TGIF

I'll be off until Sunday night or Monday, folks, but just had to note that today is the last day of Alberto Gonzales's reign as Attorney General.

That doesn't change the Constitutional crisis and unprecedented expansion of Executive powers Gonzales has engineered (along with Vice President Dick Cheney), any more than it concludes unchecked surveillance and warrantless spying on Americans, or restores habeas corpus and due process, or opens the gates at Guantanamo Bay and ends the Kafkaesque plight of those held there, or ends US-sanctioned and/or executed torture and extraordinary rendition.

But, hey, it's Alberto's last day.

And that's something to celebrate today.

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Congratulations, Tim and Donna! It's a Bava!

Tomb-Sized Tome Tips Titans, Sears Orbs, Blows Mind!

My copy of Tim Lucas's absolutely stunning book Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark arrived last night around 5:30 PM.

Despite all that had to be done before I could fall asleep last night, I stole an hour at our kitchen table and enjoyed exploring the book's pages -- this is, without a doubt, the most sumptuous single-volume self-published book I have ever laid eyes upon. It's right up there with Ulrich Merkl's exquisite Dream of the Rarebit Fiend book -- but this is literally a dream book come true for me, I almost cannot believe it exists!

I chatted briefly with Tim and Donna on the phone last night to congratulate (and thank) them -- more next week, once I steal more time to love this baby!

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See last night's post, particularly if you live in driving distance of Brattleboro, VT and have some open time Monday afternoon -- oh, and have a great weekend. I'll be posting next this coming Sunday night -- intense weekend and work week ahead, so it'll be touch and go until I get out the other end of it all.

Green Mountain Cinema Lecture Monday in Brattleboro/Dummerston...

I'll be speaking this coming Monday, September 17 at 1-3 PM at the University of Vermont's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute on Route 5 in Dummerston VT, just north of Brattleboro. The Brattleboro Lecture Series Fall 2007 is underway, and I'm launching their fall series "Made In Vermont: Films and Filmmakers" with an overview of Green Mountain Cinema from the silents to the digital era of filmmaking -- a full century of Vermont movies.

Here's the link -- scroll down to the Brattleboro Lecture Series info, and you'll find the list of the full "Made in Vermont" programming there, along with directions.

The host of this program is Tatiana Schreiber, organizer of the Westminster Festival of Film by Local Artists and of the Brattleboro Women's Film Festivals; Tatiana has hosted two of my previous Vermont film retrospective lectures at the Westminster West Library (a three-hour overview of Green Mountain Cinema and an overview of experimental and underground filmmaking in Vermont). Monday's session will be a revised and shortened version of the longer three-hour program, featuring some material I've never incorporated before for other venues.

In case you're in the area and care to attend (see the link, above, for the specifics on cost, etc.), here's the directions:

The Learning Collaborative is located just north of Brattleboro on Route 5 between Vermont Exit 3 and Exit 4 of I-91.
We are 1.8 miles north of the rotary at Exit 3 (Brattleboro).
We are 4.1 miles south of Exit 4 (Putney).
Look for a single story brick building on the west side of the road. Many people know it as "the old regional library." Parking and one doorway are at the back of the building. Handicapped accessible parking, ramp and doorway are at the north end of the building.

The rest of the week is Center for Cartoon Studies teaching work, and drawing my ass off!

Have a great weekend, one and all...

What's Up with the Dial Up This Morning?

I had something planned to share with y'all this morning, but due to either the weather or the vagaries of Sovernet (our server), I can't access my own email this morning for more than one email at a time. Having struggled through this nonsense enough today, I'm feeling lucky to get into the blog at all and will table my planned posts until the weekend or after.

So, local interest stories only this morning -- sorry!

This week has been an eventful one here, culminating in a Wednesday night five-town meeting of the minds in the Town Offices in Dummerston, VT about bringing DSL service to rural Windham County. Dummerston selectmen Tom Bodett (known to some of you for his Motel 6 commercials and appearances on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me) and Kevin Ryan organized the powwow, and Jim Mahoney and I were there on behalf of the Marlboro committee; there were folks from nearby Newfane, Brooline and Putney there, too. We'll be posting the meeting notes and other info and updates on

the Marlboro broadband committee site.

In the meantime, Jane Wilde and I continue working on the upcoming launch of the Bissette website, while I chip away at other duties and projects: the weekly drawing session with a Marlboro Elementary School student (who will remain unnamed here, to protect the innocent), ongoing work with the CCS students on our late spring DVD minicomic gig, the ongoing expansion/revisions to We Are Going to Eat You, and writing and editing chores in the hopes of getting two volumes of Green Mountain Cinema this summer.

