The White River, coming out from the Green Mountains, flows into the
Connecticut at a noted railway junction, while a short distance above
is the Olcott Falls, a cataract amid picturesque surroundings which
provides power for large paper-mills at Wilder, Vermont. To the
northward is Hanover, in New Hampshire, the seat of the most famous
educational foundation of northern New England, Dartmouth College,
having some seven hundred students. Rev. Eleazer Wheelock began it in
1770, and his name is preserved in the chief hotel. He started a
school in the forest to educate missionaries for the Indians, having
twenty-four students domiciled in rude log huts. He also educated
several Indians, giving them Master's degrees; but after some of them
had returned to savage life he changed his plan, and this object was
subordinated to the purposes of general and higher education, the
College, which was named for the Earl of Dartmouth, entering upon a
successful career subsequently to the Revolution. Among the graduates
have been Daniel Webster, Amos Kendall, Levi Woodbury, Benjamin
Greenleaf, George P. Marsh, George Ticknor, Rufus Choate, Thaddeus
Stevens and Salmon P. Chase. There are numerous buildings surrounding
an extensive elm-shaded campus, and also a spacious college park. The
Connecticut River above Hanover winds about the level fertile
intervale, making numerous "ox-bow" bends, and there appear numerous
mountain peaks which are outlying sentinels of the Franconia Mountains
to the eastward. The best known of these is Moosilauke, rising
forty-eight hundred feet, which formerly was the "Moose Hillock" of
the colonists. On the western river bank is the Vermont town of
Newbury, founded by General Bailey of Massachusetts. It is related
that during the Revolution a detachment of British troops came there
to capture him, but a friend who learned their object went out where
he was ploughing and dropped in the furrow a note, saying, "The
Philistines be upon thee, Samson!" Bailey, returning down the long
furrow, saw the note, took the hint and escaped. The crooked little
Wells River flows out of the Green Mountains and falls into the
Connecticut at the village of Wells River, nestling in a deep basin
among the high hills; and here is another important railway junction,
with routes going westward to Lake Champlain, northward to Canada, and
eastward to the White Mountains. The latter route is up the Ammonoosuc
River valley, past Littleton, with its glove factories and summer
boarding-houses, on the edge of the mountain district, and thence to
Bethlehem and into the heart of the White Mountain region.
The Passumpsic River flows from Vermont into the Connecticut a few
miles above, and about ten miles up that winding and hill-environed
stream is the picturesque town of St. Johnsbury, with about seven
thousand people, noted as the location of the extensive Fairbanks
Scale Works. St. John de Crevecoeur, the French Consul at New York,
was very popular in the Revolutionary times and a benefactor of
Vermont, and this town, settled in 1786, was named in his honor. It is
related that in 1830, when there was a good deal of excitement about
hemp-culture in the United States, the Fairbanks Brothers established
a hemp-dressing factory here, and one of them conceived the idea of a
platform-scale to weigh the hemp, which construction was the origin of
their extensive business, the works sending scales all over the world.
The railroad route to Montreal and Quebec ascends the Passumpsic,
crosses the watershed, passing Lake Memphramagog at Newport, and then
enters Canada. This noted lake is on the national boundary, more than
two-thirds of it being in Canada, and is thirty miles long.
Memphramagog means the "beautiful water," and the mountain ranges
enclosing it with their wooded slopes present fine views. The national
boundary is marked by clearings in the forests on either side of the
lake. The massive rounded summit of the Owl's Head rises thirty-three
hundred feet on the western shore in imposing magnificence, and many
other peaks are sentinelled all around. Steamboats ply on the lake
from Newport to Magog at the foot, where its waters discharge
northward into Magog River and thence flow over the vast plain of
Canada, which is so conspicuously contrasted with the mountains to the
southward, until at Sherbrooke they reach St. Francis River, and
finally the St. Lawrence. Lake Memphramagog has its Indian legends of
massacre and escape, but its chief modern tradition is of a noted
smuggler named Skinner, who in the early nineteenth century performed
prodigious feats of skill in eluding the revenue officers. Near the
boundary is Skinner's Island, having a spacious cavern on its
northwestern side. The smuggler usually disappeared near this island,
which came in time to be named for him, and it is related that one
night the officers, having had a long chase, found his boat on this
island and turned it adrift on the lake. The smuggler never appeared
afterwards, but some years later a fisherman, seeking shelter from a
squall under the lee of the island, discovered the cave hidden under
foliage and explored it.
"And what do you think the fisherman found?
Neither a gold nor a silver prize,
But a skull with sockets where once were eyes;
Also some bones of arms and thighs,
And a vertebral column of giant size;
How they got there he could not devise,
For he'd only been used to commonplace graves,
And knew naught of 'organic remains' in caves;
On matters like those his wits were dull,
So he dropped the subject as well as the skull.
'Tis needless to say
In this latter day,
'Twas the smuggler's bones in the cave that lay:
All I've to add is--the bones in a grave
Were placed, and the cavern was called 'Skinner's Cave.'"