Chester, Vermont

     Chester, it is the town I grew up in.  Chester is an amazing town with a fascinating history and it is one of the oldest towns in Vermont.  I grew up in the Stone Village in Chester and so I had a whole lot of history right at my fingertips from the day I came to live there until the day I left about 21 years later after I was married and my new husband and I were making our home in Rutland. I’ve been back a few times since then but you can’t really go home again.  It is the same but it is not the same.  However, I love coming home for a visit.  I love walking the streets where I grew up, climbing the hill I used to hike and play on and a few years ago, ten or so now I went back and climbed Mount Flamstead all the way to the top.  It sure has grown up and I sure have grown old.  The hike takes a little more out of me these days but oh it was fun and I remembered and found “Flamstead Rock”.

     Flamstead Rock is a huge boulder outcrop that has the original name of the town engraved in it.  It doesn’t look as gigantic now as it did when I was a kid.  It was the marker once upon a time back when that told folks way back then that they had arrived.  The old stage road used to pass right by it.  Old Will Abbott (his kin were some of the early settlers here) told me the story of how the stage used to run by there and then Green Mountain Turnpike was built; a better and safer road, closer to the river and water power and more suitable to a developing town.  Chester’s watershed is massive and the Williams River and its tributaries provided an excellent source for water and steam power for the new community and though the land is hilly the soil is fertile, good for growing crops.  There is good pasture land and good forest, mostly hardwood but there are stands of pine, spruce, hemlock and balsam too.  Maple trees grow there in abundance, the sugar maple for sugar and syrup.  That’s a major industry in Vermont and the folks in Chester used to make their share of syrup.  I remember an old apple orchard too and places where wild berries grew in abundance.  There was one place in particular that I used to love to go berrying.  It was down off the Green Mountain Turnpike just a short distance past the old school house.  There was an old road that had become overgrown but you could still see where it was suppose to be and if you hiked out there maybe a quarter mile, no more, you came to a big meadow with a deserted and partially collapsed old farm house and out buildings.  The right side of that meadow was loaded with raspberry and blackberry canes growing wild and free and I used to pick probably well more than my free share of those berries.  If you moved to the south end of the meadow there were some pretty fair blueberry bushes too.  It is a fair hike to get there but if you had a hankering for berries you could be pretty sure you’d find them in abundance.  The hike was always worth the effort.