I've also had prep work for this week's illustrated lecture on comics and graphic novels -- delivered Tuesday night to an architect's association in White River Jct., VT -- and more extensive prep work for two presentations next week: a presentation in Morrisville, VT's Morristown Centennial Library on Monday May 22 at 6:30 pm (802-888-3853), and a private presentation of a lecture on psychology/psychiatry and comics for a Dartmouth gathering on Wednesday. I hereby vow to feature EC's Psychoanalysis comic and Charles Schultz's famed "The Doctor is In" panel from Peanuts among other goodies, including Justin Green's confessional Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary and others.

Then there's the day-long fund-raising drawing workshop I'm giving at the Marlboro Elementary School tomorrow (Saturday, May 20th), for which I've donated my time. Morning (10 AM to 12 noon) is for K thru 4th Grade students, the longer afternoon session (1:30 PM to 4 PM) is for 5th Grade and up, including two adults who've signed up. Should be high-octane and fun, and I've got some great exercises planned. If this works out, we'll do another later this summer with wider promotion; alas, I couldn't get any assistance or aides, so I'll be on my lonesome with the small group, which is fine.

I also managed to catch evening screenings of United 93 (brilliant piece of work, and among the most harrowing docudramas I've ever seen) and Art School Confidential (engaging, excellent and haunting; kudos to Clowes and Zwigoff!) this week, too. I was suffering cinematic withdrawal symptoms, and so badly needed my dose of colored-light-on-a-big-screen and sound-coming-at-me that I would have settled for anything, really. Two good pics in a row, though, was a treat.

For your Friday reading pleasure, though, and as a follow-up to my 1927 flood 'teaser' earlier this week (as the rain picks up and continues today, after two days of sporadic sunshine here in Marlboro), I'm posting the outline for my Green Mountain Cinema II silent movie coverage. This appeared, in truncated form (edited down from this draft), in a Montpelier newspaper and in the regional newsstand magazine Livin' hereabouts in 2005; I'm expanding this considerably for GMCII, to provide broader context for my 1927 flood article and Arthur Lennig's definitive coverage of the making of D.W. Griffith's classic Way Down East, among other goodies.

Enjoy!
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REEL ESTATE: How the Movies Came to Vermont, and Vermont Came to the Movies...

The early years of Vermont’s motion picture legacy are elusive. Many of these films no longer survive, the only evidence of their flickering existence found in newspapers, trade journals, books, the occasional photograph or promotional ad. But rest assured that films were indeed being made in Vermont before the coming of sound, laying bedrock for the film and video production of today.

The first Vermont films chronicled military maneuvers, most likely filmed at Fort Ethan Allen. Hand-cranked motion picture cameras accommodated about one minute’s worth of film, and the titles were self-explanatory: Cavalry Charge, Cavalry Horses at Play, Cavalry Musical Drill, Charge Through Intervals of Skirmishes, Fencing on Horseback, Troopers Hurdling, along with Wrestling, Bareback: 3rd Cavalry and Musical Drill: Troop A, Third Cavalry (all 1897).

The famed French cinema pioneers the Lumiere Brothers August and Louis opened a plant in Burlington by Lake Champlain in 1902; it was acquired by the Eastman Company, and abandoned in 1911. The following year, celebrated silent comedy mogul Mack Sennett formed the production company Keystone with two partners, one of whom was Adam Kessel, Jr., whose Kessel Park estate on the New York side of the lake reportedly housed guest stars like Charlie Chaplin. By then, Vermont had spawned two ‘movie stars’ of its own: Commodore Admiral George Dewy of Montpelier, and Wilson Alwyn Bentley, the “Snowflake Man” of Jericho.

Dewey was one of the great naval heroes of the 1898 Spanish-American war; eager to satisfy public demand for footage of Dewey, Albert E. Smith and James Stuart Blackton boarded the cruiser Olympia in September 1899 to ‘sneak’ shots of Dewey, and later filmed the Admiral in Washington, D.C.

The team then journeyed to Montpelier to visit the Admiral’s home -- only to be tossed out. Dewey later accepted an invitation from Smith and Blackton to travel to their Vitagraph studio in Flatbush, New York and appear in The Battle Cry of Peace (1915).

