Vermont keeps its secrets in plain sight

Two presidents were from here, Calvin Coolidge, whose birthplace (he was born on the Fourth of July, 1872) is in Plymouth Notch, kept exactly as it looked when he was sworn in there after Warren Harding died in office; and Chester Alan Arthur (though there’s evidence that Arthur actually came into the world across the border in Canada, and therefore served illegally). So were Lincoln debater Stephen Douglas, tractor magnate John Deere, Admiral George Dewey, the founders of The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune (George Jones and Horace Greeley, respectively, who were both from Poultney), and Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, and his successor, Brigham Young. Though only the foundation of Smith’s parents’ house in Royalton remains, the church has built a visitors center and memorial there.

Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Jungle Book” not in India, but in Dummerston, where you can not only visit the house he named Naulakha, after a palace in India, and where he also wrote “Captains Courageous,” you can rent it and stay there.

One Vermonter took her Yankee thrift to such lengths the Guinness Booknamed her the world’s most miserly woman. Hetty Green, who was so tightfisted that when she got her $7 million inheritance on her 21st birthday, she pulled the candles from her cake and returned them for a refund. While it’s hard to believe Green left anything behind, the Rockingham Free Public Library and Museum has, among other weird local paraphernalia, her fainting couch, her glasses, and her writing desk, where she once spent two hours hunting for a missing two-cent stamp.

Vermonters have hung on to more than their money. Small museums and collections around the state show off such artifacts as President Lincoln’s trademark stovepipe hat, in the estate called Hildene in Manchester, where his son Robert Todd Lincoln lived. While you’re in Manchester, you can also stop in at the American Museum of Fly Fishing, the world’s largest collection of angling and angling-related objects, and ogle Ernest Hemingway’s fly-fishing tackle.

Mussolini’s telephone and a piece of Hitler’s desk, swiped as souvenirs at the end of World War II, are both in the museum of Norwich University, the nation’s oldest private military college, which also has the American flag flown during the surrender of the German Army to the US Army Second Armored Division in Innsbruck, Austria, and the pennant that flew from Admiral Dewey’s flagship, the Olympia, in the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War. (Dewey went to Norwich, though he never graduated.)

Even Elvis Presley’s gallstones, removed while he was in the Army and swiped by a curiosity seeker, are in the Main Street Museum in White River Junction.

Also in White River Junction is Elijah West’s Tavern, where delegates wrote the constitution of the independent Republic of Vermont on July 9, 1777. Bet you didn’t know about that, either: Though it helped fight against the British, Vermont remained a sovereign nation for 14 years before it joined the Union. The room where that constitution was debated — it was the first on the continent to prohibit slavery — looks just as it did that day. (Vermont gave in and became the 14th state in 1791, to the apparent continuing regret of some Vermonters.)

As interesting as the people who were born in Vermont are, so are some of those buried here, including Baron and Maria von Trapp, whose escape from Nazi-controlled Austria with their children inspired “The Sound of Music.” You’ll find their graves on the grounds of the Trapp Family Lodge, which they built after settling in Stowe in 1939.

In Middlebury’s West Cemetery, between Emma Moody (died 1838) and Caroline Hawley Mead (died 1894), is the final resting place of Amun-Her-Khepesh-Ef, (died 1883 BC), a 3,800-year-old Egyptian mummy brought to a local museum in 1886, but later cremated and buried under a marker reading: “Amun-Her-Khepesh-Ef. Aged 2 years. Son of Sen Woset, third king of Egypt, and his wife, Hathor-Hotpe, 1883 BC.”

Even odder than the Egyptian mummy is the supposed vampire buried in Cushing Cemetery in Woodstock: A local man named Corwin (his first name has been lost to history) blamed for a series of mysterious illnesses that occurred after his death. Townspeople dug him up and found that his heart still had blood in it, the incontrovertible sign of a vampire. Needless to say, the heart was removed and burned in an iron cauldron and the ashes buried beneath the town green in a 15-foot-deep hole and covered with a seven-ton slab of granite sprinkled with the blood of a sacrificial bull.

Something else interred in Vermont might surprise you, as it surprised the railroad workers who discovered it in 1849. It was a whale, 10 feet underground and 150 miles from the nearest ocean. Christened Charlotte after the town where it was found, the buried whale proved that an arm of the saltwater sea once extended into the Champlain Valley. You can see the bones of Charlotte the whale in the Perkins Geology Museum at the University of Vermont in Burlington, along with fossils of other sea creatures found around landlocked Vermont.

There are other artifacts of largely unknown history and culture scattered all over this state. The little-known Vermont Veterans Militia Museum at Camp Johnson in Colchester, for example, has the uniform of Florence MacAllister, one of the first women to join the Marines (during World War I). There’s a marker in Brandon at the spot where local blacksmith Thomas Davenport invented the electric motor. The Bennington Museum not only has the world’s largest collection of works by Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, it has the sole surviving Martin Wasp, the only car ever commercially manufactured in Vermont. There’s a 32-room Flemish-style castle in Proctor, complete with turrets and parapets, built by a wealthy Vermonter who married an English noblewoman. And the Haskell Free Public Library in Derby is the only structure of its kind on the entire 5,525-mile US-Canadian border that is half in each country; users who cross over are required to report to Customs.

Coolidge, whose characteristically modest grave is in the family cemetery in Plymouth Notch, perhaps best captured his home state: “If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the union and support of our institutions should languish,” the man nicknamed “Silent Cal” once said, “it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.”

Jon Marcus can be reached at jon@mysecretboston.com.