I spent a fun and interesting couple of hours last week with alumna Elise Guyette, a Vermont historian and author. Elise’s most recent work is Discovering Black Vermont: African American Farmers in Hinesburgh, 1790-1890, published by University Press of New England. In the introduction to the book, Elise writes that when she would tell someone she was writing a book about Vermont history with a focus on the African American experience, an inevitable response was “That’ll be short!”
When UPNE sent a review copy of Elise’s book to our office, I was interested to dip into it and find exactly where this community lived. On a purely geographic level, I was familiar from bike rides with some of the dirt roads that cross over the hills that divide Hinesburg and Huntington. For an article that will appear online in UVM Today later this summer and in the print VQ in the fall, I asked Elise if she could give me a tour of the area along Lincoln Hill road where Shubael and Violet Clark were the first black settlers to clear the wilderness and begin what would grow into a community of at least eight African American farming families living on the hill.
Elise, who is married to longtime UVM education professor David Shiman, is very smart and funny and talkative, the sort of person you feel immediately comfortable around. I picked her up at her home in South Burlington for the drive out to Hinseburg. As we made the turn up onto Lincoln Hill Road, she looked out of the car into the woods and speculated that the Peters family cemetery must be out there somewhere. Not long after we crested the hill and started heading down toward Huntington, she told me where to pull over and park to see where the Clarks were buried. I never would have found it on my own. Some of the tombstones look like, well, just stones. Others that were more finished are broken shards, victims of a spate of vandalism that hit what locals knew as the “old negro burying ground” in the 1950s. Down the road, other remnants of the family remain — the likely site of the cellar hole for the original Clark homestead, the original bones of a nineteenth century house still distinguishable beneath years of architectural alterations and renovations. While the traces of the families remain on the hill, Elise found most of her story in the old records of town clerks offices in Huntington and Hinesburg, relying on a wide range of documents — tax and voting records, store ledgers, estate sales — to piece together a picture of these people’s lives.
No, Discovering Black Vermont actually is not a short book. It’s an eye-opening one, certain to recast the deeply entrenched sense most have of our state’s heritage.