The humble Jericho man who made his mark in the world photographing snowflakes was visited by Pathe News in 1917. During this outdoor session (much to Bentley’s frustration, as he worked inside), the Pathe crew clumsily faked snowfall by tossing snow from a second-story window and hung cut-out paper models of snowflakes from wires to simulate microphotography of snow spiralling through the air.

Alas, this short film is all that remains of Bentley’s motion picture career, though he was visited again in 1921, this time by the Bray Studios of New York. Bentley demonstrated a firmer grasp of the principles of cinema than did his camera-toting visitors: when the filmmakers inquired whether it might be possible to film the crystallization process, Bentley suggested they film a snow crystal melting, then reverse the film to simulate the snowflake taking form. The short film, entitled Mysteries of the Snow, was exhibited at Burlington’s Majestic Theatre, where Bentley’s slides were occasionally exhibited on the big screen.

Heartbreak fueled the first features made in Vermont. A Vermont Romance (1915) was made by “The Vermont Progressive Party”, such as it was, set and shot in and around Burlington (and, perhaps, White River Junction). It soon faded from view, perhaps because it defied genre expectations, urging orphaned lasses to spurn the lovesick farmer down the road (even if he gives his last dollar in aid), find a rich man, and marry. It was resurrected and reportedly ‘restored’ by WCAX-TV for broadcast in 1965; a shortened version of this feature is in the collection of the Northeast Historic Film Museum in Buckport, Maine. A Vermont Romance is a most curious artifact, ending with an extended tour of an industrialized bakery (where the now-penniless farmer slaves away, working for the wealthy man who won the heroine’s heart), anticipating the industrial, educational, and promotional film industry which would soon emerge in various corners of the state.

Far more classical made-in-Vermont romances blossomed in Way Down East, The Offenders, and Insinuation (all 1921). In 1920, the silent era’s greatest director, David Wark Griffith was sorely in need of success to recharge his flagging career. He purchased the rights to the popular stage play Way Down East to craft a star vehicle for Lillian Gish, one of America’s most beloved actresses, and arrived in White River Junction with his cast and crew in March of that year. Gish’s country girl, previously wed to a rich city man who abandoned her with child (which soon died), restarts her life working at a New England farm, where the stout son of the farm’s stern patriarch falls for her; gossip, the return of her rich suitor, and despair drives the forlorn lass into a raging blizzard.

Intent on creating a spectacle unlike any ever seen, Griffith dared to place Gish afloat on a cake of ice in the thawing March waters. Of all silent Vermont films, Way Down East remains the best-known. Griffith’s sensitive direction, Gish’s heart-breaking performance, and the still-spectacular climax (wherein Richard Barthelmess rushes to rescue Gish before they are washed over the falls) won raves from critics and audiences alike, though the honorable Charles R. Cummings, publisher/editor of The Vermonter: The State Magazine, ridiculed the film’s portrait of the Vermont character.

Less renowned -- and sadly lost -- are the two features made in Randolph that same year, written, directed, produced by and starring an adventurous woman named Margery Wilson, who summered in Randolph. She’d appeared in films (including D.W. Griffith’s epic Intolerance) and turned down a marriage proposal from one of America’s leading movie stars, William S. Hart. Wilson chose Randolph as the ideal place to make her features, The Offenders (1921/24) and Insinuation (1921), which were both romances in the Way Down East tradition. Insinuation debuted at Randolph’s Chandler Music Hall before its road-show engagements.

By 1920, “Moving-Picture Machines” were available for sale to the public. Adventurous theater owners one-upped competitors by producing their own exclusive newsreels. Among these was the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro; when the Connecticut River washed a local bridge downstream in December, 1920, the unidentified Latchis cameraman filmed the spectacle. The footage was acquired (or appropriated) by the Selznick Weekly News and played nationally.

16mm film was introduced in 1923, opening the door for more regional filmmaking. These were, by and large, products of industry: quarries (the earliest, shot in the Barre quarries, dates from November, 1920), the sugaring firms (as early as 1926, shot by Harry Wendell Richardson for the St. Johnsbury-based Cary Maple Sugar Company), and more. There were home movies, many long-lost and never-to-be-recovered, though a few reside in the Northeast Historic Film Museum.

At least five cameramen in different corners of the state captured the November, 1927 flood on film. Two reels of flood footage have survived: about 10 minutes of 35mm footage sheltered at the Northeast Historic Film Museum, and 25 minutes currently housed at the University of Vermont Bailey/Howe Library Media Resources Department. Together, this archived footage present a remarkable snapshot of the natural disaster, demonstrating how active newsreel photographers (professional and amateur) had become in the most remote corners of the state.

