Vermont: A Study of Independence

by Rowland Evans Robinson

Farmers, who in the years before the war could only bring the year around by the strictest economy, suddenly became rich men, as farmers count wealth, by the doubled or trebled value of their land, and the same increase of price of all its products, and fell into ways of extravagance that left them poorer than before, when prices went down, and withal more discontented with their lot. Men bought land at the prevailing extravagant prices, and a few years later found themselves stranded, by the subsiding tidal wave, on the barren shores of hopeless debt, and many such became ready recruits for the insane army of Greenbackers.

The extravagance of their employers infected the wage-earners, and led them to the same silly emulation of display beyond their means, rather than to the founding of comfortable homes,—the ambition for something not quite attainable, which brings inevitable unrest and discontent.

Sheep husbandry, the old and fostered industry of the State, with which it was so long identified, deserves more than a passing mention. As has been said in a former chapter, early in the century Vermont flocks were greatly improved by the introduction of the Spanish merinos. During 1809 and 1810, William Jarvis, our consul at Lisbon, obtained about 4,000 merinos from the confiscated flocks of the Spanish nobles, and imported them to this country. The flocks of pure blood bred on Mr. Jarvis's beautiful estate at Weathersfield "Bow," lying on the western bank of the Connecticut, and half inclosed by the river, were not excelled by any in this country. From the Jarvis importation, and from a small flock of the Infantado family imported about the same time by Colonel Humphreys, our minister to Spain, the most valued merinos are descended.

From various causes the value of sheep and wool has exhibited remarkable fluctuations. During the years 1809 and 1810, half-blood merino wool sold for seventy-five cents a pound, and full blood for two dollars, and during the war with England rose to the enormous price of two dollars and a half a pound; full-blood rams sold for sums as great as the price of thoroughbred stallions, even ram lambs bringing a thousand dollars each: but such a sudden downfall followed the peace that, before the end of 1815, full-blooded sheep sold for one dollar each.

During the next ten years the price of wool continued so low that nearly all the flocks of merinos were broken up, or deteriorated through careless breeding. At that time an increase in the duties on fine wool revived the prostrate industry, but unhappily led to the general introduction of the Saxon merinos, a strain bearing finer but lighter fleeces, and far less hardy than their Spanish cousins. The cross of the puny Saxon with these worked serious injury to the flocks, but was continued for twenty years, and then abandoned so completely that all traces of the breed have disappeared. The Spanish sheep again became the favorites, or rather their American descendants, for these, through careful breeding by a few far-sighted shepherds, now surpassed in size, form, and weight of fleece their long neglected European contemporaries, if not their progenitors from whom in their best days the importations had been drawn.

Sheep-husbandry became the leading industry of Vermont, so generally entered upon that even the dairyman's acres were shared by some number of sheep, till every hillside pasture and broad level of the great valleys, rank with clover and herdsgrass, was cropped by its half hundred or hundreds of these unconscious inheritors of mixed or unadulterated blue blood of the royal Spanish flocks.

Along all thoroughfares, from the Massachusetts border to the Canadian frontier, the traveler, as he journeyed by stage or in his own conveyance, saw flocks dotting the close-cropped pastures with white or umber flecks, or huddled in the comfort of the barnyard, and the quavering bleat of the sheep was continually in his ears; nor was the familiar sound left quite behind as he journeyed along the lonely woodland roads, for even there he was like to hear it, and, chiming with the thrush's song, the intermittent jangle of the tell-tale bell that marked the whereabouts of the midwood settler's half-wild flock.

The "merino fever" again raged, and fabulous prices were paid for full-bloods, while unscrupulous jockeys "stubble sheared" and umbered sheep of doubtful pedigree into a simulation of desired qualities that fooled many an unsuspecting purchaser. Breeders and growers went to the opposite extreme from that which had been reached during the Saxon craze, and now sacrificed everything to weight of fleece, and Vermont wool fell into ill-repute. Prices went down again, and again the descendants of the Paulars and Infantados went to the shambles at prices as low as were paid for plebeian natives.

The wool-growing industry of the East now began to find a most formidable rival in the West, the Southwest, and Australia, in whose milder climates and boundless ranges flocks can be kept at a cost far below that entailed by the long and rigorous winters of New England, and in numbers that her narrow pastures would scarcely hold. At the same time lighter duties increased the importation of foreign wools, so there was nothing apparently for Vermont shepherds to do but to give up the unequal contest, and most of them cast away their crooks and turned dairymen.

But gifted with a wise foresight, a few owners of fine flocks kept and bred them as carefully as ever, through all discouragements, and in time reaped their reward, for it presently became evident that the flocks of milder climates soon deteriorate, and frequent infusions of Eastern blood are necessary to obtain the desired weight of fleece, so that sheep-breeding is still a prosperous industry, though, as has been stated, wool-growing has become insignificant.