Volkswagen had its beetle; Walt Disney, his mouse. But of all the animals that Vermont entrepreneur Ann Clark could have sent to market, she chose a little pig—and ended up with a baking-supplies empire.

The story begins around the holidays some 35 years ago. Clark, who graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in art, always had a knack for making things. She’d already been creating and selling toys and crafts from her family’s Rutland home when, late one night, as she was simultaneously painting ornaments and baking Christmas cookies, inspiration struck. As Clark recalled in an interview with the Rutland Herald, she looked at one of her most popular ornament designs, “and then I thought to myself, this pig would make a really cute cookie cutter.”

It did, and people noticed. Founded in 1989, Clark’s fledgling company would grow to become the nation’s largest cookie-cutter manufacturer, which today turns out more than 4 million cookie cutters a year—all made right in Rutland—with 700 to 800 individual designs in production at any given time.

While Clark, now 84, still comes into the factory almost every day, Ann Clark Ltd. has been overseen since 1998 by her son, Ben. Under his leadership as CEO, manufacturing has expanded to include related products such as food coloring, baking ingredients, and baking mixes (think: French crepes, Belgian waffles, gourmet scones).

On the cookie-cutter side, meanwhile, the company is continually trying out its hot-from-the-oven designs. Channeling Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, heart sunglasses were a big hit this past summer. There are new sugar skull shapes for fall’s Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), and this holiday season will see a centerpiece cookie-cutter set for creating pre-portioned cookie “pies.”

Among the top 20 longtime best-sellers, the spirit of Christmas abounds in gingerbread men, snowflakes, and a vintage truck with tree. Alas, there is no plump little pig on that list. But as it turns out, Ann Clark’s success today may be best represented by a surprisingly simple cookie cutter that’s outsold all the rest: the number “1.”

To learn more about or to buy Ann Clark products, go to annclark.com; you can also visit the Ann Clark store page on Amazon.

The post Vermont’s Ann Clark Cookie Cutters appeared first on New England.

Of all the possible locations for engagement photos—orchards, covered bridges, ocean beaches—the workplace usually doesn’t rank high on the list. Unless, that is, you can step outside your office into a wonderland of sunflowers.

As director of education and interpretation at Billings Farm & Museum, Christine Scales had exactly that opportunity in the form of the Sunflower House: a display of hundreds of red, orange, and gold blooms that’s said to be the largest of its kind in the nation. Launched in 2019, it’s become a summer sensation at the four-decade-old outdoor history museum in Woodstock, Vermont, attracting media coverage, flocks of visitors, and yes, professional photo sessions.

“It’s so joyful, it’s just impossible to take a bad picture in there,” says Scales, who had her own engagement portraits taken in the Sunflower House in 2020. “We’ve had people book it for maternity photos, family photos … and we even had two wedding proposals in the Sunflower House, both successful.”

Fittingly, this fairy-tale garden has a bit of magic in its origins. A children’s book featured in Billings’s preschool story-hour program, Eve Bunting’s The Sunflower House, had gotten the museum staff thinking about creating their own sunflower house—a simple eight-foot circle of flowers that could be a living play space for kids, maybe, like the one in the book. Then came a fateful meeting with Ben Pauly, director of property operations and design at the Woodstock Inn & Resort.

“We had gotten together with Ben to talk about a new garden shed we were putting in at Billings, and we happened to ask if he’d ever heard of a sunflower house before,” Scales recalls. “And he didn’t say anything at first—he just pulled out a folder full of pictures of sunflower houses and his whole plan for creating one. And on a much larger scale than what we were originally picturing.”

Pauly, it turned out, had already been mulling a showstopping new garden project at Billings Farm & Museum, which like the Woodstock Inn is owned and operated by the nonprofit Woodstock Foundation. “Some may have thought that a corn maze would be the better thing to do—to make a big impact, to bring people to Woodstock. It’s a classic Vermont fall attraction,” says Pauly. “But my feeling was: Nobody else has a sunflower house.”

Besides, he adds, a maze is all about finding your way out. “But a house is something you want to inhabit; you want to be a part of it and feel comfortable and experience everything around you.”

Working with the idea of creating “rooms” and “hallways” in a living structure, Pauly designed and planted the first Sunflower House for summer 2019. Set on a quarter acre and featuring about a dozen kinds of sunflowers, the result made a big impression. “It was this beautiful, amazing, magical thing,” Scales recalls. “When I saw it for the first time, I immediately thought, Yeah, people are going to want to come to see this. They’re going to come from all over to see this.”

