2011 Issue

This was the official Livin' the Vermont Way Magazine website which was first built in 2002.
Livin the Vermont Way Magazine was written by Vermonters for Vermonters. Livin magazines served the Vermont community by providing a forum for residents to share their views on politics, business, education, taxes, the environment, and other issues which affect them directly. The magazine covered statewide and regional topics pertaining to families, work, communities, recreation, health and more.

Reality: I faithfully read this online magazine when I lived in Burlington Vermont and attended the University of Vermont. I have since moved on and become a custom software developer for a company located in Virginia. Custom software development is exactly as the term implies: software designed to fit a company's needs and business requirements, saving company time and money. It's really satisfying to get feedback from clients who are knocked out by what we can do. We have a number of clients in New England which I visit to make updates and tweaks. Our products becomes more useful through the delivery of enhancements and improvements as a business needs change. And I always return to Vermont for my annual winter vacation to go skiing at Killington, Stowe, and Stratton. Enough diversion, let's get back to Livin Magazine circa 2008.

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About Us

"It's a town meeting in your mailbox."

Vermonters are different. People from “away” say so, and we do not argue it. Unlike out-of-state publications that try to paint a certain portrait of what it means to be a Vermonter, or tourism publications that showcase only what certain folks want the outside world to see, LIVIN’ is our own publication—the publication where every Vermonter’s viewpoint can be seen and voice heard. And these viewpoints and voices have a place, no matter how foolish—because as all Vermonters know, fools can, at the least, be entertaining, and winter is far too long not to entertain ourselves now and again. More important than entertainment, however, is that LIVIN’ is the place where multiple sides of important issues have their place, because here in the Green Mountain State we know things are not always black and white—not even the cows.

LIVIN’ is written for us Vermonters who think for ourselves and make up our own minds about the issues we know are really important: our families, our work, our communities, our environment, our recreation, and our health. Look for humor columns, recipes, garden tips, barn and garage wisdom, restaurant reviews, local people profiles, Vermont folklore and myths, and even places to hike, fish, sail, ski and snowmobile. We will explore Vermont history and local entertainment options, mixed in with the hard-hitting commentaries and opinions on politics, business, education, taxes and the environment that keep us informed.

Think of every issue as a town meeting in your mailbox … published six times a year.

The Abenaki Story

Looking back

I didn’t know what to expect from my first meeting with Homer St. Francis. He was polite, gracious, but incredibly intimidating. He had the type of presence that filled a room. Powerful, full of years of anger, limited by the economic constraints of the world he grew up in, he still was single-minded and entirely focused on bringing not just recognition, but education, jobs, and social justice to the Abenaki Indians who lived by a thread on the rim of the Northern Champlain Valley and hidden in the Kingdom’s mountains.

-Excerpt from The Abenaki Story by Nakki Goranin. To read this story in its entirety, subscribe to Livin’ Magazine.

Recruitment Shams

Keep it out of the schools

You may have heard about a group of people on November 30, 2007 who closed down two military recruitment offices in Williston, VT. If you did, you probably know about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) section 9528 that mandates military recruitment in public schools, and that the students from Mount Mansfield High School were demonstrating against this that day.

Section 9528 of NCLB (Armed Forces Recruiter Access To Students And Student Recruiting Information) states… “this Act shall provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school students names, addresses, and telephone listings…. A secondary school student or the parent of the student may request that the student’s name, address, and telephone listing described in paragraph (1) not be released without prior written parental consent, and the local educational agency or private school shall notify parents of the option to make a request and shall comply with any request.”

If soldiers are refusing to fight, and veterans and students are staging demonstrations at recruitment centers with the message “Out of our schools, Out of Iraq,” why do we think it is a good idea to promote military recruitment in our schools?

Most of the students and parents I talk with around the state are not aware of this policy. Some educators, and even legislators have also said they are not aware of it. While there is a clause stating that students and parents can “opt-out” of the students’ information being sent to military recruiters, most students and parents do not even know it is being sent out, let alone that they can opt-out. Only because of legislation passed in May, 2006 in VT, did many of the public schools begin to send home “opt-out” information to the students’ families. Even still, the information tends to be tucked away in the student handbook or sent home within a pile of forms that are rarely read.

