Bennington and Glastenbury Railroad.

The Bennington & Glastenbury Railroad has a fascinating story. It was established in 1873 as a logging railroad and continued for 22 years until 1889, when the trees were gone. Then, in 1895 it was resurrected as a trolley line by the Bennington & Woodford Electric Railway Company. The logging village of South Glastenbury at the end of the line was transformed for only one summer into an upscale resort with hotel, clubhouse, dance hall, dining room, and casino. Alas, the trolley line was irreparably damaged in the “freshet” or flood that fall and the resort was abandoned, no doubt resulting in great financial loss to its investors...

The mid 19th century saw several abortive attempts to build a plank highway and then a railroad across Glastenbury. Shortly after the Civil War a new settlement called South Glastenbury was formed in the south central part of town. This village became the terminus of an eight-mile rail line, The Bennington and Glastenbury (B&G). This railroad climbed some 1,300 feet in elevation and was first designed to transport timber. Its locomotives burned wood, later coal, and finally the line was electrified. The new village had a sawmill, a blacksmith shop, a boarding house, several small homes, a school, and even a post office between 1873 and 1878. A major railroad stockholder was Trenor W. Park, a native of Woodford, and a lawyer who made a fortune during and after the California Gold Rush. He used some of his riches to build the mansion now known as the Park-McCullough House in North Bennington. His descendants would inherit many of Glastenbury’s abundant acres of forest. The 1880 Hamilton Child Gazetteer of Bennington County listed 30 Glastenbury residents by name but commented, as if to apologize for the number, “Much of the population of this town is transient and therefore not enumerated.” The year 1880 also marked the town’s maximum population, when 241 residents were counted in the two settlements, Fayville and South Glastenbury. For a brief time before oil fueled American industry, Glastenbury’s trees were transformed to create charcoal that was used to produce iron, both in Shaftsbury and Bennington, and a train’s ride away in Troy, N.Y. Archeologists have discovered in Glastenbury the ruins of more than two dozen brick kilns where crews would labor around the clock to prepare the wood and then keep watch as it smoldered into charcoal. Each kiln, consisting of some 36,000 bricks double-layered, was 28 to 30 feet in diameter, 12 to 16 feet high, and held together by iron bands. An entire production cycle of charcoal, including wood preparation, charring, and cooling took about twelve days. Four or five men a day were needed to load the charge of wood, and a crew had to be alert around the clock so that the wood didn’t burn to ash. Some 20 years after the B&G was organized, the mountainsides had been clear-cut, the blizzard of 1888 closed all roads for three months, and the railroad went out of business in early 1889. Some businessmen sought to revive it in 1894, calling it the Bennington and Woodford Electric Railroad. The line carried seasonal sportsmen, fisherman, picnickers, hikers, and fern pickers who camped out in the abandoned charcoal kilns and lumber camps. “Ferning,” in fact, became a summer activity that would continue to provide income to a few families who sold the decorative fronds to butchers and other retailers in metropolitan areas until plastic finally replaced nature’s design. The excursionists of 1894 provided the spark of the idea that blossomed in 1897 and 1898 into an attempt to transform the rough and abandoned South Glastenbury community into an attractive summer resort, served by the railroad. The identity has never been known of entrepreneurs who invested probably $300,000 (in today’s money) by converting the old logger’s boarding house into a hotel with a dance hall and dining room, and the company store into a “casino” with a clock tower. They stocked the streams with fish and promoted summer tourism in Vermont’s mountains. A news item in the Troy Times in September, 1897, described the fish hatchery, tennis courts, and plans for a possible new “cottage”: “This week six or seven well known New York physicians will arrive in Bennington and go to Glastenbury to look the place over, with the view of sending such patients as require high altitude, really pure water, and bracing mountain air.” The singular summer of 1898 was memorialized by a euphoric description in the Troy Times, reprinted in the Bennington Banner, of “life in full midsummer swing at Glastenbury, a popular resort at the terminus of the Bennington and Woodford Electric Railroad.” The forest-clad domain, happy fishing parties, crystal streams, grand sweeps of mountain scenery, and delicious trout dinners were described glowingly. Alas, that first season of the grand South Glastenbury resort was also its last because a massive flood, it was remembered as “the freshet of ‘98”, soon washed out the rail line and several bridges. Whether anyone saw a connection between the clear-cut forest and consequent flooding was not recorded. The newly renovated buildings were allowed to deteriorate back into forest compost. If photographs had not been taken, it would be hard to believe the resort had ever existed. In the final decade of the 19th century, two murders took place in Glastenbury, and in neither case did justice prevail. In Fayville, on the evening of April 4, 1892, John Crowley, 38, a “jobber” at the Eagle Square sawmill, was murdered by Henry McDowell, another mill worker. Most versions of the story agree that an argument followed a night of heavy drinking and McDowell, who used the alias William Conroy, fatally struck Crowley with a chuck of firewood. McDowell-Conroy fled, rode freight cars to Canada, and finally turned himself in at South Norwalk, CT. Brought back to Bennington for trial, he was convicted, sentenced to life imprisonment, and assigned to the Vermont State Asylum at Waterbury. Allowed to work around the institution, McDowell-Conroy busied himself filling a railroad coal car, hid under a departing load, and was never seen again. During the opening day of deer season in 1897, John Harbour of Woodford, age 40, was killed near Bickford Hollow, ostensibly by another hunter who mistook him for a deer. The perpetrator never came forward to acknowledge having fired the shot, but took the trouble to drag the body several yards and lay it out with care, accompanied by the victim’s loaded rifle, under a large hemlock limb. A massive search party took several days to find the nearly concealed corpse. When his widow, Nettie Eddy Harbour, died some 38 years later her obituary noted that she never had the satisfaction of seeing justice done. The 20th century was marked by continued decline in Glastenbury’s population: 48 in 1900, 29 in 1910, 40 in 1920, and only 7 in 1930. Five of those seven were Mattisons. The other two, Rowland and Caroline Hazard, were seasonal residents from Rhode Island. In the 1936 town report, Ira Mattison, his wife, and his mother, plus the Hazards, held all town offices. In the 1937 session of the Vermont Legislature, Rep. Ira Mattison neglected to be sworn into office or even go to Montpelier, so his case was never presented when the issue arose of disincorporating both Glastenbury and Somerset. Legislators as well as news reports focused only on Somerset, where Rep. Katie Taylor had gained the reputation as a “dictator” of a one family town and her husband, John, faced criminal charges of abusing their foster children. Ira Mattison managed to travel to New York to appear on the “Believe It Or Not by Ripley” radio program, but he never got to Montpelier. The disincorporation drama played out in the pages of Vermont’s two morning dailies, the Burlington Free Press and the Rutland Herald. Stripping local government from small towns was sensitive business in the Vermont House, where each of the 246 towns, regardless of population, had the same representation: one member. Larger towns were pleased and the smaller ones protested, but by a vote of 138 to 52 Somerset and Glastenbury were declared “unorganized”, the only time in state history such action was taken. In 1939 Ira N. Mattison died at the age of 45. The Bennington Banner carried his obituary on the front page. His mother died in 1945 and his wife and two sons moved to Bennington. The perpetuators of the ghost-town legends were encouraged by the disappearances of Woodford woodcutter Middie Rivers in 1945 and Bennington College student Paula Welden in 1946. Though she was last seen walking up the Long Trail Road in Woodford, there is no evidence that Paula Welden ever set foot in Glastenbury. However, the fact that she vanished has prompted several writers to stretch f

CREDITS: Town of Glastenbury