From the editor: What's in an old road?

On Feb. 25, the Middlebury Select Board will consider a proposal by land developer Middle Road Ventures of Addison County to use part of the nearly vanished roadway of Old Middle Road as a lot for its upscale South Ridge housing development (see story). Old Middle Road is mostly forgotten by local residents and long out of use. There aren't many records about this old road, but you can trace it through the years by consulting old town and county atlas maps. On a copy of an 1870 map of Middlebury in my library at home, you can see the road—off Halladay Road—is one of the primary thoroughfares from the south of town to the downtown area. Also, Creek Road, still in use along the Otter Creek, appears as a main artery. In the old days, the Ethan Allen Highway (Route 7) didn't exist. Bit beginning in the early 1800s, farmers and other rural residents used old gravel roadbeds, like Middle Road, which probably began as 18th-century horse paths—and existed earlier still as native footpaths. (For example, above the falls in Middlebury's Marble Works was a nexus of Indian paths which headed off to all four compass points.) Middle Road began to fade away by the 1940s, probably at the time when the Ethan Allen Highway became a faster way through town. It's probably foolish to think that the local community has any interest in leaving Old Middle Road alone After all, when it comes to upscale "green" construction projects, most are ok with removing woods, wetlands and mountaintops; witness Vermont's rush to install giant "green" wind turbines along pristine ridge tops. We can justify progress, that is, if it's the kind of progress we can get behind. Replace all those existing and proposed mountaintop wind turbines with one small nuclear power facility (which can do the work of many thousands of wind turbines and solar arrays) and you'd witness a moral outcry heard 'round the world. Start a local sand pit or propose a commercial garage structure in the same place and a vocal, outraged opposition will camp outside your local public-hearing room to halt the work or, in the extreme, maybe monkey wrench your Cat (such malicious property damage has happened in the recent past). I have nothing against the South Ridge development, upscale energy-efficient homes, or wind turbines per se, but I am troubled by how our elected decision makers (and the special interests that control them) parse what is, and what is not, acceptable to bulldoze. I have no emotional bond to Old Middle Road; it is just a ghostly, grassy tract now. And no, I don't think that the Old Middle Road verge has much in the way of Native American and 19th-century artifacts waiting to be uncovered, but it would be nice to think that—as a community—we will look first before leveling; we have done more for even less. In the end, I suspect the Middlebury Select Board will approve the South Ridge plan—and when it does, a little piece of Middlebury's past will have vanished forever. Louis Varricchio, the Vermont Eagle

Signup for our newsletter

From the editor: What's in an old road?

COMPANY

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

SUBMISSION FORMS

BEYOND THE NEWS