With the implementation of NCLB in 2002, and the U.S. led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. military’s need for soldiers increased. It increased even more in 2005 when national support of the Iraq war went into decline, and less people enlisted in the military. In June of 2006, Lt. Ehren Watada became the first commissioned officer in the U.S. military to refuse deployment to Iraq, stating that he believed Operation Iraqi Freedom to be illegal and immoral, and if he deployed, it would make him party to war crimes. In 2004, Camilo Mejia was the first US combat veteran to refuse to redeploy to Iraq, after witnessing detainees being tortured and abused by US troops under the direction of American civilian contract employees. To date, over 100 G.I.’s have refused deployment, redeployment or gone AWOL (facing a variety of legal repercussions) due to a surge in opposition to the morality and legal basis for the war in Iraq.

If soldiers are refusing to fight, and veterans and students are staging demonstrations at recruitment centers with the message “Out of our schools, Out of Iraq,” why do we think it is a good idea to promote military recruitment in our schools? Is it because the schools don’t understand the policy well enough to fight it, or do they believe they are looking out for the best interest of the students?

Either way, the realities of military service these days are much different than what the recruiters are telling our students.

Money for education is the biggest carrot that recruiters hang in front of potential recruits. The Montgomery GI Bill - Army/Navy College Fund, is in reality, according to an August 27, 2004 press release from the US Army Recruiting Command, only available to those who qualify with high test scores, sign up for what the military deems “critical” military specialties (critical usually means hardest to fill and least desirable), and enlist for at least six years of active military duty. Approximately 95 percent of those who enter the military are not eligible for this maximum amount.

According to a 2007 article posted on Army.com, “statistics from the U.S. Department of Education show that in school year 2003-04 the average cost of tuition, fees and room and board rates for all 4-year colleges (public and private combined) was $15, 504. It doesn’t take a math major to see that with those costs, attending a four year school until graduation can cost as much as $60,000 on average. With a little digging on the Internet one can discover that the Montgomery G.I. Bill will pay up to approximately $38,000 worth of education benefits, depending on individual duty status and eligibility.

We all have the right to self-determine our path in life, and we have the right to know what we are getting into when we make a decision. There are many options in which we know truthfully upfront what we are getting into, and are not wounded physically, physiologically or emotionally in the process.

Jen Berger is with the Recruiting for Peace Campaign at the The Peace & Justice Center in Burlington.

2 Responses to “Recruitment Shams”

  1. Peter Knights Says: 
    March 25th, 2008 at 12:54 pm

    It has been awhile since I have been in Vermont, but are you implying that the students in Vermont are that gullible that they cannot think for themselves? I would assume that the students “subjected” to the military recruiters would also have access to television, print and internet media where they could get an opposing viewpoint about military service. It has been my experience that most teachers in public schools and colleges are just a little to the left of Noam Chomsky. Once the recruiters leave the teachers can then counteract any “propaganda” that the military subjected the students to. I think that Ms. Berger should remember that public schools are government schools. The military is just another part of the government. They have every right to be there. I would hope that Ms. Berger would follow up this article with one about school choice or the evils of forcing children to go to public schools.

 

MARCH | APRIL 2008

Vermont’s Role In The 10th Mountain Division

The WWII US Army Alpine Fighting Force

The U.S. Army needs “persons with cold weather experience” read the bulletin board note. It caught the eye of Staff Sergeant Clyde Limoge, Vermont National Guard. “I know cold weather,” he thought. “Anything’s better than this Florida duty.” He signed up. That was one way the US Army found men when organizing the 10th Mountain Division Ski Troops in the 1940s.

And the word got out. Adventure! Many left north country farms, abandoned weekend ski parties. Dartmouth and Williams College skiers/racers, hardened lumberjacks, ski bums, socialite sportsmen—all heeded the call. Later, many who had never seen snow swelled the three regiments—the 85th, 86th, 87th—that formed the 10th Mountain Division. 

Clyde Limoge, of Morrisville, was a trooper in the 10th Mountain Division during WWII, stationed in Italy. This photo was taken in 1945 very shortly before he was wounded. Photo courtesy of Brad Limoge.

