Spring 2008
A Town in Transition
With the loss of its town meeting, change has come to Tinmouth.
Tom Slayton explores a town's struggle to find its present-day identity.
The easiest way to get to Tinmouth is to follow Route 140 westward from Wallingford. The road west climbs steadily uphill, over a forested mountain, and eventually drops into a high, farmed valley. It's only about five miles through open farm and forestland to a T-intersection and the cluster of buildings that mark the little village of Tinmouth, but by the time you get there, it feels pleasantly remote, as though you've somehow dropped into a peaceful rural section of Vermont's past.
Tinmouth is a friendly place, and though less rural than it once was, it is still a small Vermont town, still warm and welcoming, even to a stranger. But change has come to this small town, and its residents are concerned that it may become more like everyplace else in the years ahead. Changing tax rates, changing ways of making a living, and most recently, a change in the format of town meeting have raised those questions for many in Tinmouth.
Surrounding the village is a classic Vermont landscape: working farms and forests climb the hills. More pickup trucks than SUVs cruise the town's roads, and there are frequent views of Dorset Mountain and Tinmouth Mountain as you drive along.
When Tinmouth residents talk of "going uptown" it's the long uphill climb to the little village that they're referring to. Right in the center of things, the office of Town Clerk Gail Fallar shares space with the Tinmouth Historical Society in a pale yellow, two-story Victorian building that used to house Tinmouth's general store. Right next door is the Tinmouth Volunteer Fire Department, and across the street are the town grade school and the Community Center.
Fallar's office is a cavernous space filled with books, papers, town records, and photos of town events. In the summertime, there's a box of summer squash and zucchini with a "free" sign by the door. As supper hour approaches, a couple of kids scamper over, grab a squash or two, and shout "thank you!" through the open door before scampering off.
On Mondays and Thursdays a green flag is posted on the town office building: "Library Open," it announces in purple letters. Tinmouth youngsters come over after school to select a book in the library, which is located in a pleasant, sunny room behind the town clerk's office. The not-so-young residents of town use the library also.
What may be most notable about this small Rutland County town is the very large amount of conserved land it contains — and, interestingly enough, the strength of its community life. The two facts are closely related.
The town is determined to hold onto its rural landscape and rural values, and therefore has conserved a surprising amount of its farm and forestland. If you add up the land that's been protected by the Vermont Land Trust and other conservation easements, plus the state land set aside in a conservation district to safeguard Tinmouth Channel (a Class 1 wetland that flows through the town), you come up with a total of more than 40 percent of the town that is protected from development. Add in the acreage enlisted in the Vermont Land Use Tax program, and the percentage jumps to 66 percent. Just as noteworthy as those remarkable figures is the fact that most Tinmouth residents, natives and newcomers alike, strongly support the conservation efforts. They want to keep the land open and working.
While Tinmouth is pretty, it's no Shangri-la. The farm fields are scenic and productive, to be sure. However, most of the town's year-round residents of working age leave the town each morning for jobs in Rutland or Manchester. Once economically independent, Tinmouth is now largely a bedroom community for those larger cities "on the grid" — and off the mountain. It's a lot like other hill towns around Vermont; many, if not most of its residents make their living elsewhere. And a lot of hillsides that once were farmed are now returning to forest.
Nor is Tinmouth a haven for the wealthy. Median income of its approximately 600 residents is $32,600, slightly less than the median Vermont income of $39,000. Of the 50 or so kids in the school, one-fourth receive a free or reduced-price lunch. Again, this is a lot like the rest of Vermont.
Gail Fallar, the town clerk, says that people like Tinmouth the way it is now, and don't want it to change too fast or too much. Most others in town seem to agree.
However, last spring a bruising battle over the future of town meeting left many wondering if their strong community life was as strong as they thought it was. The issue was whether to end town meeting as it had been practiced in Tinmouth since the founding of the town in 1761 and replace it with an election — voting by "Australian ballot" as the question is commonly phrased. Some people refer to it as "ending town meeting." Others see it as the beginning of the end of Tinmouth's flourishing community life.
It's a classic controversy, one that has been enacted in many towns throughout Vermont. There's no absolute right or wrong on the issue, but it causes hackles to rise, nonetheless.
On one side are the traditionalists who like the open participatory nature of the classic town meeting: pure democracy, face-to-face with your neighbors. It's the kind of self-government that Norman Rockwell depicted in his famous painting, "Freedom of Speech," the kind that Vermont is known for worldwide.
On the other side are those who charge that the older system is inefficient in today's world and unrepresentative — a regular town meeting takes too long, and many working people can't attend, they say. Furthermore, it vests too much power in too few people.
Each side has plenty of answers for every point raised by the other side. But it bothers many in Tinmouth that the issue was raised, that sides were chosen at all, and that it became so acrimonious. The public debate on the issue was polite, but private conversations via e-mail and telephone were apparently not. That bothered people who had long felt Tinmouth was not that sort of town. "It got so nasty and so personal," says Cathy Reynolds, chairwoman of the town selectboard.
The final votes (there were two, both in early 2007) were very close, and changing to Australian balloting won, the first time, by 97-95, the second by 112-104.