As popular as it was the first year, the Sunflower House boomed the next, when the need for outdoor, socially distant activities saw people streaming to places like Billings. And the crowds were back in 2021 to experience an even bigger iteration of the Sunflower House that sprawled over nearly half an acre; that year marked a new record for museum attendance.

The 2024 Sunflower House, which is expected to peak in late August or early September, is laden with more than 50 varieties ranging in height from 12 inches to 14 feet and bearing names like Lemon Cutie, Just Crazy, and Starburst Panache. Rounding out the 20,000-square-foot installation by Pauly and Taylor Hiers, a fellow Woodstock Inn master gardener, are 50 “sunflower buddies”—zinnias, marigolds, etc.—to expand the color palette and extend the bloom time.

Like the sunflowers, the companion plants are all annuals. So after this year’s Sunflower House dies down, a completely new one will rise next year. It’s a structure that’s not meant to last, but it does serve a lasting purpose: to nourish the birds and bees, and to provide visitors with garden memories that will never fade. billingsfarm.org      

The post The Sunflower House at Billings Farm & Museum in Vermont appeared first on New England.

Some 1,700 miles from Vermont there stands a showroom in Dallas that’s a testament to modern artisan craftsmanship from the Green Mountain State. Like its sister showrooms in Las Vegas and High Point, North Carolina, it’s filled with the wares of Castleton-based luxury lighting manufacturer Hubbardton Forge. There are sconces that glitter, pendants that gleam, chandeliers whose lines dance and swoop.

But the most popular item on display here is a homely, unpolished hulk of black industrial metal, tucked into a corner by the entryway. It is a forge—it is the forge, the one used by George Chandler and Reed Hampton, two young UVM graduates, when they founded Hubbardton Forge in 1974 and began turning out handwrought candlesticks, fireplace accessories, and eventually lighting fixtures. And to current CEO Maria Mullen, it is priceless.

“We are not like everybody else. We don’t want to be like everybody else,” she says. “And the best way to do that is to remember our history and our founders—who we are and where we came from. We try to keep that history front and center all the time.”

Having arrived at the company in 2020 as chief operating officer, then stepping into the CEO spot the following year, Mullen is relatively new to the Hubbardton Forge tradition but not to the world of handcrafting. Her grandfather was an expert woodworker in New York City who was known for his custom cabinetry and furniture; both her architect father and her uncle worked with him. “I grew up around that, and I always loved the smell of woodworking and being down at the shop,” Mullen says. “Subconsciously, I guess, it somehow got under my skin.”

Her own career path veered at first toward fashion, including jobs at brands such as Versace and Bruno Magli. But it was after she signed on with Murray Feiss, a family-owned company famed for making decorative residential lighting, that she “kind of fell in love with the lighting industry. To me it seemed like it was still fashion, but for your home.” By the time Hubbardton Forge recruited her, Mullen had been leading her own lighting design company, Kalizma Home, for six years.

Today, Mullen and her senior team oversee some 250 designers, artisans, engineers, and staff at what is now one of the biggest and oldest commercial forges in the country. And while the founders, Chandler and Hampton, transitioned out of the company more than a decade ago, their spirit remains. “This was two guys in a barn with a vision, and they did it their way,” Mullen says. “They didn’t follow the conventions of the lighting industry at the time—they went more on feel, and art, and loving the product that they were putting out. And they absolutely always focused on quality.

“That all still resides here. We really have that feeling in our building of what we call ‘the pride of the forge.’”

Put into practice, that means everything at Hubbardton Forge’s 100,000-square-foot factory in Castleton is made to order and crafted by hand. All the work—from initial designs to shipping the finished product—happens right on-site.

Even in assembling the ingredients of its creations, the company sticks close to a “made in Vermont” ethos. Its lighting and home decor have incorporated, for instance, graceful handblown glass from Simon Pearce and Burlington’s AO Glass, Vermont wood and stone from Maple Landmark and Fair Haven’s House of Slate, and lighting technology from LEDdynamics in Randolph. Working with local partners like these not only makes for a smaller carbon footprint, but also gives Hubbardton Forge a big advantage in the design process, Mullen says.

“Collaborating is so much easier when you can go right down the road to meet with the slate manufacturer or the wood manufacturer and say, ‘No, this thickness would be better than this thickness,’ and ‘We need something more like this shape,’” Mullen says. “Because again, we’re not doing cookie-cutter things here. And sometimes just explaining what our crazy ideas are can be challenging.”

