Our Vermont Travelblog

Trip 10 - Barnet And Peacham

It's Christmas Eve Eve, and we are up at the Fortress of Solitude for a few days respite from real life ('cept that I had some course development work to do in the morning), so we of course had to take the opportunity to do a rare 251 Club jaunt.

We'd planned to just stop in one of our favorite towns, Peacham, but decided to add neighboring Barnet along the way (history, demographics):

Barnet was granted to 67 men, 9 of whom were named Stevens. The tradition in the Stevens family is that their first American ancestor had emigrated from Barnet, Hertfordshire, England, accounting for the origin of the name.

Very early in the town's history some of the Stevens group moved to Barnet and bought a gristmill. The stream which powered the mill became known as Stevens River, the village as Stevens Mill or Stevens Village. When the Post Office was established there in 1807, the village was renamed Barnet, and has remained so since.

We weren't going to officially do Barnet, but I had to stop when we passed the General Store.

I found Barnet to be an absolutely charming, quintessential Vermont town.  And of course, Peacham is even more so: a number of shots from that famous little village below the fold...

Ebb And Flow

Freep:

A new analysis by the U.S. Census shows that every weekday morning, Vermont shrinks by about 5,000 people.

The state's population declines as workers head off to their jobs in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York, according to the study, the first U.S. Census Bureau estimate of the daytime population of every county and more than 6,400 places across the country.

Although the Green Mountain State loses weight overall, Chittenden County grows by about 14,000 people each workday. Larger Vermont towns and cities become busier as suburbs and rural areas empty out and people go to work. Some Vermont communities double in size.
...
Big cities with large daytime gains include Atlanta (62 percent), Tampa (48 percent), Pittsburgh and Boston (both around 41 percent). New York City adds half a million people each workday.

Much of the influx into Chittenden County comes from Franklin and Grand Isle counties, said Peter Keating of the Metropolitan Planning Organization, which sets transportation priorities for the county. The 2000 Census data also shows daytime population declines in Grand Isle and Franklin counties.
...
Burlington's population swells from 38,889 at night as residents are sleeping to an estimated 48,319 as people from outlying towns take their positions in offices, shops and warehouses.

"Because our daytime population is different from the residential population, the demands on services and the demands on the community as a whole are different," said David White, comprehensive planner for Burlington. The city must orient services such as police, fire protection and traffic management toward the daily influx, he said.
...
Essex Junction's daytime population almost doubles each work day to 15,857, according to the Census estimates. Most of that increase is probably associated with IBM, said Jeff Arango, Essex Junction's development director.

Arango said he already had the sense from traffic and business patterns the village population increases sharply during the day.

"Based on what I know," he said, "the number doesn't surprise me."

Well, as the Freep told us back in October, Vermont has become a state of commuters, so this isn't surprising at all.  It is neat to see the numbers confirm the intuitive. 

Until I started teaching on campus for Champlain College this semester (I'd previously only taught online classes for them), I never really knew what the traffic flow was like into Burlington during the AM rush.  I've since learned what time I need to leave to get in town without becoming too annoyed. 

I'm pleased that next semester I'm back to 100% online, though I do really enjoy the classroom setting.  I just don't like dealing with traffic--that's why I telecommute as much as I can!

ntodd

Template Weirdness

You might see some strange stuff happening with the design for a while.  I had a massive brain fart and totally screwed up the template when I was playing around with some design mockups to demonstrate blog potential for my Vermont-based training company, Hill Associates.

ntodd