By STEVEN JUPITER
GOSHEN—One of the smallest towns in the entire state of Vermont—with a population of less than 200—Goshen nevertheless has big aspirations for its new Historical Society.
Pressed up on the slopes of the Green Mountains, Goshen has remained remote enough from any of the larger towns around it to maintain its resolutely rural feel. There are few businesses in town—the most notable being the Blueberry Hill Inn and Camp Thorpe—and no stores to speak of. But for folks like Madine Reed (née Brown), who was born there in 1948, Goshen has a history worth preserving.
“Half the people in the cemeteries are my relatives,” Reed said on a recent morning. Reed isn’t just interested in the history of the place; in many ways, she is the history of it. She’s spent her whole life in the town and her family’s roots there go back to before the Civil War.
“I’ve always thought that we should have [a historical society],” she said. Reed began batting the idea around seriously at least a dozen years ago, but it didn’t really get off the ground until a discussion at Town Meeting in 2021 led to formal organization of the Society in spring of 2022. It is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit with the stated mission “to research, document, preserve, and reveal the rich history of Goshen and its people.” Ms. Reed is the Society’s current President.
And though neighbors in larger towns may often see Goshen simply as a nice place to hike or a place to pass through on the way to somewhere else, it has a more complex history than might be apparent at first glance.
Isolated by its location, Goshen was founded a bit later than many of the surrounding towns, with the final boundaries of what is now Goshen set in place only in the 1840s. The earliest settlers were farmers, though the physical remove and tough soil made it rough going. Merino sheep, prized for their wool, were one of the primary sources of income. Logging was also a crucial industry—there were half a dozen sawmills scattered throughout the village. It was hard but a community was built and
Ms. Reed’s family were among the earliest to arrive in town and when she was a child in the 1940s and 50s, children still attended one-room schoolhouses, with only 15 or so kids
“All the children knew each other,” she recalled. “We spent all day together at school.” But when Otter Valley opened in 1961, the Goshen kids found themselves lost among the children from Brandon and Pittsford, losing that connection with each other that the intimacy of a one-room school provided.
Since then, Ms. Reed has noticed less familiarity among the residents of Goshen. What had been a close-knit farming community became by the mid-1900s a summer colony. Even today, new arrivals often come seeking out privacy and solitude rather than community.
But Ms. Reed hopes to rebuild a sense of Goshen as a community through the formation of the Historical Society. There are currently 20 or so members. Among the founding members were Thomasina Magoon, Galina Chernaya (current VP), Marci Hayes (current Secretary), and Barbara & Ken Brown (Barbara is the current Treasurer).
The group has already been quite active. An exhibit on Goshen in the Civil War was very well received last year, as was an exhibit this past spring on Goshen in WWII at the Brandon American Legion. That exhibit brought participants from surrounding towns and even had the Otter Valley Jazz Band playing music from the WWII era.
An Open House is planned for Saturday, November 11 from 2 pm to 4 pm at the Goshen Town Hall. The Society is working on raising funds through the sale of calendars and T-shirts with the Society’s logo (which is the Civil War monument commemorating Goshen’s soldiers that stands in front of Town Hall).
Anyone with an interest in Goshen history is welcome to attend the Open House. You can also visit the organization’s Facebook page or website–goshenhistoricalsociety.org–to find out more about the Society’s activities and membership. The Society is especially eager to hear from people with old photographs of the town or other materials relating to its history.
