Join us at 6 pm on Thursday, November 15th for a Roundtable Discussion, as Brattleboro Words Project Director Lisa Weinmann discusses ways in which the greater Brattleboro community can participate in helping the project to discover new aspects of Brattleboro’s past.
PUTNEY, VT—October 4, 2018—A gathering of current and past Putney Craft Tour members will celebrate the tour’s fortieth year on October 24th at 7pm at the Putney Public Library. Along with friends and neighbors, stories and memorabilia from the fascinating early years of the tour to the present will be shared.
I thought it might be fun to tell you about a project (in-progress!) I’m working on with the Brattleboro Historical Society. It’s an exhibit all about Brattleboro that will be on display at the Vermont Historical Society in Montpelier, from August to January.
BHS hired me on to do exhibit design and project manage, two things I enjoy doing. I also love Brattleboro history.
One of the popular features of iBrattleboro is the old stories featured in Today in History. For the most part, these are taken from the Vermont Phoenix, a Brattleboro newspaper that thrived in the late 1800’s.
On the old site, we loaded them all into a sidebar. This time around we’ve kept a sample of them on the homepage, but given them their own section of the site.
You can get to the page by clicking on the Browse menu, then Today in History.
This Week in Brattleboro History by Joe Rivers and BAMS, et. al., Friday, April 1, 2016, “The Trophies”
The Armory and Gibson Aiken Center
Why does Brattleboro have Representative Town Meeting? Why not a regular, open Town Meeting like the rest of Vermont? These questions led me on a search through old newspapers and town records to look at Brattleboro’s town meetings in the 1950’s to see if there was some obvious answer. It turns out, there was no single reason that led to the “representative form of government” in Brattleboro. There were many factors, personalities, and coincidences unique to Brattleboro that contributed to its adoption.
Arguments made in favor of representative town meeting were sometimes specific to Brattleboro, such as outgrowing the public meeting hall. Other times they were more lofty, arguing that representative government would be more fair and better able to deal with complex issues, while giving voters a greater say in how the town operates.
