Reasons abound why the ancient highway between Bennington and Manchester is called Historic 7A.
Officially, the designation of "Ethan Allen Highway" was pronounced by the Legislature to honor one of Vermont's founding heroes. It could well have been called "The Allen Brothers Highway" because Ethan was only one (the oldest and most prominent) of brothers who used this route from their home in Salisbury, Conn., to Vermont, starting in the late 1760s. There were also brothers Heman, Zimri, and Ira, each of whom has a claim to fame.
In addition to the Allen brothers, their ruffian compatriots known as the Green Mountain Boys roamed this highway when it was barely more than a tree-shaded footpath in newly settled territory. They used it to help create the independent Vermont Republic, and they used it to enrich their real-estate holdings, notably those on the Onion River, now called the Winooski.
In the 1770s, all up and down what is now the New York state line, these Green Mountain vigilantes physically harassed and mentally outfoxed agents from Albany, capital of the hated colonial province of New York. The agents were chiefly sheriffs who sought to exercise jurisdiction, and surveyors who tried to measure out the land these patriots had already purchased.
At the root of the problem, aside from obvious real-estate concerns, was a sharp difference in an underlying social and economic system. On the one side of this dispute was the New England arrangement of of small, self-sufficient farmers who held to title to their own land within self-governing townships. On the other, New York's patroon structure, dominated by large, wealthy landowners for whom tenant farmers worked.
"Historic 7A" also lies in the midst of a place once called Princetown, a town New York attempted to patent in 1765 along the course of the Batten Kill in territory we recognize today as Dorset, Manchester, Sunderland, and Arlington. New York's jurisdiction didn't take hold, and Princetown today is merely a historical footnote.
Did Historic 7A play a role in the Battle of Bennington, Aug. 16, 1777? No one can be certain precisely where troops marched relative to today's highways. It is well agreed that Seth Warner's regiment, coming down from Manchester, saved the day and assured victory. A granite marker stands in Peru on the site where Gen. Stark's New Hampshire militia units camped on their way to the battle. It can be reasonably assumed that they all marched, at least the first part of the way on what we know as 7A to reach this Revolutionary War battle site in Walloomsac, N.Y.
The old highway between Bennington and Manchester was at the very fulcrum of forces that led to the Republic of Vermont (1777-91). Bennington was the first town chartered by Benning Wentworth as provincial governor of New Hampshire. Boldly, he did that in 1749, without any authority, and named the town for himself. (It was the maiden name of his mother, Mary Benning.)
The town's settlement, in 1761, awaited the end of the French and Indian Wars. And in that year, Wentworth continued to ride roughshod over the expressed opposition of New York as he chartered many other towns in this region, then known as the Hampshire Grants. These new towns included, along 7A, Shaftsbury, Glastenbury, Arlington, Sunderland, Manchester, and Dorset.
During the Vermont Republic, and afterwards, the Legislature met in different places, including Manchester, Arlington, and, repeatedly, Bennington. Thus it is technically correct to refer to any of these towns as having been briefly the capital of Vermont. The first official Statehouse was built in Montpelier in 1808.
When the new highway between Bennington and Manchester was opened to traffic in the 1970s, it was given the designation "Route 7." Locally, the new road seems to have kept its nickname of "Super 7" to help distinguish it from the older Route 7, which became officially Historic 7A.
Historic 7A is also important for its geology, and therefore historic in the macro sense. The great spine of Green Mountains rises up to its east, with the Taconics somewhat more irregularly displayed along the west. This "Valley of Vermont," which runs from Brandon down to the Berkshires, is most dramatically compressed in Bennington County. It is most notably seen along Route 7 in northern Dorset, where "the valley" is only a few hundred yards across.
Several well-known Americans have lived along Historic 7A. During the 1930s the poet Robert Frost resided in a stone Gothic-revival house in Shaftsbury; his gravestone is located in the cemetery at Old Bennington. Illustrator Norman Rockwell was inspired to create his most memorable Saturday Evening Post covers while living in Arlington between 1939 and 1954. Novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher, an early arbiter for the Book-of-the-Month Club, resided in Arlington until her death in 1957. Robert Todd Lincoln, prominent diplomat and businessman in his own right (in addition to being the son of a famous father), in 1906 built his Hildene near a scenic Manchester promontory that features a spectacular view of both Mt. Equinox, highest of the Taconics, and the vast carpeted expanse of the Green Mountains.
Vermont's longest-serving (and first) governor, Thomas Chittenden, and the runner-up for that distinction, Jonas Galusha, lived in Arlington and Shaftsbury, respectively.
A once-vital transportation course that closely parallels Historic 7A is seen in the trackage of the old Rutland Railway, built in the 1850s. Railroads were of immense importance to Vermont in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, largely because of the state's location as crossroads for north-south New York-Montreal and east-west Boston-Chicago rail traffic, both passenger and freight.
"The Rutland" still traverses Bennington County, but its track bed is in need of such extensive repairs that a 10-mph speed limit restricts the line to local freight use. Passenger traffic here was mostly phased out by 1950, a century after it began.
Another parallel route that attracts heavy seasonal traffic is the Long Trail. This 265-mile "footpath in the wilderness," created in the 1920s, follows the Green Mountains from the Massachusetts line to Canada, and offers shelter along the way. Between North Adams, Mass., and Sherburne Pass, near Killington, the Long Trail coexists with the Appalachian Trail, which branches off to take hikers east across New Hampshire toward its terminus at Mt. Katahdin, Maine.
The serenity found along both sides of Historic 7A is "home" to thousands of Vermonters. In addition, its charms have attracted hundreds of artists, writers, musicians and other creative residents, prominent and otherwise, as well as generations of business entrepreneurs both active and in retirement.
Tyler Resch is the editor-author of The Shires of Bennington, a countywide pictorial history, and ten other books of regional heritage. He is co-publisher of Beech Seal Press.
Take me back to stories!
Take me back to This Is Vermont!