The man who’d already shot some of the first industrial films in the state (for the maple sugar industry), Harry Wendell Richardson, shot footage along the northernmost portion of the state, showcasing the wake of the flood in Newport, Orleans, Coventry, and areas along the Clyde River; this reel is in the Northeast Historic Film Museum collection. The UVM footage, entitled Vermont Flood of 1927, is the most publicly available of all (on display at the new Vermont Historic Society Pavilion in Barre, Vermont; excerpts appear in the VPT video Vermont’s Great Flood), featuring the towns of Winooski, Bolton, Waterbury, Jonesville, Jeffersonville, Cambridge, Rutland, Proctor, Richmond, Hinesburg, and White River Junction, as well as bordering New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Four photographers are credited: Edward V. Hoyt, L.A. Norcott, “ex-Governor Proctor, of Proctor, Vt., and Ralph R. Eno of New York City.”

The silent era of Vermont filmmaking did not end with the ‘bang’ of the flood. After the arrival of sound, regional filmmakers were still using the silent film format; it was the most affordable of media, and was used throughout the 1930s.

A nomadic female filmmaker named Margaret Cram Showalter wandered New England currying funding from local businesses to produce her rapid-fire “Movie Queen” featurettes. She shot and completed these silent featurettes in a little over a week, always using the same narrative, reaping whatever boxoffice the finished product earned at the local town hall or opera house before rushing off to another town to do it all over again. At least one Vermont-based “Movie Queen” film has survived, shot in Middlebury. There may be others.

Mack M. Derick of Orleans was the sole native son to continue filmmaking (sans sound). Derick was engaged by The State Publicity Department and various chambers of commerce to make Dot and Glen See Vermont (1932), chronicling the honeymoon travels of the (fictional) couple Dot (17-year-old Josie Pomeroy, now Josie Pomeroy Sherrer) and Glen (19-year-old Glendon Foster). Vermont film historian and archivist Richard W. Moulton presented excerpts from the film (with interviews with Dot and Glen, and clips from another Derick short, Model ‘A’ in the Mud) in the VPT video Vermont Memories Vol. 1 (1994). Derick carved out a living as a still photographer; his work graced many issues of Vermont Life.

There were a handful of silent feature films set, but not shot, in Vermont, such as The Street of Tears and Which Shall it Be? (both 1924). The first sound film set (but not shot) in Vermont was Drag (1929), which brought Way Down East co-star Richard Barthelmess "back to Vermont" as a small-town newspaper publisher. Hollywood continued to set films in Vermont, all filmed on studio sets, including Frank Capra’s humanist comedy Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and William Wellman’s retaliatory satire Nothing Sacred (1937).

With the notable exceptions of Mack Derick, the Movie Queen, and industrial and education films (including those made for the growing ski industry), regional filmmaking hibernated until Robert Flaherty’s arrival in the late 1940s. In 1954, Alfred Hitchcock came here to film his peculiar black comedy The Trouble with Harry (1955)...

...but that’s another story.
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[Special thanks to the folks at the Northeast Historic Film Museum, and to Joseph A. Citro, Richard W. Moulton, Arthur Lennig, Art Donahue, Roger Wiberg, Martha Day, Lori Holiff, and Cecile Starr.]

Wet Weather in New England

It's been raining nonstop in Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and parts of Massachusetts now for almost a full week, with flooding conditions in much of western NH and evacuations underway as I write this in a few riverside communities.

Last October brought some momentous flooding to NH and parts of VT, with towns like Alstead NH hit the hardest (including seven fatalities). Marge's work involves the Alstead school district, and she knew some of the folks nailed by that flooding; one family not only lost their home, but the land they'd built upon and owned -- all gone, washed away, cratered and valueless. It wasn't the kind of devastation New Orleans, Mississippi, and the Gulf States suffered under Katrina's fury, but it was as hard as we'd seen it hereabouts in years.

All of which brings me to today's post, which looks back at the most intense devastation flooding caused in Vermont in the 20th Century.

