Danville, Barre & Stowe, Vermont

Note:  This is a "blast from the past" post as we work our way backwards to catch you up on our previous destinations. Please remember that we will not be doing any current postings for the next couple of months as we're visiting with family and friends in California.

Visited Oct. 6-9, 2020

By Janell

We spent four nights in an RV park in Danville, Vermont, and explored the surrounding towns from there.

It's probably fairly common knowledge that Vermont is a major producer of maple syrup; but did you know that Vermont also produces a lot of granite? We didn't. (After all, New Hampshire is "The Granite State".) We visited the Vermont Granite Museum in the city of Barre, VT, and we found it fascinating! 

This massive piece greets you as you pull into the museum's parking lot.

The museum is housed in an authentic turn-of-the-century granite manufacturing plant, the former Jones Brothers Granite Shed. Jones Brothers was founded in 1870, and it was the oldest operating granite works in Vermont when it shut down in 1975. In this facility large blocks of granite were processed into finished products, primarily cemetery markers. (More on that shortly.)

As it is a museum, there was a fair amount of informational material to read about the history of the plant and the processes used. There were a lot of finished and unfinished sculptures to walk around and admire, but there were also a few fun and/or interactive things as you see above.  

The museum also houses the Stone Arts School, which holds classes and workshops for aspiring sculptors at the Jones Brothers Granite Shed. We saw some of the students' pieces in the museum. 

Peek-a-boo!

After the museum we went in search of the Grand Lookout Trail, which we heard about while at the museum. We had a bit of a challenge finding it, but it was worth the trouble. It's located near the site of an old granite quarry, and it offered stunning views. The trail is sprinkled with sculptures and scraps of granite, known in the granite world as "grout". It was almost like being on a treasure hunt as we walked along and were surprised with beautiful or strange works of art.

This granite wall was full of random carvings such as this shield-bearing warrior (above)

and these creepy skeleton-like claws (below).

Marty and Mary on a hunk of granite. Even though it was a beautiful day, it was pretty chilly!

Notice the many holes in the granite hunk (above). It's part of the granite cutting process. Once all the holes have been drilled, explosives are placed in the holes. The explosives, when detonated all at once, serve to separate the granite along the line of the holes. After that the slab can be cut into smaller blocks. As with much of the granite we saw on this trail, this piece seems to have been abandoned mid-project.

Marty wanted us to stand closer to the edge of this granite ledge, but this was close enough for me!

The city of Barre calls itself the "Granite Capital of the World". Hope Cemetery (located in Barre), aka the "museum of granite sculptures", is known for the superb granite workmanship on its memorials and tombstones. Honestly, there were so many interesting sculptures that we could've spent a lot longer at the cemetery if the afternoon hadn't turned so bitterly cold.

Hope Cemetery consisted of 53 acres when it was established in 1895. At that time stone cutters from all over the world, especially Italy, were flocking to Barre to take part in the area's booming granite industry. 

Barre is known for having an uncommonly high death rate, which is also linked to the granite industry. Silicosis, a respiratory disease that is caused by inhaling granite dust, led to an abnormal number of deaths in the area. 

When the Spanish Flu swept through the area, many knew that death could be just around the corner and got to work designing their own tombstones. This tradition has carried on ever since, and about 75% of all the tombstones in Hope Cemetery were carved by the occupants of the graves they sit above.

The cemetery now encompasses 65 acres and hosts more than 10,000 tombstones and memorials. Below are just a few of the many we saw.

One might consider us disrespectful, but we found this particular memorial hilarious. The couple appears to be in their pajamas in their beds. That's how they wanted to be remembered?!

Now, about that maple syrup! We visited Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks in Montpelier, VT, and we found more than just maple syrup. There's maple fudge! And maple sugar! And maple creemees! (Maple creemees, which we'd never even heard of before, are basically a very creamy soft-serve treat . . . maple flavored, of course.) Yes, we tried them all, and they were all so yummy!

The Morse Farm was definitely a fun stop for more than just the goodies. They have a teeny theater where we sat on wooden benches and enjoyed a very funny video by Burr Morse. 

Burr Morse is also a talented carver, and there were several of his fun carvings around the place. 

For your convenience, here's Burr Morse's words about "Elephant and Donkey" (taken from the sign below).

I love finding trees that already look like something, like the yellow birch I found which resembles an elephant. I cut it down, tweaked it a bit, and ended up with the sculpture displayed to your left, "Elephant". Shortly after I found the elephant, I was walking down in our pasture and all of a sudden two trees, a black cherry and an apple, "jumped out" at me. They had rooted so close together that they spent their lives tangled around each other. My mind went mischievous . . . turn them bottom-side-up, add a tail, and they would look like the "business end of a donkey".

Just like that I had a spoof on politics, two perspectives on the elephant and the donkey!

Lest I offend any Democrats, I will point out two things:

1) Portraying the elephant in the "best light" is historically correct because Vermont used to be heavily Republican.

2) I didn't tell these trees how to grow!

I present to you below, "Donkey".

        - Burr Morse

Anybody else have a craving for pancakes right now?

We found this bridge just a few miles from Danville, in Marshfield. 

Of course, we had to make this our first stop one day. How could we not?

About an hour from Danville was the cute little town of Stowe.

We spent the better part of a day in and around Stowe. We walked around town visiting the shops; we biked the Stowe Bike Path and stopped along the path to get lost in a corn maze; and perhaps most importantly (if you ask Marty, anyway!) we went to The Alchemist to pick up our online order of the legendary "Heady Topper". 

I'm sure many of you are wondering, what is Heady Topper? I'm actually the one who heard about Heady Topper several years ago and told Marty about it. It's a double IPA brewed by The Alchemist with a lofty reputation and a cult-like following; to put it simply, it's the "Pliny the Elder" (by Russian River Brewing Co.) of the east coast. 

So . . . visiting The Alchemist has been on our list for years. Unfortunately, our visit to Vermont happened during Covid 19 -- Ugh. Not only were there no tours of the brewery, you couldn't even go inside to order beer to go. 

They had it dialed in though: 

- order online

- drive into the parking lot on your designated day

- do not get out of your vehicle

- show your drivers license through your window

- they'll load your beer order into the back of your vehicle

- you drive away

BUT we just had to ask if we could get out of the car briefly for this photo op, and they said we could. It wasn't right near the brewery, so we weren't in anybody's personal space at all. I was prepared to plead that Marty was a big IPA fan, he'd waited years for this, and we'd driven all the way from California, yada, yada, yada ..., but alas no need. We got the photo!

We had heard that our RV park was right on the edge of a lovely bike path, the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail. We'd been too busy to check it out, but we decided to do it on our last morning before we headed on to our next RV park. The Beast had to vacate our camping spot by a certain time in the morning however, so we asked permission to leave it in their parking lot for a couple of hours. 

Ready to ride!

So glad we checked it out! It was an incredibly scenic ride!