Adding fuel to the fire in Tinmouth was a recent sharp increase in the town's tax rate, which reopened questions about whether Tinmouth should continue to maintain its own school. ("If the school goes, that's the end of Tinmouth's community life," said one person. "We'd be just another bedroom town.") The fact that additions to the school were built with volunteer labor is a point of pride in town also. Eliminating the school seems unlikely at present, since shutting it down would cost Tinmouth thousands of dollars more — in busing and tuition fees paid to other towns — than to continue running its own school.
But the hot-button issue that left several of Tinmouth's most active and hard-working officials feeling more than a little beat-up was whether Tinmouth was being run by a select few.
That hurt people like Gail Fallar, and her brother, Marshall Squire, who is Tinmouth's fire chief and was chairman of the Planning Commission and town meeting moderator. Another brother, Hollis Squire, is town Road Commissioner and also serves as "Town Hugger," a slightly tongue-in-cheek office created (before the town meeting controversy) in case anyone in Tinmouth needed a hug.
The Squires work for the town, and admit that they are involved in a lot of important decisions. But they've also put in thousands of hours of volunteer time, without pay, to organize town events and activities. And virtually everyone affirms that they have been very careful to make sure all points of view were heard and weighed before decisions were made.
It's the classic case of a small cadre of hard-working "insiders" who do a lot for the town — and then get blamed by the "outsiders" (who often don't participate in the volunteer activities) because they are at the heart of town affairs.
The Squires aren't the only "insiders" — there's actually a large number of volunteer workers in Tinmouth. That's how the community center got built, for example — volunteer labor. One of the reasons Tinmouth works as a town is because it has a lot of people who pitch in to get things done.
Marshall Squire, for example, works almost non-stop to make the Volunteer Fire Department a good one. It boasts the largest junior Fire Department in the state — and Squire loves the fact that the youngsters in one local farm family drove their tractor over to the town center to join up.
"It gets a sense of community and volunteerism going at an early age," he says.
But Squire was especially stung by the campaign to end the Tinmouth town meeting. After the first vote, he stepped down as moderator and left the meeting. He has since resigned his seat on the town Planning Commission, a
move he admits was in reaction to the town meeting vote.
Despite the town meeting controversy, Tinmouth remains a town that others envy because of its community spirit. Town softball games involve players of all ages, the town's Game Supper each fall is a huge, community-wide event, and there are several neighborly traditions in town — for instance, when a Tinmouth woman gets married, the other women in town with flower gardens present her with a large floral bouquet. Townspeople get updated on the local news regularly through the town newsletter, "Tales of Tinmouth" — another volunteer effort by Gail Fallar.
And Tinmouth people are good neighbors — exceptionally good neighbors — to one another.
When Alfred Ballou's tractor overturned and critically injured him a few summers ago, his neighbors in town knew his hay had to get put in the barn, or Ballou would face a huge loss and a hard winter. So they turned out, cut and baled his hay, and put about 3,000 bales of it in his barn.
"There's kind of a tradition here," Bob Lloyd says, "of people taking care of one another."
Lloyd was a founder, in 1988, of The Tinmouth Land Trust, which holds easements for some of the town's conserved farm and forestland. It was founded to protect a 170-acre farm that had a striking view. The farm, saved from development by the campaign, is in operation today.
"Once the land was conserved, people could see that land trusts were not a Communist plot — that relinquishing some of your rights still allowed you to use the land," says Lloyd.
Other land trust agreements were forged, and townspeople liked both the fact that their town stayed beautiful — and relatively little changed socially. It was still a small town, with a few hundred people who knew each other well. It's that sort of social cohesion that Tinmouth fears losing in the current fight over town meeting.
The little town has faced threats to its community life before — when trucks from a nearby quarrying operation chose a route directly through the heart of town, and when a large development was proposed for the steep sides of Tinmouth Mountain, to name but two. Townspeople acted together to defeat both proposals.
But Tinmouth is undeniably changing. One veteran farmer notes that there's now a traffic jam on the way out of town each workday morning as cars leave Tinmouth for jobs in Rutland and Manchester. It raises the question: What should your hometown be: the center of your life? Or a place to come home to, where you can recover, undisturbed, from the turmoil of the day?
Nelson Jaquay, a teacher in and around Tinmouth for 30 years, made an impassioned defense of the traditional town meeting in a public letter: "The virtual worlds we seep into as a community by moving away from open forum decision making are those of the suburbs," Jaquay wrote, noting that five minutes in a voting booth is "not much like the way real life is worked out."
Like others in town, Jaquay is worried that the loss of a "live" town meeting will cripple the strong community life there. But he, like all the others, remains passionately committed to the town:
"There are other places in this world where I could live," he said recently. "But there's no other place like Tinmouth — and that's because of the land and the people. This is our community. And it's a real community."
Several others interviewed for this article used the word "real" to describe what they love about Tinmouth. They don't want to lose that hands-on reality.
Times change, people change. Even time-honored traditions change. And though Marshall Squire is concerned that Tinmouth is losing its essential community spirit, he, too, admits that change happens.
As he drives the back roads of Tinmouth, Squire notes that hillsides once farmed are now growing up to trees. And as the trees fill in the open fields, moose come back, replacing the wildlife that preferred the open meadows of a bygone day. Likewise, Tinmouth's population is changing.
"Tinmouth now is moose habitat," Squire says. "Tinmouth now is the people who live here."