Those crazy ideas—say, a custom-ordered chandelier measuring a whopping nine feet in diameter—begin with Hubbardton Forge’s design team, who all come from different backgrounds, including engineering and even jewelry design. They then work shoulder to shoulder with the company’s artisans and engineers, welders and forgers and finishers, to bring the concept to life. “We’re not sending a drawing off to a faraway land and getting a prototype that we may or may not like,” Mullen says. “We’re all putting our two cents in, one way or another.”

These days, Hubbardton Forge’s designs can be spotted in such prestigious locations as Las Vegas’s MGM Grand and Luxor hotels; closer to home, more than 100 of its sconces, chandeliers, and pendants lend sparkle to Stratton Mountain Base Lodge. The company has also notched a number of accolades, most recently winning the lighting fixtures category at the international home-industry competition known as the ARTS Awards.

Yet as Mullen sees it, making this heritage Vermont company a household name isn’t what motivates those who work there (though a designer once joked to her, “I’m tired of us being a ‘nice surprise’ to people… I want them to know who we are!”). The goal instead is to create something that people will want to keep for a lifetime.

“If you buy something beautiful, it stays with you,” she says. “We want people to have that attraction, that feeling when they will look at our product that they can’t live without it. It’s not just plugging a hole; it’s not something you’ll trash at some point down the road. It’s going to become an heirloom.” hubbardtonforge.com  

Ready, Set, Glow

Handcrafted lighting that lets New England’s artisan tradition shine through.

1. modernmaine

Along with eye-catching geometric shapes and the quiet beauty of wood grain, Julie Morringello’s pendant lights are saturated with a sense of place. Trained in both industrial and furniture design, Morringello—who has been honored as a Society of Arts and Crafts artist of the year—crafts them all in her studio on Maine’s Deer Isle and sources the materials as close by as possible. No wonder her lights were chosen to warm the interiors of the Stonington Opera House and local roastery 44 North Coffee, where they glow with the unmistakable warmth of home. Stonington, ME; modernmaine.com

2. Janna Ugone & Co.

A graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, Ugone designs lighting that mixes lively artistic inspiration—birds and butterflies, native plants, maps, journal drawings—with heirloom-weight details like hand-modeled pewter finials and honed slate bases. Visitors are welcome to stop by Ugone’s studio, set in a historic mill building, to see her team of artisans at work, browse the showroom and outlet, and check out the Lamp Bar, filled with lampshades ready to give any old base that extra bit of soul. Easthampton, MA; jannaugoneandco.com

3. Providence Art Glass

The passion of two award-winning artists, Rebecca Zhukov and Terence Dubreuil, not only fires their exquisite lighting creations—colorful, fantastical hand-blown glass pendants and chandeliers—but also extends to the community at large. Last year they founded the 20,000-square-foot Blackstone River Glass Center, which houses their state-of-the-art glass studio along with providing a place for other artists and members of the public to learn and create in a variety of disciplines, and for the tradition of hand-making to live on. Cumberland, RI; providenceartglass.com

The post Luxury Lighting | Vermont’s Hubbardton Forge Shines Bright appeared first on New England.

Miranda Thomas has a voice made for a good chat. There’s a complexity to it, with vowels and inflections shaped by both her British parentage and her years spent living in Australia, England, Italy, and America. There’s a warmth, as well, that flows from her love of bringing things into the world, be they children or gardens or works of art. It’s a voice of someone you could imagine welcoming into your home.

Her pottery has a voice, too. From the blue and white of the Netherlands to the lustrous gold of the Middle East, it carries the accent of many lands; at the same time, its techniques speak of centuries of human culture. But to really hear what it has to say, Thomas believes, you need to touch it.

“Imagine you have a mug, and you’re putting your lips to it or your hands to it or just sort of resting it against your cheek,” she says. “And if it’s been made by hand, you can feel those very slight variances in the surface. It’s just as if you’re having a conversation with it. It’s another form of your senses being coaxed alive.”

Making things by hand—and putting them directly into the hands of others—is a calling that Thomas has long shared with her husband, the furniture maker Charlie Shackleton. After having met at an art and design school in England, the two crossed paths again in Vermont, where they worked for the famed Irish artisan Simon Pearce. Before long they were married and working for themselves, and today they preside over their joint workshops, ShackletonThomas, which has been headquartered in the same 19th-century mill building in Bridgewater for much of their company’s three-decade-plus history.

The couple’s mediums are different, but their designs are complementary—in the showroom, her quiet, elegant pottery sits alongside his classic wood furniture. And their point of view is a shared one.

