Sign Language

Sign Language
By chadabramovich

Vermont roads are named after a profusion of different things. Indigenous plants (many which were sacrificed to make the road), local landmarks, geographical features, compass directions and dead white people. But some road names muddle people, and make you wonder just what the hell was the namer thinking. For example, West Haven's Ghost Hollow Road may scratch some heads.

Another example that's always attracted me are the several areas denominating claiming the moniker "Lost Nation", for a abundance of bases, spanning from a poignant yet overlooked commemoration of the Native American leagues  Indian populations who lost their nations when Vermont became Vermont, to the town of Essex's case, an area of town so remote that the people who decided to settle and farm out there were so difficult to reach, that travelers were continuously getting lost. However, Paul Carnahan of the Vermont Historical Society surmises that the label may be more Biblical than Native American.  There are lots of references to "Lost Nations" found in newspapers from 1800 to the 1850s and it seems to be religiously based, sometimes relating to the Lost Tribes of Israel.  The title was bestowed to remote places, which were sometimes also considered to be Godless places. "New Boston" was also a popular term for these hard to reach places, as locals would groan that travel through parts of the state took so long that they might as well have traveled to Boston to get there. There are several New Boston roads throughout Vermont as well, including my particular favorite in the Green Mountain town of Chittenden.

I love to travel, and one of my favorite aspects of any road trip is to observe the surroundings viewed from my windshield in quiet fascination, regarding landmarks, street signs, monstrosities and natural splendor. But I also love my down time, which I often pass by pouring over Google Earth with sedentary amusement. A while ago, I discovered a back road down near Chester, intriguingly called Popple Dungeon Road. That almost immediately fired my imagination. What's the story here? A google search revealed another surprise, there were two such roads in Vermont, another, much shorter stretch of gravel in Charlotte, a town where anything containing the term dungeon seems very incongruous. There had to be a story here. But what was it?

The interesting essay by Seven Days' Ethan De Seife, and the book Popple Dungeon, Vermont: The Settlement, Farms and Genealogy of a Small Community in Vermontby Chester author Virginia Blake Clark offered some amusing clarity.

Let's start with the tenebrous term Popple. Popple is a regional term, apart of the lexicon of the northeast and parts of the Midwest. It's also a bit of skewed etymology, deriving originally from Poplar trees. But somewhere down the line, it became sort of an arboreal catch-all term for a variety of different trees, including Quaking Aspens, Cottonwoods and Alders.

In the 18th century, the perpetual trickle of people would find their way up into the rocky forests and undulating hills of southwestern Chester, and slowly hack farms out of the wilds. The isolated area would eventually grow to encompass 30 houses,  5 schoolhouses, and a few cemeteries. and spread into parts of Andover and Windham. There was a dirt road that followed the banks of the South Branch of the Williams River which became the main route into that part of town.  The locals started to call that area "Poplar Grove", named after the Poplar Trees that grew in clusters along the road.

The Dungeon part of the name gets a bit mysterious, and far less dramatic in it's alternative. It doesn't actually relate to it's dank pit of despair namesake, which may disappoint the more morbid minded. It's more of a trope which alludes to the similar associating characteristics – bestowed to a place that was dark and creepy in appearance. The Popple Dungeon Road that serpentines through the hills of Chester and Windham was lined with overhanging tree branches and thick brush where the boughs created a sort of tunnel, casting the rough road in eerie shadow. The atmosphere along this road was so redolent, that around the years that lead into World War 1, the local boys began to designate the area as "The Dungeon", or, "Popple Dungeon".

Another more amusing story comes from a frazzled school teacher who was stationed at the road's district 15 schoolhouse, who was so exasperated by the rowdy boys he instructed that he supposedly uttered "This place isn't Popple Grove, it's Popple Dungeon." The boys were proud of the new designation, and it proved to be a memorable sobriquet. Over time, the name began to spread into local parlance, and would make it's way into local newspapers, become the unofficial moniker for the area, and eventually became the official name of the road printed on it's ubiquitous green aluminum street sign.  Sometimes, the miscellany on the list of most despicable things that humanity has produced prove to be the most memorable and compellingly investigatable.

Agriculture has always been an endlessly laborious affair in the Green Mountains. You probably couldn't pick many worse places to farm, except in the middle of Lake Champlain I suppose. Vermont is notorious for it's rocks, which farmers would find plenty of in their fields. An old Vermont joke is that there are new "rock crops" every year, normally found with dismay during the Spring plows. And it's the truth. As the ground freezes and thaws in the winter and spring, it heaves up rocks from below, and sometimes, dissuaded farmers would find that rocks would be just about the only thing that would grow in their fields.