Here's a preview (a tease, really) of one of the feature articles I've written for Green Mountain Cinema Vol. 2, forthcoming this summer from Black Coat Press...
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Swept Away: Images of the 1927 Flood

The Northeast Historic Film Museum preserves precious images of the past, as does the University of Vermont’s (UVM) Bailey/Howe Library’s Media Resources Department. Their treasures include these startling -- and distinctively different -- motion-picture records of the infamous 1927 flood that hammered Vermont...
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Like many Vermonters, I grew up amid riverbanks, flood plains, and landmarks that had been reshaped by the infamous flood of 1927. I was hardly conscious of this as a lad. Though I loved science and geology, the ability to ‘read the landscape’ was a skill beyond me.

Still, there were glimmers: glib references to the flood by my parents, aunts, uncles, and other adults; the occasional mention by a teacher in the two-floor Duxbury schoolhouse; the occasional stolen glance at an ancient postcard or photograph; frequent visits, picnics, hikes and swims in and about the Waterbury Dam in Waterbury Center, which we were told was built in the wake of the flood. In the woods close to our home in Duxbury, my friends and I used to play around the partially-buried chasis of an ancient automobile amid a sprawl of what seemed to us to be old garbage; we would on occasion excavate some arcane bit of metal debris from the dirt, and wonder how it all got there. The flood was a mysterious, ominous event of unimaginable proportions, its history still buried in the soil, its ripples still spilling through time.

Many Vermont towns and villages bear similar landmarks; we all have our reference points. Though I spent most of my childhood traveling along, rafting, fishing, and playing in and around the Winooski River (where it flows between Waterbury and Duxbury), the most evident scar of that legendary flood presented itself every time I went to Bob’s Barbershop on Elm Street in Waterbury (Dad insisted on my brother Rick and I having crewcuts, so we went to Bob’s often). It seemed to me every time my father led me into Bob’s, I looked forward to seeing that evidence: a watermark, if you will, painted high above the sidewalk.

You can see that “watermark” still. If you drive into Waterbury heading east down South Main Street, just turn right on to Elm Street. Let your eyes wander up the second building on the right -- #3 Elm Street, the large brick building that is now Fisher Auto Parts, a Federated Auto Parts store -- and note the painted marker just above the sills of the second-story windows:

"High Water Mark: Nov. 3rd - 4th 1927"

As I used to say to myself, “Wow -- that must have been a lot of water!”

*****

It was the first week of November, 1927. Our own Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, it had been a productive summer yielding an abundant harvest, and there had been few frosts. There had, however, been a great deal of rain all through October, causing high water and some washouts. But there were no dire weather predictions, no flood warnings.

In an era long before the exhaustive weather ‘watch’ and forecasting we take for granted today, the first few drops of rain that began to fall on November 2nd from the cold front moving east harbored nothing more than an early winter shower.

But the rain fell steady throughout the early morning of the 3rd, until “the clouds lifted slightly,” Harold H. Chadwick recalled (in his article “Flood” in Vermont Life, Autumn 1952). “People left their homes to view the raging streams, curious to see what was going on... no one realized the danger... the rushing waters inspired awe but not alarm until about mid-day...” (Chadwick, pg. 8). The rain resumed that afternoon and it didn’t let up. The worst was yet to come as the sun faded, the rain fell, the rivers rose, and the waters became as all-consuming as the darkness.

F. E. Hartwell, U.S. Weather Bureau meteorologist stationed in Burlington, Vermont, wrote, “Consideration must be given to the fact that October was a wet month in Vermont. The total rainfall was about 50 per cent above normal and well distributed throughout the four-week period. Consequently the ground became soaked so full of water that by the end of the month all rainfall was running off as surface water, with practically none entering the ground. This was the condition when the phenomenal (for New England) rainfall of November 2, 3 and 4 occured.... practically all of it flowed immediately into the river systems of the state without the retarding process of first soaking into the ground and running off more gradually as would have been the case if this rain had followed a dry month instead of a wet one” (Hartwell quoted from R. E. Atwood, Stories and Pictures of The Vermont Flood: November, 1927, 1928, pg. 3).

And still it fell, swelling the brooks, streams, rivers, and lakes.

These soon spilled over their banks, and the waters crept up over pastures and roads, over streets and sidewalks, over steps and porches and door sills.

It lifted bridges from their moorings and houses from their foundations, and still it rained. It bore away everything in its path, and still the torrential downpour continued.

The water rose -- and rose -- and rose -- still, it rained.

The water was a force in and of itself. Every river in the state swallowed its banks and spilled over, but the Winooski River -- arising near Lower Cabot, swelling southest between Barre and Montpelier, and continuing northwest past Waterbury to Lake Champlain just north of Burlington -- savaged its hapless neighbors with unimaginable force. R.E. Atwood wrote, “As if drunk with its new-found power, it staggered and roared its crooked way down the valley, ripping out trees, tearing away houses, barns, bridges, and gathering live stock and even human beings into its awful arms, until, spent with its Herculean effort, it passed mutteringly out into Lake Champlain” (Atwood, pg. 4).

