Tucker Carlson in Maine
Bryant Pond (aka Christopher Lake), in the western Maine town of Woodstock. Ousted Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson has a house in the Bryant Pond Village section of Woodstock, where he has done some shows. He has often said that it’s his favorite place and noted that his family has vacationed there for more than 40 years. His presence there has not been without controversy.
— Photo by Zendry423
Monument commemorating that Woodstock was the last location in the United States still using the crank telephone system until the early 1980s.
Climate 'ameliorated or deteriorated' by us
George Perkins Marsh when he was U.S. ambassador to Italy
The quote below is from an 1847 speech by George Perkins Marsh (1801-82), a native of Woodstock, Vt., to the Agricultural Society of Rutland County, Vermont. Marsh, a distinguished philologist, diplomat and naturalist, was the first modern thinker to theorize that man's activities influence climate (but never mentioning carbon dioxide). Some historians have labeled him the first American environmentalist.
"Man cannot at his pleasure command the rain and the sunshine, the wind and frost and snow, yet it is certain that climate itself has in many instances been gradually changed and ameliorated or deteriorated by human action. The draining of swamps and the clearing of forests perceptibly effect the evaporation from the earth, and of course the mean quantity of moisture suspended in the air. The same causes modify the electrical condition of the atmosphere and the power of the surface to reflect, absorb and radiate the rays of the sun, and consequently influence the distribution of light and heat, and the force and direction of the winds. Within narrow limits too, domestic fires and artificial structures create and diffuse increased warmth, to an extent that may effect vegetation. The mean temperature of London is a degree or two higher than that of the surrounding country, and Pallas believed, that the climate of even so thinly a peopled country as Russia was sensibly modified by similar causes."
Marsh is memorialized in, among other places, the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, in Woodstock. The park preserves the site where Frederick Billings established a managed forest and a progressive dairy farm. The name honors him and the other past owners of the property: George Perkins Marsh, Mary Montagu Billings French, Laurance Rockefeller and Mary French Rockefeller.
Carriage road in the the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park.
'Too perfect'
An arial view of Woodstock, Vt.
“A sinking feeling that here is a transient, a tourist, a caretaker, and not the householder; that men live in New England as the Venetian lives in Venice….All this white and green and blue is precariously too perfect.’’
Robert Lowell (1917-77), in “New England and Further,’’ a long essay on New England poets.
Fusing tourism and town life
Woodstock, Vt.
''It looked like the set for an Andy Hardy movie - things quaint in the manner of Norman Rockwell...Maybe the town wasn't the prettiest village in America, but if the townspeople wanted to make the claim, I wouldn't have disputed them. It was Woodstock, Vermont.
"....the village lived by the tourist - the well heeled tourist. But few places in the country fused tourism and town life so well. In Woodstock, they were parts of the whole.
"If the village had a fault, it lay in both a hubris about its picturesqueness and in its visitors with new money and new facades...."
-- From William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways