By chance, I’m playing two towns in a row at the end of July which have historical connections to two of Vermont’s four remaining gores: concert no. 37 in Warren and concert no. 38 in Coventry. In a further coincidence, each town is oddly distant from its associated gore, but very close to the gore belonging to the other.
You, dear reader, are likely by now asking “what is a gore?” I’ve mentioned them in two earlier posts but without explanation. In the broadest definition, a gore is any “irregular parcel of land, as small as a triangle of median in a street intersection or as large as an unincorporated area the size of a township.” (Wikipedia) In New England, a gore is more specifically a piece of land that has never been incorporated as a town, and so has limited local government, if any, and often few or no inhabitants. (A once established town that is depopulated and stripped of its municipal status is called something else, an “unincorporated town”, at least in Vermont, which has two: Somerset, pop. 6, and Glastenbury, pop. 9.) Of the New England states, only Maine and Vermont have remaining gores. Typically, gores are “leftovers” resulting from incomplete, erroneous, or conflicting surveys, but they can also be created intentionally.
On July 21 I’ll be playing in the United Church of Warren. As most of Vermont was being divided into towns in the late 1700s, the aim was to create roughly 6-mile-square parcels. When the town of Warren was chartered in 1789, the main tract of land intended for it, in the Mad River valley, was on the small side. To make up for this, a roughly 11 square mile gore was added—about 100 miles northeast. The gore has always been treated as distinct from the town of Warren proper, and no one was recorded living there until the 1970s. At some point it was officially separated. It’s referred to variously as Warren Gore, Warrens Gore, and Warren’s Gore.
Meanwhile in 1780, Major Elias Buel, a veteran of the Revolutionary War originally from Coventry, Connecticut, put together a group that petitioned the Vermont Legislature for a grant in the area south of Middlebury. But there was a misunderstanding about the surveying (which is odd, because one of the Buel group was Ira Allen, the Surveyor General of Vermont) and it turned out there was no longer enough unincorporated land there for a town. So a few years later the Legislature let them convert their claim into a “flying grant”, basically permission to go hunting around the state for enough acreage to make up a town. They ended up cobbling together three parcels: the main one, which they called Coventry; a gore called the Coventry Leg, which was eventually annexed to the town of Newport, and a second gore far to the south, a little triangle of land that looks like it could be the dot under the question mark of the town of Huntington (where I live). Known as Huntington Gore, it now became Buel’s Gore, changed to Buels Gore when the US Postal Service told everybody to get rid of their apostrophes.
If all this seems a bit geographically insane, it helps to know that the chartering of towns was a largely financial and speculative business. Governors and legislators sat in rooms sometimes hundreds of miles away and, often to curry favor or pay political debts, granted to speculators the rights to land they might never have seen, about which they may have known very little, and where they often had no intention of settling. Sometimes the grantees planned to establish farms or lumbering operations, but often they were just looking to make a quick buck by selling their holdings. Adding to the general chaos, prior to the establishment of the Vermont Republic in 1777 there was a race between the governments of New York and New Hampshire to plant towns as quickly as possible to bolster their competing claims to the Vermont lands.
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