Clyde Limoge (now deceased) from Morrisville, Vermont knew “cold weather.” “He had skied Vermont mountains since the 1930s,” according to his son, Brad Limoge. “He and his friends often would ‘herringbone’ two miles up Stowe, Vermont’s Mt. Mansfield just to earn one run down, but about his combat experiences—he didn’t share much until the last years of his life.”

Never had there been such a unique fighting unit as the Army’s 10th Mountain Division nor was there a feat as famous as its’ night time assault/capture of Riva Ridge in the Italian Apennines.

Soldiers On Skis?

The idea of soldiers on skis was not accepted readily in the 1940s despite the example of the Finnish ski soldiers who had held out against superior Russian forces in 1939. Without the dogged determination of skier Charles Minot Dole, no US alpine fighting force might have become a reality.

Active in the National Ski Patrol, “Minnie” Dole, along with Robert Landry of the National Ski Association fought to convince the Army High Command (Gen. George Marshall) and Pres. Roosevelt that a skiing fighting force might be invaluable were Americans obliged to fight in Europe’s mountains.

Shelburne, Vermont resident Gordon Lowe remembers “I was put in the 10th Division’s 87th Regiment. After basics we went to Ft. Lewis, Washington and ski-trained on Mt. Rainer. Before joining the 85th and 86th Regiments at Camp Hale, we were sent to the Alaskan Aleutians to retake Kiska Island from the Japanese. When we got there, it was abandoned.”

Lowe also spent six weeks in Lincoln, New Hampshire studying rudimentary Norwegian in case Norway was attacked. “But it had been a diversionary tactic to draw German troops away from other parts of Europe.”

Camp Hale

The first Mountain Training Center opened at Camp Carson, Colorado. Then a permanent site in the Colorado Rockies near Leadville was chosen. In November 1942 Camp Hale (named for General Irving Hale’s distinguished action in the Spanish American War in the Philippines) became the 10th Mountain Division’s home post.

“I was in the 85th Regiment,” recalls former ski trooper Alexander Ward, 90, of Richmond, Vermont. “At Camp Hale (nicknamed Camp Hell) we learned climbing, rappelling, hiking, skiing, and cold weather survival. We had the best equipment. First we packed an eight-pound rifle but it was replaced by a lighter .30-30 carbine with 18 shots in the magazine. And we carried a 90-pound rucksack. From Hale we transferred to Camp Swift in Texas for more training.

“We were deployed to Italy January 1945. Eight thousand sailed on the S.S. America renamed ‘The West Point’. We were ferried ashore in Naples on LCIs (landing craft) then moved to Pisa-our staging place.” Bill Osgood of Shelburne, Vermont, Company “C” of the 87th, also sailed on the West Point. His basic training was at Ft. McClellan in Alabama.

“The Italian ski troops joined us on patrols,” he remembers. “Known as ‘Alpini,’ they helped us in scouting, underground reconnaissance and let us use their mules to carry equipment.” One Alpini became Ogood’s friend. They met 50 years later in February 1995 at the Division’s reunion and commemorative climb of the famous assault/capture of Riva Ridge on Mt. Belvedere in the Italian Mountains.

Riva Ridge Capture

February 18, 1945. At 7:00 p.m. the signal was given to begin climbing a steep and foreboding 1,500 foot precipice. Under cover of darkness one thousand soldiers from the lst Battalion, 86th Regiment and F Company of the 2nd Battalion, began their silent ascent of a sheer ice-covered wall on the face of Mt. Belvedere. The objective: rout the Germans entrenched on the above mountain ridge—Riva Ridge—and take possession.

One side of Belvedere gave easy access to the ridge, while the opposite side was impossible to scale. Germans posted on the ridge knew no one would attempt such a climb. They were wrong. The 86th Regiment boys reached the top without one man losing his footing and surprised the Germans. It took two days to secure the ridge with reinforcements from the 85th and 87th Regiments. On February 20, the Division took the ridge.

(Prior to the assault, the men had built a tramway to the top enabling them to quickly carry supplies/ammunition up and the wounded down in minutes. The original design is attributed to Bob Heron who later designed ski resort lifts all over the U.S.)

Regarded as one of the most daring night time attacks in military history, it was planned by Lt. Col. Henry J. Hampton (1st Battalion, 86th Regimental Mountain Infantry Commander). Seventeen men of the 86th died, 38 were wounded and three were reported missing.

