had been memorialized in one place”; so Kathleen started digging.
Driven by the importance of telling these stories before the generation with first and second hand memories of the vibrant lake life that existed in the first half of the 20th century isn’t around to tell them, Kathleen began tracking down as many people as she could find to gather this information. Some of the people she interviewed for the first book are now gone and she realized this institutional knowledge was quickly disappearing; “Just getting to the people that had access to this knowledge felt really important”.
Kathleen’s early sleuthing started with Front Porch Forum locally and Facebook, which reached people across the country. She put out the call for information on memories, family histories at the lake and summer fun folks remembered. Often one minor mention brought her down a months-long rabbit hole to find descendents, “finding actual phone numbers in some cases”.
What Kathleen realized was that each story she came upon had “five different versions, and I’m not a five different version gal; I had to get to the bottom of it”. She spent much of her time searching newspapers.com and ancestry.com and those investigations brought her to other stories. The book is full of images and advertising from these sources inspiring imaginings of Barnet as a vibrant destination full of music, dancing, drama and long days on the water. Some historic photos are in association with a story, but others are just a bit of local color to give the reader a feeling for the Barnet of old.
There are stories in Legends II that Barnet folks are familiar with, such as the Pavilion Dance Hall’s bear and the Harvey Mountain Road Water Tub, but there are details that Monroe found through her interviews and research that are, or were, little known within those broader stories. Many of the camps today are still owned by the families that either built them originally or acquired them early on in Harvey’s Lake’s early settlement. Because of this fact, the families retain their own photographic and oral archives unavailable to the public. There are many photos in the book that are from private collections. Some of the lesser known photos Kathleen found are of a confiscated rumrunning seaplane , a Regatta that drew about 5,000 to our town, the swimming hole at Comerford Dam Circle, and the original plan for the Public Beach.
As the stories came in fast and furious, leading to previously unknown eccentrics and eccentricities, Kathleen realized she was going to have to figure out how to include some of the more vibrant Barnet characters. Why? Well, Kathleen says, “the local color tells the story about the town. The people generating the events we attend, versus the attendees themselves, are the ones that brought the community together to the dance hall, barn, theater, etc. And therein lie the stories of the town”. So, included are these characters that played a role in generating what Barnet is today: Seraphine Fowler, a dancer, actress and at the forefront of promoting exercising for women in NYC, summered in West Barnet and put on popular plays here in the 40s; Hugh Somers, gunsmith and creator of the Somers sharpshooter’s rifle made here in Barnet, and carried into the Civil War; and Napoleon Lamothe who is said, during the flood of ‘27 to have saved the town of Passumpsic.
While a large portion of Kathleen’s book involves the Lake, what the book truly highlights is the role water has played and plays in defining the character of Barnet. It includes the Harvey’s Dam conundrum, the mills, deaths and drownings. Also, chapters on commerce, construction, controversy and, of course, missed opportunities give the reader an opportunity to peek behind the curtains in the darker corners of Barnet. It gives a sense of the ebb and flow of a small and mighty Northeast Kingdom town and the people who built a life here, if even for a short time. While we don’t know if there will be a third Legends book in the future, we do know there are many more stories yet unknown that Kathleen is eager to uncover.
The book is now available for $29.95 locally at Copies & More, Three Ponds, Green Mountain Books, the Peacham Corner Guild, Monroe Store and the West Barnet Quick Stop.