Top Stories for Tuesday September 23, 2008

Tigers Just Short At St. J 13-6
By Mike Cameron
   The Saint Johnsbury Hilltoppers have always been very difficult to defeat at home and like the Tigers they have a long-standing legacy of fielding some very good high school football teams.  Saint J. is also one of the oldest high schools in Vermont with many scholastic and athletic traditions.
   Known locally as “The Academy,” Saint J. is always prepared and well coached, Their traditional rivalry game with Lyndon Institute usually held in early November is truly one of the great small town sporting events held in New England every year and has been written about in major publications.
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When Cows Were King: The Crosby Barn Past And Present
By Cookie Steponaitis
   When this reporter was a child, she went looking for her first real job. The only problem was that she was seven years old and didn't know how to do too much. Walking down Crosby Heights into town, she stopped at the Crosby Barn and went in to see the owner, Edgar Crosby. Now, before you assume that furniture was her first job, guess again. At that time the barn held cows, and it was the center for commission sales in the region. When current owner Bub Crosby tells you in his advertisements that, “the cows paid for the barn, so you don't have to,” he wasn't joking. Under the guidance of the Crosby family, many of that generation got their first job, their first wage, and learned a great deal about cows, agriculture and the generosity of the Crosby family.
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Sowing Seeds of Peace: VUHS Holds Fourth Annual Peace One Day Celebration
By Cookie Steponaitis
   Driving through the Vermont countryside we have all noticed the uniqueness with which nature, the wind and birds distribute and plant seeds. Growing alone in the midst of a corn field a giant sun flower stretches toward the heavens. Bunched together in a ditch, a sea of purple thyme blows in the breeze of an autumn afternoon calling attention to the hearty nature of plants and their determination to grow and bloom. Row after row of corn stretches toward a limitless goal of growth and bears witness to the changes of nature, weather and shaped by both. While the seeds were planted either deliberately or on the whim of nature, each has taken root, grown and focused on an individual path to bloom in the state we call home.
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Around And About Addison County- Salisbury
By M. Stuart Parks
   The first permanent settler in Salisbury was a woman.  Amos  Story came from Norwich, Connecticut in 1774, claimed one hundred acres, built a log house and began to clear the land to grow wheat.  He intended to bring his family the following year but he was killed by a falling tree.  Mrs. Story, not to be deterred from her husband's plans, came to Salisbury in late 1775 with her sons Solomon, Ephraim and Samuel and her daughters Hannah and Susannah.  She was then 32 years old and reputed to be a woman of large stature and somewhat masculine in appearance with great strength and endurance.  She reclaimed the log cabin and with the boys she labored on the farm, taking the lead in clearing the land, raising grain and all the other chores necessary to raise her family.  As the Revolutionary war began to heat up settlers were advised to return to whence they came for fear of being killed by marauding Indians.  At the least they were advised to go to the southern part of the state where the population was denser and better protected.  Mrs. Story, confident in her ability to use a musket, wintered in Rutland but spent the summers working the farm in Salisbury.  For her efforts the town proprietors gave Mrs. Story 100 acres of land in her own name.  In 1792, with her children grown, she married Benjamin Smalley who died in 1808.  She married a third time at the age of seventy, in 1812, to Captain Stephen Goodrich.  Goodrich was one of the first settlers in Middlebury.
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Looking Ahead to a Year of Celebrations and Looking Back at a Banner Year of Discovery
By Jacqueline Steponaitis
    2009 will be a banner year for historians and celebrations around the Champlain Valley. It will mark the 400th anniversaries of the explorations and discoveries by Samuel de Champlain and Henry Hudson. Vermont, New York, Quebec, and most of New England are filled with references and monuments to the impact of these two European explorers. Known as the “ Father of New France”, Champlain made 23 trips across the Atlantic Ocean and left four books of drawings, maps, recordings, and information that inspired a decades of settlement and exploration to follow him.
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