Casualties

The 10th Mountain Division landed in Italy 14,101 strong but over 4,000 men were wounded and nine hundred never returned home. The 10th spent 114 days in combat. The greatest number of casualties—553— suffered in one day was on April 14, 1945 at Monte della Spe. Among the wounded was Lt. Robert Dole, later a United States Senator.

Sgt. Limoge served in Rome and Casablanca (Company “L” of the 87th) but was wounded March 1944 during night patrol. He stepped directly on a flare which ignited and drove up inside his leg and out his knee. Hospitalized nine months, he received the Purple Heart.

The six Vermonters from the 10th killed in action were: David C. Dennis, 21, of Bennington; Delmas J. Devenger, 22, of Danville; Everett R. Griffin, 20, of Barton; Edwin A. Johnson, 23, of Proctor; Robert J. Labombard, 22, of Vergennes and Herbert W. A. Spaulding, 30, of Cavendish.

War’s end

“I drove an executive officer through Florence as we pushed the Germans north,” said Ward. “We wound up in the town of Malcesine. That’s where we were when the war ended. We came home on the SS Marine Fox-a Sun Oil Company tanker. I never returned.”

Three New England monuments commemorate the 10th: In East Norwalk, Connecticut a plaque is erected honoring Distinguished Medal of Honor recipient PFC John McGrath. A second memorial stands on the Riva Ridge Ski Trail in the Berkshire East Ski Ridge, Massachusetts and the Mountain Road (Rte. 103) in Stowe, Vermont is dedicated as the Memorial Highway, 10th Mountain Division. There also is a National Memorial at Tennessee Pass in Colorado as well as one at Ft. Drum, New York. The 10th also is honored at Stowe’s Ski Museum.

Two hundred and fifty-six men residing or born in Vermont are listed as having served in the 10th Mountain Division. Many came to Vermont, New Hampshire, Colorado, and other states and established skiing as a national sport.

Gordon Lowe came to Stowe and became vice president of the Spruce Peak Ski area. Jack Murphy of the 86th established Vermont’s Sugarbush Valley Ski area and Arthur G. Draper, ex-86th helped establish New York’s Whiteface Mountain Ski area.

In November 1945, the 10th Mountain was deactivated at Camp Carson, Colorado but was reactivated at Camp Funston (Ft. Riley, Kansas) on July 1948 to train troops headed to Korea. Again it was deactivated on February 1958 at Ft. Benning, Georgia but was reactivated at Ft. Drum, NY in February 1985 (its current headquarters) henceforth to be known as the 10th Mountain (Light) Division.

In 1991 the 10th Mountain (Light) sent 1,000 troops to Operation Desert Storm. In August 1992 the Division built shelters to house Hurricane Andrew victims in Florida. The 10th was airlifted on two peace-keeping missions: first to Somalia, Africa in 1992 and in1994 to Haiti. The Division also has served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Riva Ridge Re-enactment

On February 18, 1995 a contingent of 10th Mountain (Light) Division soldiers from Ft. Drum, several Alpini and hardy veterans of the first Riva Ridge climb participated in a second climb commemorating the 1945 event 50 years later to the day. Joined atop the ridge by German ski soldiers, Italian Alpini, the Ft. Drum soldiers, the 10th Mountain veterans and two climbing instructors from the 172nd Mountain Infantry Battalion, Vermont National Guard, all stood in brotherhood, flags flying, to mark the event!

Post Script

Coincidently, Alexander Ward’s grandson, Brian J. McCormick, enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the 10th Mountain (Light) Division. He served in Baghdad and recently completed his tour of duty.

Margery Sharp is a freelance writer from Hinesburg, Vermont.

 

Emerald Hills, Green Mountains

The Irish in Vermont

By Cindy Ellen Hill

Vermont’s Green Mountains bear more than passing similarity to the emerald hills of Ireland. But picture postcards are for Yankee tourists: mills, quarries, iron rails—and freedom from England’s economic and cultural oppression—were all the destination-marketing needed to entice thousands of Irish immigrants since the early eighteenth century. Once here, many stayed, and Vermont’s ethnic tapestry today continues to weave around a strong core of Irish-American threads.

