The fountain was a gift to the people of St Albans. It took awhile to come about after the war because of the devastation the war caused to the area:
Most Vermont towns have a monument in memory of the soldiers who participated in the Civil War. Decades after the war, the upland hillsides of the state were littered with the cellar holes of long-gone farmhouses from farms that had been abandoned because all the family's sons had been killed in the Civil War.
It was a tribute for the sacrifices made in the War and sometimes whole months pass when I don't wonder what the country would be like if the War Between the States had not happened. Every time I go to Maine I look at the endless stone/rock walls lining the roads that outline a patch of dense forest and think that it was land that went back to nature after a century or two of backbreaking effort to make it a farm and that it likely went to ruin as a result of the Civil War. One way or another, the young men of Maine did not come back to the fields and fisheries, and Maine slipped slowly behind even as the Reconstruction raged throughout the South.
If you do go to or pass through St Albans, keep in mind that they roll up the sidewalks promptly at 1700 and not a second later. In the summer that means another 4 to 5 hours of daylight without a damned thing to do there except read a book. You'd have to bring your own.
6 comments:
Over in North Carolina there's some land that once was a farm where some of my ancestors lived. Someone lives there now, but it isn't us, because the damnable Yankees burned them out. They had to seek a new life in Tennessee, and did--for about 80 years. Then the Yankee government ran them out again, to build Land Between the Lakes.
You might understand why we're not too fond of the government.
--Tennessee Budd
Not enough Yankees died
Almost nobody alive today has any idea how much the Civil War cost us and set us back. I think what they teach in school, if anything, was that it was a war fought purely over slavery when that was just about the last reason that war came about. In another 50 years or so only a handful of Southerners will have any clear memory of the cost and the descendants of those who fought the war will number about 10% of America's occupants.
Back in the time of savage war the only real thing that mattered was industrial might and there was nothing at all like that anywhere in the South. They were going to lose no matter how many they killed. The only way they could have won was if they had gotten the major European Powers to enter the war on their side and that just wasn't going to happen because things like that don't "just ever happen." They can be made to happen but it takes years of effort ahead of time. You remember why Ben Franklin and those other guys were living in Paris?
Quite true. The South just didn't have the industrial might necessary to win. Lincoln's 'Emancipation Proclamation' framed the war as being over slavery, at least enough to sway the people of England and France, and any chance of recognition, let alone assistance, was gone.
Charles Dickens, among others, recognized from the start that it was a war over money and political hegemony.
--Tennessee Budd
Thats what you get when you invade someone's homeland. Dead sons.
Post a Comment