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...

We began at the intersection of the Bayley-Hazen military road and Church Street:

Cairo: "Oooh, a pile of snow!  Must.  Dig."

Peacham is probably what most people have in mind when they think of Vermont (history, demographics):

Vermont has its share (more, perhaps) of fascinating town name stories, and Peacham is one of the more colorful. There are actually four possibilities as to how the town was named:

   1. A misspelling of the name of one of the grantees. To get from Meecham to Peacham, however, is a stretch even considering the relaxed spelling conventions of the time.
   2. For the author Henry Peacham. His book, The Compleat Gentleman, was reprinted several times and widely read in the Colonies.
   3. After one of two villages in Kent, England: Peckham and West Peckham (pronounced "Peacham").

The fourth, however, is the one most favored by locals:

In 1726 the English playwright John Gay wrote what has become his best-known work, The Beggar's Opera, a slightly scandalous parody of grand opera. The beautiful actress Lavinia Fenton played the role of Gay's enchanting Polly Peachum with such success that the piece remained popular in England for over fifty years (in recent times Gay's plot has been revived by Bertolt Brecht in The Threepenny Opera). Gay later wrote a sequel, Polly, banned from the stage but widely read in both England and America.

The British nobility was aghast when Charles Paulet (1685-1754), the third Duke of Bolton and eighth Marquis of Winchester, married Fenton. The average citizen was thrilled with the marriage; she was, after all, the personification of Polly Peachum to many.
...
When The Beggar's Opera was brought to the Colonies in the early 1760's, it achieved as much success as it had 35 years earlier in England. The aging Benning Wentworth, caught up by the romance of the Polly Peachum-Duke of Bolton story, may have named the town to honor the late Duchess...

The Peacham Store (and the town) was where The Spitfire Grill was filmed.

Way back in '98, when NTodd and NTodd's Folks were first seeking the Fortress, Peacham was one likely candidate for its location.  Stef and I on stopped by the store for sandwiches when we were traipsing around at the time, and chatted with the (then) new proprietor, a very nice CA transplant who'd gotten tired of the rat race and bought the place sight unseen.  She doesn't appear to still own the place--at least we haven't seen her the last few times we've been in.

And here are a few shots from our brief walkaround:

At the start of our hike up Church Street.

I was expected Marley's ghost to appear at the entrance to the cemetery.

You won't miss that board on the slopes!

Snow defying gravity.

ntodd

PS--The template, though pretty much fixed after my brain fart, still needs a bit of tweaking (e.g., dealing with the cut off right edge of the photos).

Comments

[scully]

Thanks for the update NTodd. Sarah's mom is in town and she spent some time at the Buddhist mediation center near Barnet in the mid-70s, so we planned to drive up this weekend.

Hope you all have a happy holiday season.

[Kath]

Very nice and wintery! Which does Cairo like best? Snow or sticks?

[Caitlin]

I grew up above the West Barnet General Store (my parents owned it for 10 years), so it's great to see a picture of it here!

My husband, baby and I are moving back to the NEK next month (well, back for me....new to him) from Portland OR. I love seeing the pictures you've taken -- it's bringing it all back!

Hope you keep going with this! What fun!