“We both love putting life into an inanimate object,” Thomas says. “[Handcrafting] takes a particular sort of mixture of material, observation, skill, many things that culminate from your very hands, and it’s something the machine can’t do.

“There’s a famous saying, I’m pretty sure by Pascal: What is it that puts life into an inanimate object? For is that not what man is? And if you think about it, we’re the same as the rocks and the trees and everything around us, but there’s a little bit of magic that we instill [in the clay and the wood], and that’s what gives them life.”

Thomas first realized her affinity for pottery (which she affectionately calls “cooking with rocks”) when it was introduced at her high school in Australia. “It was the most surprising thing, at the age of 16, to look down and see a bowl just appearing underneath your hands,” she recalls. “I loved it immediately, like I loved surfing. So I just kept doing it.”

She honed her craft with a bachelor’s degree in ceramics as well as learning directly from master potters in England, notably Michael Cardew. Thomas’s distinctive style emerged early on: strongly decorative but not ornate, with an emphasis on universal symbols of nature, like fish and rabbits, trees and flowers, painted or carved onto the clay.

Thomas was already well into making pottery under her own name—which she had begun doing in 1984—when she found herself taking commissions from, of all places, the White House. In 1998, on a whim, she had sent President Bill Clinton a “rudimentary, really simple little pot” as a gift in appreciation for the country’s recent and notably long stretch of peace. What came back was a thank-you note … and then a request for 16 turquoise and gold pots to be given to Middle Eastern dignitaries … and then a request for a very large white porcelain bowl carved with a peace dove design, to be Clinton’s personal gift to Pope John Paul II.

(About the Pope’s bowl: Because of the tight deadline, Thomas actually made six of them simultaneously in hopes that just one would sit absolutely true, its glaze pristine and incandescent. And just one did. As for the rest, she says, “President Clinton heard about the bowls that didn’t come out perfectly and he wanted them anyway, because he felt he himself wasn’t perfect. And he gave some of those as gifts as well.”)

Thomas has had several other high-level commissions since then, including bowls for the United Nations to present to Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon, but much of what she makes is meant for everyday people to use in everyday life. And for Thomas, her lasting legacy isn’t about who buys her pottery, anyway. It’s about the next generation who are working alongside her.

“We have this incredible flow of people across our workshops here who want to learn to be either craftsmen or designer craftsmen, and we’ve created a home or a sanctuary for them for a while,” she says. “When you teach somebody skills, it’s like passing the torch. It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing. And human beings need those skills to be happy. So it’s the one thing I can do for the human race, I think. Working with people and working on those skills and sharing that language—it really places you on a long, long timeline.”    

Editor’s note: Like many homes and businesses across Vermont, the historic mill building in Bridgewater that houses ShackletonThomas was flooded by record rainfall as this issue was going to press. As repairs continue, the web store featuring Miranda Thomas’s pottery and Charlie Shackleton’s furniture remains open for orders, via shackletonthomas.com.

The post Open Studio: Vermont Potter Miranda Thomas appeared first on New England.

“Coastal hammocks like Hammonasset are terrific stopover habitat for migrating land birds,” says Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society. “It’s a big open area on a very highly developed coastline, so for any bird flying over, it stands out like a sore thumb.”

But that’s just part of the reason the nation’s third-smallest state is a major jumping-off point for birds trekking between their wintering and breeding grounds. Its 5,543 square miles encompass a rich mix of habitats, including river valleys that start leafing out sooner than inland waterways, drawing migrants with early-spring shelter and food.

Connecticut Audubon’s 21 wildlife sanctuaries reflect that variety, from the Coastal Center at Milford Point to the forests, meadows, and wetlands of the 850-acre Deer Pond Farm Sanctuary. But for eager springtime bird-watchers, it’s hard to beat the tiny Birdcraft Sanctuary in Fairfield: “It’s six acres surrounded by development, so in a sense it’s the only game in town for these migrating birds,” Comins says. “It concentrates them all into this one area, and sometimes you get amazing views of birds that you wouldn’t normally see.”

No matter where you are, you probably won’t have trouble finding these annual visitors, many of which are in their brighter breeding plumage and singing enthusiastically to mark territory and find mates. Spring migrants generally begin arriving in Connecticut in late April; their numbers peak in mid-May, when nearly 200 species are likely to be passing through the state.

Comins’s own favorite sign of spring, though, is a bona fide early bird: a type of plover called the killdeer, after its distinctive call. “They’re one of those species that are pressing the snowmelt line and trying to get as far north as possible. You can hear them as early as March, on those first warm evenings,” he says. “It always reminds me that spring is here, when I hear the killdeer flying around at night.” 