Early Irish

Vermont’s earliest Irish settlers were delivered by John Bull himself. “The British army was full of Irish,” says Vince Feeney, adjunct UVM professor of Irish history for over thirty years and author of a pending book on Vermont’s Irish. “In the French and Indian War and in the Revolution as well, many deserted. If you didn’t have a lot to go back to, here was an opportunity to start fresh.”

Irish-Vermonters lined up on both sides of the Revolution. Dublin-born Crean Brush is traditionally cast as Vermont’s loyalist villain opposite local hero Ethan Allen. And while Matthew Lyon may have been a genuine son of Vermont in spirit—infamously re-elected to Congress while serving a sentence for sedition at Windsor jail—he was Irish-born and active in the United Irishmen, a movement advocating Irish emancipation, factors which inspired his floor-of-Congress brawl.Feeney’s research shows that by the 1790’s about ten percent of Vermont’s inhabitants were Irish immigrants or first generation born of Irish parents. Some were Catholic, but many were Presbyterian Scots-Irish who came with the linen trade. A later collapse of the linen market boosted immigration to Vermont, where linen was quickly replaced by woolen production. But the fall of the linen market paled compared to the devastation of the potato blight.

Famine And Industry

The Great Hunger arose from successive crop failures beginning in the mid 1840s, but to attribute the famine solely to agricultural fungus is historical error. Over seven hundred years of British domination, Parliament had outlawed Catholic land ownership, rendering the Irish tenants on their own land. As Britain’s upper classes grew more prosperous, demand for beef, cheese, and butter increased. Irish lands were enclosed for pasture, and Irish tenants were squeezed onto smaller, higher, rockier plots. Potatoes, introduced in the 1600s by Sir Walter Raleigh from the Virginia colonies, became the necessary staple: they are the only means by which a family can raise a year’s supply of food on a postage-stamp plot of rock with no tools.Irish-raised food flowed to England in record quantities during famine, while the disenfranchised Irish died in the ditches or fled. “From 1845 to 1860 half of all immigrants coming to America were Irish,” writes Elise Guyette in Gathering and Interaction of People, Cultures and Ideas: Immigration to Vermont 1840 to 1930, a set of Vermont educational curricula. “By 1850, the largest foreign-born group in Vermont was Irish, numbering 15,377.”

Rails And Rocks

At the time of the famine, what Feeney calls a “mini industrial revolution” was going on in Vermont. Railroads, textile mills, and quarries drew the Irish from Boston and New York to Burlington, Bellows Falls, and St. Albans. “It was a perfect storm for Irish settlement,” says Peter Patten of Fair Haven.

Patten’s maternal ancestors arrived in North Poultney in the 1850s. “They had worked slate in Tipperary, and when they heard slate quarries were opening here they bee-lined over.” The west shore of Lake Bomoseen was all “patches,” small quarry villages where “even the American-born of several generations spoke with an Irish accent, the roads were so bad and people didn’t get out much. When I began to get interested in these things in the 1970s, the old folks in that area still talked with what was called the Castleton Brogue.” An American-born neighbor in Fair Haven “could say the Lord’s Prayer in the purist Munster Irish, so that must have been the last thing they let go of in the language, they held on to their prayers.”

Burlington attorney John Leddy’s ancestors were also famine Irish, among those arriving through the British Canadian quarantine station at Grosse Ile, where over 5000 souls expired of starvation in the summer of “Black ‘47” alone. “Congress had passed stringent immigration laws, they didn’t want the sick famine Irish coming in,” Leddy says, but ships bringing lumber from British Canada to England would otherwise be returning empty, and so were happy with human cargo loaded like cattle by landlords and relief agencies. It was not unusual for half the passengers to die en route.

The Leddys haled from the Meade side of Parish Kilbride, and eventually made their way to an Irish settlement in Underhill populated by other families from Leitrim and Cavan. Leddy’s parents moved to Burlington in 1924, when their farm was condemned for the Underhill artillery range. “My great aunt kept a summer camp in Underhill but everybody left the Irish settlement there, to Boston or Burlington. The Leddys moved in across from where the police station is now, on North Avenue, which was an Irish neighborhood. And my wife’s family, the Cassidys, lived on Park St. North, where there were a lot of Irish.”

