Names lost in Vermont, Part 38: Liberty, Lamorder, and Forsha 

Returning to previous strolls through St. Mary’s Cemetery in Brandon brings me to three photos of gravestones whose stories needed to be retrieved. In all three instances, the subjects’ first and last names had changed from records of their baptisms or marriages in Québec.

Names lost in Vermont, Part 36: Wideawake, Morris, Brooks, and Smart

Over twenty-five years ago, after reading one of Christian Wideawake’s by-lines from the Rutland Herald, I commented to George Valley, “I wonder if Wideawake is a Native American surname?” George, raised in a Francophone family, did not speak English until he went to school. He said, “I bet it was Leveillé.”

The Marsh House on Pearl Street: Mansion of Prominent Brandon Abolitionist

In 1976, when the Brandon Village Historic District was officially added to the National Historic Register (NHR), the Rodney Marsh House was cited as “one of the finest examples of Greek Revival domestic architecture in all of Vermont.”

Brandon’s Otterside Animal Hospital was once the Thayer mansion

n 1976, the Brandon Village Historic District was officially added to the National Historic Register (NHR). 245 of the town’s “architecturally and historically significant buildings,” mostly residences, “representative of the growth and prosperity of the village” from the late 1700s to the early 1900s then became nationally recognized.

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