The Connecticut Audubon Society hosts its annual Migration Madness birdathon May 13-15. For details, or to learn about its many other birding programs, go to ctaudubon.org.

A sampling of spring flyers, curated with help from the pros at Connecticut Audubon:

Killdeer: Occasionally overwinters in southern New England but in general is considered an early harbinger of spring migration, with males closely following the melting snow line to find the best territory first. 

Tree Swallow: The spring return of this trim little songbird, which nests across New England, is a prelude to a bigger show later on: The autumn roosting of migrating tree swallows on the lower Connecticut River—where they gather in numbers up to half a million strong—is one of the true wonders of the bird-watching world.

American Robin: A year-round resident in parts of New England, but largely inconspicuous in winter. Come spring, robins’ numbers swell across the region and the air once again fills with their song.

White-Crowned Sparrow: Though sparrows aren’t often associated with spring migration, white-crowns fly though New England each year—reaching peak numbers in Connecticut, for one, around Mother’s Day—as they head for breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic.

Common Nighthawk: A species with one of the longest migration routes among North American birds; considered endangered in parts of New England. In mid-May, watch the skies for these migrants in late afternoon and listen for their buzzy meep calls.

Blackburnian Warbler: Typically a May arrival, this spectacularly colored bird often perches high in the treetops; to locate, listen for the Blackburnian’s distinctive high-pitched series of tsee notes ending with a very high trill.

Yellow-Rumped Warbler: One of the biggest joys of spring are the warblers. Yellow-rumps winter much farther north than most warblers and are among the first to show up in New England; can be super-abundant in peak migration.

Common Loon: Though known for nesting in northern New England, loons can be seen migrating over southern areas from late March to roughly mid-May. After spring rainstorms, it’s worth checking decent-size ponds for loon sightings, along with grebes and sea ducks.

The post Rite of Return | A Connecticut Migratory Bird Parade appeared first on New England.

But in his 22-year career with the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, Anthony Hennessy has come to see them more like companion plantings.

“The Common is an area where people can go and just be whoever they want to be. They can shout as loud as they want, wear outrageous clothes, protest, sing. A person can go there and reflect on who they are,” he says. “Then when you enter the Public Garden, there’s this feeling of tranquility, and everything else sort of disappears. And it really makes you think about what people can do, the amazing things that individuals can accomplish.”

The city’s horticultural superintendent since 2013, Hennessy leads the team that makes the Public Garden, along with about 40 other sites across Boston, a showcase of gardening accomplishment. The springtime display gets under way in March, as they begin planting pansies and other early perennials from the parks department’s 13 greenhouses, and it becomes downright lavish by May, when 30,000 bulbs burst into life—the vast majority of them being tulips in the Public Garden, where they have been planted each year since the 1840s. 

The tulip show is close to Hennessy’s heart not just because he’s a big backer of Boston traditions—which he admits he is—but also because of its message of hope. “You take this bulb, this plain little thing, like an onion, and bury it deep in the ground through the dead of winter,” he says. “And then when the signs of spring show up, and you see that first green and then a couple of weeks later, a beautiful flower… it’s like you know that everything’s going to be fine.”

Beyond the 24 manicured acres of the Public Garden, that kind of floral reassurance takes on all kinds of additional, equally marvelous forms when spring comes to Boston. The Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain is famed for its 400-plus lilacs, which send their perfume across its 281 scenic acres starting in April; meanwhile, the cherry trees along the Charles River Esplanade are pinking up. Over in Boston’s Back Bay, historic brownstones are framed by growing drifts of magnolia blossoms.

And this spring, like the one before it, is bound to have a little extra resonance for the city’s residents and visitors than in years past, Hennessy predicts.

“More people are outside, they’re out in these parks, they’re just being outside in general,” says Hennessy, who is often out working in the beds and receives the public’s feedback firsthand. “When a random stranger comes over to you and compliments you and says, ‘I love what you’re doing, you make my commute to work special’—I mean, that’s just the best thing.” 

For more on the Public Garden, go to boston.gov/parks/public-garden; for details on visiting the Arnold Arboretum, go to arboretum.harvard.edu.

The post Bloom Time | Spring Comes to the Boston Public Garden appeared first on New England.

If you were in the market for a printing press toward the end of the 19th century, your eye may have been caught by an ad from the Peerless Printing Press Company in Palmyra, New York. Headlined “That Smooth, Easy-Running ‘Peerless,’” it gets right to the point: Constructed substantially. Built to stand the test. High speed—no noise—no jar—is easily operated. Remember we have been building these machines for over 30 years, and each year have improved its mechanism.

