Then Again: A 1930s plan had Vermont paving its peaks

Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”

[C]ol. William Wilgus must have envisioned it as the ambitious project that would cap his illustrious career.

As a civil engineer, Wilgus had helped design the new Grand Central Terminal and the Holland Tunnel in New York City, had run the U.S. Army transportation service in France during the Great War (which would later become known as the First World War), and had even righted some of the columns of the Parthenon in Athens.

Now, having retired to Vermont, Wilgus looked out at the Green Mountains and imagined a highway running along their flanks and peaks. In his vision, this road, soon to be dubbed the Green Mountain Parkway, would cover 260 miles, from the Massachusetts line to the Canadian border. It would employ thousands of Vermonters who had been left jobless by the Depression, bring countless visitors to the state, and, best of all, would cost Vermont almost nothing. This was the 1930s and the federal government, through its New Deal economic recovery plan, was spending millions on public works programs.

The project seemed unstoppable. Vermont’s share of the $18 million project would be a scant $500,000. That money would buy rights of way (amounting to roughly 50,000 acres) along the route. The state would then deed that land to the federal government, which would designate it a national park.

Wilgus had influential allies, among them legislative leaders, former governors, and famed author Dorothy Canfield Fisher of Arlington.

Most importantly, though, he had an indefatigable ally in James P. Taylor, father of the Long Trail and the Green Mountain Club. Taylor’s backing would help blunt claims that the road would despoil Vermont.

Taylor and the other founders of the Green Mountain Club modeled it after the Sierra Club, which was launched by renowned naturalist John Muir. But Taylor was no John Muir. Whereas Muir was an ardent environmentalist, Taylor was a promoter of whatever he thought would increase the vitality of his state, whether it involved its nature or its economy, which made him as enthusiastic about roads as he was about trails.

Indeed, after helping start the Green Mountain Club, he became secretary of the Greater Vermont Association, which later became the state Chamber of Commerce.

Together, Taylor and Wilgus began rallying public support for the parkway. In June 1932, Taylor took a group of Vermont business leaders to meet with planners from Westchester County, outside New York City. Describing the meeting in a press release to newspapers, Taylor wrote that the group had studied the area’s roadways and heard planners offer such insights as that “It’s shrubbery that makes a city.”

The group, Taylor wrote, came away with “the conviction that the more Vermonters study Westchester County, the better for Vermont.”

Taylor clearly believed that Vermont should be more like the suburbs to its south. Writing to another state chamber official, Taylor stated that if Vermonters examined the communities and parkways of Westchester County, “there will seep into the Vermont consciousness more and more the ideas and tastes and desires that we need to inculcate in order to keep things going along the way in which they have been started.”

Helping promote the parkway were some newspapers in northern and central Vermont. The Burlington Free Press editorialized strongly in favor of the road. And, according to Taylor’s notes, the Waterbury Record wrote in August 1933 that “when a man of the experience (and) knowledge that (the) Colonel possesses figures that it is a good thing for Vermont to do, (the) right thing to do, it just behooves the average person to fall into line, (and) go through with this man who is trying to do so much for Vermont.”

Part of the reason the parkway’s supporters pushed so hard for it was that the road had many enemies. Chief among them was the Green Mountain Club itself. In 1933, GMC trustees declared the organization “unalterably opposed to the construction of such a highway.” The parkway would cause “the abandonment of the Long Trail of the Green Mountain Club and would commercialize a section of the State that has so far been unspoiled but has been opened up by the Green Mountain Club’s Trails to lovers of the outdoors in its natural state,” the trustees wrote.

If an environmental argument didn’t win people over, trustees added that maintenance of the road could become a financial burden to the state. Furthermore, some argued, there was no guarantee that, once started, the federal government would ever finish the road.

Among the club’s most influential members were Rep. Mortimer Proctor (soon to be speaker of the House and later governor) and Henry Field, publisher of the Rutland Herald, at the time the most state’s influential paper.

The parkway’s opponents relied on arguments that the road would scar the state’s beloved Green Mountains, invite development into the wilderness, physically divide the state east and west, as it had always been divided politically; make it impossible to drive across Vermont without crossing federal land, draw tourists away from the villages, which needed their business; and attract a “flood of undesirable visitors.” To some observers, this fear of “undesirable” types smacked of elitism and perhaps also racism.

The distrust of outsiders extended to suspicion of the promoters themselves. Here, parkway opponents argued, was a pair of non-native Vermonters (Wilgus and Taylor were both from upstate New York) inviting the federal government in to make mischief.

Parkway supporters, for their part, couldn’t understand why opponents would reject the blessings of modernity and the economic benefits this state-of-the-art parkway would bring. Wilgus assured Vermonters that the road’s landscaping and layout would block it from the ears and eyes of hikers.

He also attacked those who worried about “undesirable visitors.” “As if we wished to remain a ‘hermit kingdom’ for all time,” Wilgus wrote emphatically, “just because an occasional visitor via the parkway may not be all that is to be desired.”

Privately, he called people who worried about newcomers “snobs” and complained about the Herald’s “poisonous activities.”

By 1934, supporters seemed to have the upper hand. The state and federal government were treating the project as if it had been approved. A team of surveyors, engineers and architects began laying out the road, plotting how it would run along the flanks of Glastonbury Mountain, Killington Peak, Camels Hump and Mount Mansfield before ending at the Canadian border in a national park surrounding Jay Peak.

Even GMC’s trustees began to view it as inevitable, and worked to minimize its impact. The club proposed running the parkway through the state’s valleys to protect the mountains and keep visitors in the villages, where their business was needed.

The Legislature finally voted on the Green Mountain Parkway in early 1935. The proposal easily passed the Senate, 19-11. But supporters were stunned when the House narrowly defeated it, 126-111. A shift of eight votes would have given Parkway backers their highway.

Wilgus was stung. He wrote Taylor that summer: “It is really too bad that Vermonters have so deliberately turned their back on their great opportunity, thus alienating the powers at Washington in whose hands lies the expenditure of fifteen to twenty million dollars of Vermont’s own money!”

Taylor wrote back, offering Wilgus hope. “Well, it’s a process to which we are more or less accustomed, this mental measles before projects are accepted here in Vermont as well as everywhere else. It took years to sell the Long Trail idea some places in Vermont.”

Of the House’s defeat of the proposal, he wrote, “There was a lot of personal and political pathology in it all. It is easier to analyze a situation than to change it, but here’s hoping we can gradually change it.”

The vote was so tight, and feelings on both sides so intense, that the Legislature decided to convene again that December to reconsider the issue. They ultimately decided to put the parkway’s fate before the people. Under the state Constitution, only the Legislature can set law, but it can look to the public for advice. Since the state has no referendum mechanism, legislators used a clever workaround. In their special session, they approved funding for the parkway with two enactment dates – one in 1936, the other in 1941.

It was essentially a yes-no vote on the highway. If people picked 1936, the road was a go. If they chose 1941, lawmakers promised to repeal the funding.

On Town Meeting Day 1936, Vermonters finally got a chance to weigh in on the debate and crowded town halls to vote. They were far less divided than their representatives, defeating the parkway 42,318 to 30,897, or by a margin of 58 percent to 42.

Politicians and scholars have debated the meaning of the vote ever since. It was the victory of southern Vermonters, who feared tourists would zoom right past them, over northern Vermonters, who thought they’d snare that business. Or, others argued, it was the defeat of capitalists by conservationists; or native Vermont conservatism winning out over the big, federal government.

Whatever it signified, the public’s vote meant one thing for sure: the Green Mountain Parkway was dead.