One of the notable things about the small villages and towns through which we passed was the presence of the white wooden churches that seem to govern the lives of the people. They seemed to use the identical architecture but some of them had two entrances in the front rather than one. I wonder why they opted for two entrances? Were these at one time one entrance for Women and one for Men? The Shakers and Quakers had men on one side of the building and women on the other, but I do not know if these were buildings from that era of the country. In any case, the church seems to be central to the village and commands the skyline and the main road and in some instances the aura cast by these pristine beautiful churches, resembles a hen covering or protecting her chicks. As we passed by I could read the signs and most of the churches were either Congregational or Baptist. Rarely did I see any other denomination represented. Some of them had bells in the belfry while others just had a spire and no belfry. Just about all of them had beautiful glass windows - not necessarily stained glass, but little square panes of colored glass and I suspect that they could have been the original glass when the building was first constructed. Many of them had the arched windows with the panes separated by narrow wood pieces and the glazing must have been a headache. My father worked as a joiner and I do remember him glazing the windows of our house at Caloundra – that was not an easy job putting the putty exactly where it needed to go and mixing it with the linseed oil was a challenge but the oil kept the putty pliable. In today’s world we have windows that come with metallic fixings to hold the glass in place….and in places where I have lived, most of the windows have been double pane windows. At Sara’s house in Nebraska, the putty on some of the original windows has come away from the glass and the windows are single pane. Her house is over 100 years old.
The locals tell me that this was a glacial area long ago and that accounts for the granite presence in just about every community. I saw many granite outcrops on this trip to Vermont and back. I did notice that they did not build their homes around the outcrops like they do in Prescott or do the Frank Lloyd Wright method of incorporating the rock into the house itself. The architectures of the houses I saw is distinctive of the area and rather beautiful to look at. There is a minimum of fuss and the only houses that have any fancy wood work on them are the Victorian style houses. The rest of them present very clean straight lines….and are mostly white. As we passed an area of many outcrops of granite, I noticed a spigot poking out from the lower area and water was coming out. There was a similar spigot in the rocks along a well traveled highway in Pennsylvania where people could take empty containers and fill them to use as drinking water that had filtered through the rocks and was considered more pure than the water from the city.
We were passing through an area that had a large lake called Androscoggin Lake. I saw a rack of what looked like Amerigas cylinders but discovered that these were pontoon boats for sale and they were piled into these racks that went at least 2 or 3 stories high. I wonder how they got them up there and better yet, how do you get them back down. In another sales lot , I saw motorboats stacked similarly. One of these sales lots had a sign that said, We have sold other people’s boats, why not let us sell yours as well.
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