Straightforward and puffery-free, it’s the sort of sales pitch that would have appealed to the late Vrest Orton, founder of the Vermont Country Store, who learned the importance of less-is-more salesmanship from none other than Leon Leonwood Bean. In a 1979 radio interview, Vrest recalled the legendary Maine retailer telling him early on, “When you write something in your catalog, don’t say the merchandise is better than it is. It’s much better for the customer who gets the merchandise to say it’s better than you said it was.”

Vrest Orton was born in 1897, so he probably never saw the Peerless ad. And by the time he embarked on his retail career in the 1940s, a Peerless press was a bona fide antique. But it’s fitting that this machine, its virtues plainly extolled, would churn out the first editions of Vrest’s catalog—a publication whose success selling products that were, above all else, useful would help turn the Vermont Country Store into the multimillion-dollar family company it is today, 75 years onward.

—

A visit to the Vermont Country Store headquarters in Manchester, Vermont, feels a little like stepping into a local historical society, albeit a particularly well-funded one. The lobby walls are filled with museum-quality panels of vintage photos and Orton family lore. In an alcove next to the company archives is a display of technological artifacts ranging from Vrest’s 1930s Smith & Corona to his son Lyman’s 15-pound “laptop,” a 1989 Compaq. And at the foot of the main staircase sits the Peerless press, several hundred pounds of weathered cast iron, next to its similarly hulking paper cutter.

Now 80, Lyman Orton is the patriarch of the company’s family storekeepers, a group rounded out by sons Cabot, Gardner, and Eliot. Lyman was only 4 when his father, spurred by memories of the country store run by his own father and grandfather in North Calais, Vermont, began laying the groundwork for the Vermont Country Store with his wife, Mildred, in 1945. In Weston, where the family lived, there was a suitable building (by coincidence, a virtual twin of the North Calais store), but because of war shortages, merchandise for stocking the shelves was hard to come by. So they began with mail-order.

“My father had started a print shop called the Countryman Press in 1935, so he already had the printing presses, and he knew how to write and put out a catalog,” Lyman says. “So he gets some local products together, calls them ‘36 items you can buy now,’ and prints a little catalog to send to mainly people on the family Christmas card list.”

Enlivened by Vrest’s conversational descriptions (The flavor is the best I have ever tasted, and I am a crabby fellow who insists on something pretty special in popcorn), the medley of local crafts, rurally themed books, and whole-grain foodstuffs drew plenty of orders. “But my parents also got letters from people saying, ‘We’re coming up next summer and we want to see the store,’” Lyman says, and laughs. “There was no store yet!”

The Ortons had rectified that by 1946, though, when they opened the Vermont Country Store in the heart of Weston. Lyman remembers learning how to sweep the wooden floor with sawdust and kerosene, and how to open a barrel of pickles; at 6, he was already stamping endorsements on mail-order checks.

As a kid he even helped with the catalog, hand-feeding the paper into the press alongside his father in the garage print shop. “Even to this day, when I pick up a ream of paper for the copy machine, I automatically flex it to break the pages apart, like this.” Lyman gives a vigorous twist to an invisible slab of paper, recalling the way his father would break reams of newsprint.

By the 1950s, though, the Vermont Country Store catalog had grown in size and circulation to the point that the Peerless was retired in favor of newer technology. Along with its paper cutter, the press was offloaded to a professor in neighboring South Londonderry, and it would not be seen by the Orton family again for more than half a century.

—

Lyman Orton is fond of saying that the Vermont Country Store today is actually three stores: online, wooden, and paper. Yet for all the convenience of the website and the yesteryear coziness of the physical shops in Weston and Rockingham, the catalog endures by offering both those lures at once. It’s a trip back in time—through seersucker and oilcloth, taffy and Teaberry gum, toiletries and remedies—that can be taken from a favorite armchair, unhurried.

“People will even bring their catalogs into the store, with pages folded down on what they like,” Lyman says. “They tell us, ‘My gosh, I’ve been getting the catalog for 20 years!’”

In millions of households, the Vermont Country Store catalog is an old friend—which means the Ortons, who frequently appear in its pages, are too. “Whenever I’m traveling and someone asks what I do, when I say I own the Vermont Country Store it’s amazing how people will take me into their closest confidence,” Lyman says. “They feel like they know me, which is terrific.”

