Point of order: towns, villages, gores, and grants

This Saturday’s concert in Jeffersonville prompts me to revisit the question of community place names.Someone asked me “Where are you going to play in Moscow?”. I say “Nowhere—didn’t you hear I stopped flying?” Haha, I kid, I know they meant Moscow, Vermont. But the answer is still “nowhere”, at least not for purposes of fulfilling this project mission, because Moscow  is not a town but a village in the town of Stowe, whereas I will most likely play in Stowe (village), which is…also a village in Stowe. I get similar questions about other villages. As I wrote in a post back in May:

In Vermont, “towns” are large-ish areas defined by boundaries that were mostly set arbitrarily by distant power brokers in New Hampshire or New York, usually long before there was much European settlement within those borders. “Villages” are clustered settlements within towns: the places you’ll probably find a church and maybe a general store, town hall, railway station (as in Essex Junction) etc. Towns can have multiple villages. Villages can be incorporated or unincorporated, but in either case they are still a part of their surrounding town and are not counted in the tally of Vermont’s 251 (soon 252) distinct municipalities.  

This project is Play Every Town (and city), not Play Every Village. It is understandably confusing. Many towns, like Stowe, have an eponymous village. Or back to this weekend’s concert, I will be playing my Cambridge performance in Jeffersonville, not in the other village in Cambridge, which is…Cambridge. 

Adding to the confusion, a few villages are located in more than one town, like the nearby village of Underhill Flats, which straddles Underhill and Jericho.

And I didn’t even trouble you with the onetime Cambridge “hamlets” of Pleasant Valley, North Cambridge, and East Cambridge. As far as I can tell, a hamlet is just a smaller village, but there is no sharp distinction between the two. Except that some villages are officially incorporated, meaning that they have at least some services and taxes, such as water or sewage, that are in addition to the services provided by the encompassing town. But even Vermont’s 35 incorporated villages (soon to be 34, I suppose, when the village of Essex Junction becomes an independent city on July 1) are not counted in the official 251 (soon 252) tally of towns and cities. Like Essex Junction, most of Vermont’s 10 (soon 11) cities came into being when large-ish villages calved off from their parent towns.

I don’t have an official Vermont village count, and I don’t think an unarguable count would be possible. But many towns have multiple villages, so I am guessing a fair tally would be around 600. Some are officially incorporated, others are Census Designated Places but not government entities, others are barely detectable historical relics from a time when a few dozen homes a few miles distant from the next village was occasion enough for another post office or general store. And since Scarlatti wrote only 455 sonatas, I can’t play in every village, as this will make clear.

Then there are a few towns without villages, because they are almost or completely without people. I’ll be playing those towns too, because they’re on The List. And as I mentioned in the May post referenced above, I’ll play the four gores and grants for an even 256, lest I leave blank spots on my concert map. More about those another time, I have to go practice.