By the mid 1800s, when the Midwest was discovered to have seemingly endless fertile, rock free lands to farm and a burgeoning railroad network which allowed farmers to get their produce to major cities in a timely fashion, Vermont farmers became midwestern farmers, and by 1860, The Green Mountain State found exactly half of it's population had emigrated elsewhere. While Vermont, and New England as a whole, were at one point 70 percent open farmland and 30 percent forested, today, those proportions have been exactly reversed, which is not only an incredibly profound change of any industrialized area in just a century, but sort of a change in direction to the assumed course of progress. Even in the most remote of Vermont's forests, it's not hard to come across the toppled and moss laden remains of a stone wall, coils of rusted barbed wire or an old cellar hole, a sobering reminder that nature reclaims things fast.

The last of the original working farms in Popple Dungeon went defunct in 1990, and the unofficial community has long since vanished, replaced by a road that mostly meanders through northern deciduous forest with permanent residences occasionally puncturing it. The only modern day indicator of Popple Dungeon is the street sign, which more or less intrigues or befuddles people.

So, how did this erroneous name migrate to Charlotte, to a private driveway that's mostly flanked by open meadow and sunlight? As the story goes, the first resident of the Charlotte thoroughfare had a mischievous son years ago, who while traveling through Chester, decided he liked the street sign, stole it, and put it up in front of their driveway in Charlotte. In 1993, when Vermont started enhancing it's 911 emergency response system, one of the stipulations was, in short, that all locations needed to be named or identified so emergency response crews knew where they were going. In the wake of this, the informal christening became official, and the town of Charlotte gave the driveway it's own street sign.

But not everyone is fond of the name. Ed Amidon, a resident of the Charlotte road, told Seven Days that he's continuously needing to explain the road's name, which has became tiresome, especially when it comes to phone orders. "You spell it out, and there's dead silence on the end of the line."

Personally, I would be eager to list that address on my business cards or outgoing mail. I can't really defend that statement, I just think it's cool.

Humankind has an ego problem, and a great deal of us spend our lives trying to chase the triumphs of feeding it. It's long been a unifying dream to make a name for ourselves, to leave a long lasting and inspiring mark for those we will never know, before we too become part of the inescapably strange ritual of being buried and having a slab of granite shoved in the ground where our body winds up, before being forgotten all together. Leaving a legacy can be worthy of heroism, admiration, peculiarity, the title of villain, or even, a nutcase. And depending on who you ask, it's more about being remembered as opposed to the why.

I'd like to end this piece with another road name that I've always been very intrigued by. In the small village of East Dorset, is a road called Mad Tom Road, which starts in white clapboarded"downtown" East Dorset and turns to dirt as it heads up the hills into the Green Mountain National Forest. But this curious name isn't singular. There is also a Mad Tom Notch nearby, a Mad Tom Brook, and even a commercial apple orchard all bearing the moniker. But WTF? Who was Mad Tom? What could have been done that was so significant that warranted branding in it's honor?

In my amused reverie, I envisioned myself approaching an old timer sitting on a Dorset porch, A Judd Crandle type of fellow who squints his eyes at me and says something like "Folks around these parts don't like to talk about that". I decided to reach out to the Dorset Historical Society, and curator Jon Mathewson was able to explain it to me, and I guess I shouldn't be surprised that they get this question a lot.

Some people say that it is named after the Madtom catfish, but catfish prefer slow moving water, and probably don't live in the Mad Tom Brook. But it's easy to see why that would be a speculation, given that the Mad Tom Brook is a tributary of the renown Batten Kill.

My favorite speculation is that it was named after an early, insane settler named Thomas, but there is no actual record of such a person. I can only wonder what Thomas had to have done to have earned that unflattering yet very indelible nickname.

The most likely explanation is the aforementioned Mad Tom Brook, which was named after the old English term for a crazy person, "Mad Tom O'Bedlam," or "Mad Tom."  Bedlam was the nickname unceremoniously given to London's infamous Bethlehem Royal Hospital, which was an insane asylum. The rushing mountain brook was seen as a crazy, unpredictable cascade of water. If that is the case, than this comparison shouldn't be alien to us Vermonters – A similarly named river in Vermont is the Mad River, which runs alongside Routes 100 and 100B from Warren to Middlesex, and is one of the state's most popular tourist regions where famed ski resorts like Sugarbush and Mad River Glen can be found.

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June 14, 2015 at 03:23PM
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