That same feeling of goodwill toward Vermont’s famous family of storekeepers, in fact, may have led to the return of the prodigal Peerless. Or it could have been plain old small-town connections. Lyman isn’t sure. But he does know that about 15 years ago, someone called to say that Vrest’s old printing equipment was down in his cellar, and the Ortons were welcome to it.

Turns out, the Peerless hadn’t ever moved from the professor’s house in South Londonderry. It had only waited to be rediscovered. And after being scrubbed of decades of grime and rust, the machine that once launched a tiny mail-order business from a garage took its place of honor at the Vermont Country Store’s headquarters—in its own way, a testament to the power of bringing back things remembered.

To read more of Yankee’s recent conversation with Lyman Orton about life behind the scenes at the Vermont Country Store, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, go to newengland.com/lyman-orton.

The post Meet the Press | Up Close appeared first on New England.

Yankee recently caught up with Lyman Orton at The Vermont Country Store’s headquarters for a story in the September/October issue [“Up Close”]. Here’s a bit more of what we talked about with this native Vermonter, businessman, and philanthropist (and proud grandfather), who calls himself a storekeeper at heart.

The post Meet the Storekeeper: Q&A with Lyman Orton appeared first on New England.

Sailors love to argue, so it’s no surprise they can’t agree on what cats have to do with catboats. Some say there’s a feline agility in how these broad-beamed, single-masted sailboats can dart in and out of shallow coastal waters; others claim that when first used by New England fishermen in the mid-19th century, the boats were magnets for hungry local cats.

Bill Womack isn’t ready to settle that argument. But when it comes to the classic Cape Cod catboat known as the Beetle Cat, he does see a definite “nine lives” connection. “There are so many times in the past 100 years where if certain people hadn’t stepped in or had a real love for this boat,” he says, “the Beetle Cat wouldn’t be here today.”

As the current owner of Beetle Inc. in Wareham, Massachusetts, which still builds the little wooden sailboat that John Beetle of New Bedford first launched in 1921, Womack is one of those people. Another is Leo J. Telesmanick, who started as a 15-year-old apprentice in the original Beetle family shop and went on to oversee the construction of virtually every Beetle Cat made before he passed away in 2001.

Womack’s shop still uses the mold that Telesmanick built in 1946, among other vintage tools and equipment. And why not? Little about the 12-foot, 4-inch Beetle Cat has changed in a century’s time: It’s entirely made from wood, and it’s entirely built by hand.

Also unchanged is the Beetle Cat’s appeal. One of the oldest wooden boat designs actively raced today, it’s nimble enough to have inspired Beetle Cat fleets up and down the New England coast—including at the Chatham Yacht Club, which this summer hosts the annual Leo J. Telesmanick Beetle Cat Championship Regatta (July 31–August 1). But it’s also roomy, sturdy, and easy to sail, making it a favorite for families. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis bought one for her kids; so did author Nathaniel Philbrick.

Families, in fact, are a big part of what may ultimately keep the Beetle Cat from using up that fabled ninth life. There’s a devotion to this boat that builds from generation to generation, says Womack, whose shop stores and refurbishes many, many more old Beetle Cats than it makes new ones. 

“The kids start out in it, then they get grown and put their kids in it, who put their kids in it,” he says. “And Granny can still sail it with the grandkids. In the end, it’s like a member of the family.”

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Two years ago, a 60-story tablet of glass known as the Millennium Tower officially took its place in the Boston landscape. Topped by a penthouse whose price tag set a city record ($37.5 million), it casts a shadow over many of its Downtown Crossing neighbors—including, right at the base of this luxury tower, the former home of some of the best bargains in New England.

The original Filene’s Basement had operated for nearly a century beneath the Filene’s department store at Washington and Summer streets. Known as the “Tunnel Bargain Basement” when it opened in 1909, the store immediately got people’s attention with its sales model: The merchandise, a mix of discontinued designer lines and overstocks, was automatically marked down the longer it went unsold, with anything remaining after 30 days donated to charity.

This meant that patience, luck, and even a little sneakiness (i.e., trying to hide a great piece of clothing from other shoppers until the next markdown) were key to scoring brag-worthy deals in the Basement. And when the annual bridal gown sale, aka the “Running of the Brides,” began in 1947, the ability to throw an elbow didn’t hurt either.

By 1990, the Basement was Boston’s second most popular tourist attraction, drawing up to 20,000 people a day. Visiting celebrities, local politicians, working-class families—they all dug through the motley bins and racks under dingy fluorescent lights, shoulder to shoulder, right up until the store closed September 3, 2007, for a redevelopment project.

