It Ain’t Necessarily So

February 27, 2011Posted inNorth Danville, NSM articles

…or How a Vermonter Brought His Girlfriend to a Minstrel Show

Locks of love and tick­et stubs
By Mark R. Moore, Ver­mont Asso­ciate at Danville His­tor­i­cal House
Beside the two tick­et stubs that lie before me on the desk are two locks of hair. One is longer, thick and satiny with a slight curl. The oth­er is wispy and of a rougher texture.

Like many things at His­tor­i­cal House, a glance at the sur­face of what one encoun­ters does not reveal the facts. Instead, these items are more like a mul­ti-faceted dia­mond, a kalei­do­scope of thoughts and con­clu­sions that change with the slight­est turn. The facts must be eval­u­at­ed against the par­tial evi­dence that we have before us as well as our knowl­edge of the past, placed in con­text of the present. Add to that the knowl­edge we gath­er from out­side sources, and it will bal­ance our first gut reactions.

A Leap Year Proposal I Send by Mail

January 30, 2011Posted inFrom the archives, NSM articles
Flo­rence and Her­bert Stan­ton of North Danville
By Mark R. Moore

We tend to think of peo­ple whose writ­ings date from the ear­ly 1900s as “old” folks–ossified cit­i­zens of Danville who were “set in their ways” and as per­son­able, humor­ous and emo­tion­al as a mar­ble stat­ue that we touched as a child. Fre­quent­ly, in the course the course of clas­si­fy­ing fam­i­ly doc­u­ments for the Danville His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety, I come across one that offers insight that shows that they were not much dif­fer­ent that teenagers are today.  Had I read only Flo­rence Johnson’s 1907  let­ters to Her­bert Stan­ton (her hus­band only a year lat­er) I would been con­firmed in a strait­laced con­trol­ling stereo­type of an all-know­ing spouse-to-be. In the fol­low­ing let­ter, Her­bert was con­fined to home with mumps.