For three days, every river -- the Connecticut, the Missisquoi, Lamoille, Wells, White River, Black River, the Clyde, Otter Creek, the West River, etc. -- and every brook, stream, river, and body of water in the state (and those nearby, including the Hoosac River in Massachusetts) matched or vied with the Winooski in destructive force. Flash floods further carved out the hills and valleys, needing no names, taking no prisoners, and leaving nothing behind, save the scars of their passing.

Thus, November 2nd, 3rd, and 4th forever marked Vermont and its people.

*****

In hindsight, the details still astound: over five inches of rain drenched ninety percent of the Green Mountain State and parts of Northern Massachusetts within thirty hours. Before it let up, over half the state was awash with six to nine inches or more of rain. Though all parts of the region were affected, the Winooski River basin -- the most populated area of the state -- was the hardest hit. It was a storm unlike any in Vermont’s recorded history since the flood of 1869, and it changed the region forever.

Before the waters receded, the resulting flood claimed eight-four human lives (including that of Vermont’s Lieutenant Governor S. Hollister Jackson, who abandoned his stalled car mere yards from his home and tried to wade across Potash Brook to safety, only to be swept away; his body was recovered almost a mile down Potash Brook). The deluge killed thousands of livestock as it swept away almost seven hundred farms; it demolished almost two hundred homes and over two hundred factories; washed away over a thousand bridges; and ultimately devastated the area to the tune of over 30 million dollars (1927 currency), with four million dollars alone due to the extensive damage to railroads.

And then came winter. Cleanup, repair, and reconstruction were difficult once the snow blanketed all and the ground froze (thankfully late that winter, allowing for extensive repairs to be completed, particularly to the railroads; Central Vermont’s first passenger train traveled the reconstructed line by February 4th, 1928; see Chadwick, pg. 13). The back-breaking work continued well into the spring of ‘28.

For many, recovery and healing took much, much longer.

Vermont was already a financially impoverished state, its populace getting by on modest incomes at best; the flood was an enormous setback, not to mention a hell of a precursor to the Depression. But the surviving Vermonters rallied, helped one another, and endured; all worked hard to put it behind them. President Calvin Coolidge dispatched Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to the state as his personal representative in mid-November; after his tour of the devastation, Hoover commented, “I have seen Vermont at her worst, but I have also seen Vermonters at their best” (quoted from Chadwick, Ibid.). Vermont Governor John E. Weeks issued a statement which declared the flood “the greatest disaster in the history of our beautiful state.” Noting the devastation, Weeks wrote, “It was indeed a hopeless situation to meet with winter hovering in the offing. But Vermonters are not those to be daunted or broken by hopelessness. With unbelievable courage our people started to reconstruct and rehabilitate and not for a moment did they yield to a spirit of demoralization” (as published in Atwood, pg. 1).

In the wake of the flood, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed three flood retention reservoirs (and their accompanying dams) along the hard-hit Winooski River Basin (East Orange, Wrightsville, and Waterbury) in hopes of preventing similar flooding in the future. Subsequently, New England and Vermont weathered other powerful storms (including the floods of 1936 and 1947, the hurricanes of 1938 and 1950), prompting the building of more reservoirs and dams, “but no event has approached the Flood of 1927 for areal extent,” according to the

National Weather Service.

Many towns, large and small, still sport ‘high water marks’ for the 1927 flood on key public buildings, still-visible testimonials to the disaster. There are also many still photographs, archived in many local historical societies, countless home collections and scrapbooks, and a few even committed to postcards of the time. Immediately after the waters had receded, the U.S. federal government commissioned a “flyover” of the Winooski River, the White and Black Rivers, and the Lamoille River, and their respective basins to document the extensive flood damage. They accumulated ninety aerial photographs, sixty-eight of which are now displayed on the University of Vermont’s Landscape Change website (go

to this site,

which offers literally thousands of flood images along with the aerial views cited).

But another visible testimonial remains: rare motion picture footage of the flood.
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[End of preview/tease -- The rest awaits you in Green Mountain Cinema II, heavily illustrated, coming this summer!]
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Tuesday Morning Factoid:

Vermont is the only state that the capital, Montpelier, does not have a McDonalds.