In summing up the Basement’s legacy, it’s hard to top the observation of veteran Globe reporter Joseph Dinneen, writing of the store in its heyday, “The Basement is democratic. The first families of Boston mingle with the last families off the boat, and it is the same way with the merchandise.… There is no caste system of any kind in the Basement—no special distinction or special privilege. Big names among people and in merchandise come and go; but the Basement goes its merry way.” 

SEE MORE: Confessions of a Marsha Jordan Girl Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins | Recipe & History

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At mile 19 of the Boston Marathon there stands a statue depicting the great Johnny A. Kelley, who started in the race a record 61 times and won it twice. He’s also known for the 1936 duel that inspired the nickname “Heartbreak Hill” for the marathon’s grueling final climb—a duel he lost just a mile from where his statue now stands, and to a runner who is lesser known yet whose achievements are just as worthy of immortalizing.

A Narragansett Indian born in 1913 in Westerly, Rhode Island, Ellison Brown grew up in a large family that struggled to make ends meet. Though his athleticism and love of the outdoors earned him the nickname “Tarzan” (which would follow him throughout his adult life), members of his tribe also knew him by his Narragansett name, Deerfoot.

Brown left school around the seventh grade, by which time he’d already come to the attention of Tippy Salimeno, a local running trainer. With Salimeno’s encouragement, Brown started running—and winning—distance races. He also began capturing the public’s imagination: At the 1935 Boston Marathon, he ran in an outfit made from his mother’s dress; on his feet were beat-up sneakers that he shucked off during the race, running the last miles barefoot to finish in 13th place.

At the 1936 Boston Marathon, Brown, now 22, set such a blistering pace that the press vehicles initially lost track of him. He was so fast, in fact, that when Kelley caught him halfway up the last hill, it seemed inevitable that Brown would fade. Then Kelley tapped Brown on the shoulder (“as much to say, ‘Hey, boy, move over,” Kelley recalled with regret, decades later), and the younger man took off like a rabbit, leaving Kelley to his “heartbreak hill.”

Brown followed that marathon victory with another in 1939, in which he cruised across the finish line at 2:28:51, a new American record, nearly a quarter mile ahead of his closest competitor. In 1940 he ran the Salisbury Beach Marathon in 2:27:30—that year’s world’s fastest time.

Brown retired from running not long afterward, and he passed away in 1975 without much by way of fame or fortune. But his inspiration lives on. “[He] proved anyone was capable of winning,” said Mikki Wosencroft, a Narragansett who ran the 2016 Boston Marathon in Brown’s honor. “It wasn’t just if you had great training or the right equipment and the right shoes … if you had the skill and the gift, you could win.” 

The post King of the Hill | Timeless New England appeared first on New England.

One hundred years ago on January 15, the cadets aboard the USS Nantucket broke off their training to rush to the aid of drowning victims. But instead of steaming from their Boston Harbor berth to a disaster at sea, the 116 sailors rushed down the gangplank and into the streets of Boston’s North End, which had just been devastated by a tidal wave the likes of which had never been seen before—namely, 2.3 million gallons of molasses.

The source of the gooey tsunami was a five-story steel tank owned by Purity Distilling, which used molasses to make rum as well as alcohol for munitions. The company had built the tank a few years earlier on a Commercial Street lot (today the site of Langone Park) and, in a grim foreshadowing, painted it brown to disguise the molasses leaks that plagued the structure almost from the start.

When the tank ruptured at about 12:40 p.m. that fateful Wednesday in 1919, molasses spewed out in a 25-foot-high wave that traveled up to 35 mph and inundated the neighborhood. It knocked a fire station off its foundations and buckled the steel girders beneath elevated railroad tracks—“as if by the smash of a giant’s fist,” wrote the Boston Post. All told, 21 people were killed and 150 were injured, while property damage reached an estimated $100 million in today’s dollars.

Decades later, new chapters in this bizarre tragedy are still being written. In 2004, Massachusetts historian Stephen Puleo published a best-selling account called Dark Tide, which mined fresh details from court papers that had been buried in archives for 85 years. A 2014 engineering investigation into why the tank failed found that its walls were far too thin and made from a steel susceptible to fracture (the same type used on the Titanic, it turns out). Two years later, Harvard researchers delved into fluid dynamics to show why the wave of molasses had been so deadly. And just last May, the historical musical Molasses in January premiered off-Broadway—a testament to the Great Molasses Flood’s power to grip people’s imaginations, even a century on. —Jenn Johnson

Dark Tide author Stephen Puleo will give a talk at the Boston Public Library on 1/15, the centennial of the flood. For details, go to bpl.org.

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