Anti-Catholicism, The Civil War, And Fenians

The influx of famine Irish sparked anti-Catholic backlash. “The old British immigrants distrusted the Irish,” writes Elisa Guyette. “By the mid 1850s more than 100 members of the Vermont House represented Know-Nothingism, an anti-foreign sentiment pledged to end the spread of Catholicism.”The Know-Nothing movement temporarily dissipated during the Civil War, and when Irish Fenians attacked British Canada in the 1870’s, Vermonters of all religious stripes were supportive in sympathetic retaliation for the St. Albans raid. The Fenian military excursions failed in the short term, but cannot be ignored as part of a series of events which established the Republic of Ireland in 1923, in all but six counties of the Emerald Isle.In the 1890s when Vermont’s government enticed protestant Swedish farmers as antidote to the Irish and French Canadian plague. Later the Vermont Eugenics Program took a pointed interest in breaking up Irish, French-Canadian, and Abenaki families who were considered to have genetic criminal predisposition. But anti-Catholicism in Vermont was doomed by sheer numbers; despite the white Congregational Church-on-the-green iconography, the state today stands as the fourth most Catholic in the country.

Green Ties Continue To Bind

The 1920s and 30s were the great immigrant era, “but the newcomers are Italians, Poles, Finns, Swedes, a wholesale shift in immigration ethnicity,” Feeney says. “The Irish benefit from that, because, number one, they are so close to their own immigration experience that they can empathize, and number two, they are the success stories. The Irish become the upper class of the newcomers, and to a certain extent, except for the French Canadians, the new immigrants defer to the Irish, and the Irish become community and political leaders. In 1903 Burke was elected mayor of Burlington, Powers was elected mayor of St. Albans, Corey in Barre, H.A. Bailey was the first mayor of Winooski in 1920, and so on, all because of the changing demographics.”

While Irish immigration slowed to a trickle, the institutions which bound Vermont’s Irish communities–Catholic churches and schools–stayed strong through the 1950s. But whether due to frightful echoes of the eugenics program, the overwhelming urge to be modern Americans, or simply the passage of time and the loosening of tight church and community bonds, the light of Irish culture in Vermont grew dim by the 1960s.“

I think it was just assimilation, enough generations had gone by, and unlike Boston or New York there was no new influx of Irish immigrants here to keep the culture fresh,” Patten says. “DNA-wise, it is still very Irish around here. But in terms of identifying with Irish roots, it’s not that strong.”

That outlook, however, is fast changing.

Keeping the tradition of Matthew Lyon’s United Irishmen and the state’s Fenian circles, some Vermonters still work passionately to free the six counties of Northern Ireland from the British yoke. Graydon Wilson of Burlington has served as an international observer in Northern Ireland conflicts and organized a Vermont unit of Irish Northern Aid. “There’s a common misconception that the difficulties in the north of Ireland have been resolved,” Wilson says. “They’ve eased some, but the British government still rules the north. Loyalist gangs, still fully armed despite the IRA having decommissioned all of its weapons, still run rampant and terrorize Catholic communities. The work will not be over until Ireland is no longer a partitioned nation.”

Other Vermonters are rekindling their Irish heritage through music and cultural events. Tenor and bodhran player Patrick Webb was recently the first of his family to return to Ireland in over 150 years. He frequents the growing number of “seisuns”–Celtic music jams–in the Burlington area including Wednesday nights at both the Lincoln Inn at Essex Junction and Radio Bean in Burlington. Webb’s maternal grandmother was a MacAllister who married into the North End’s Ganey clan. Webb recalls her singing as she engaged in days-long bread and pie baking. “I do a lot of research in old Irish songs and some are hauntingly familiar,” he says. “I’m just drawn to it, I have a passion for Irish music.”

That passion led Webb to join with the Burlington Irish Heritage Festival, an annual mid-March week-long series cultural presentations celebrating the heritage of Vermont’s Irish. At the festival’s tenth anniversary in 2007, Webb launched the first Vermont Irish Music Showcase. This year’s Showcase will follow the Festival’s traditional ceili–a music and stepdancing party—on Sunday March 16th at the Contois Auditorium.

Many of Vermont’s Irish will be there, celebrating the Emerald Hills amidst the Green Mountains their ancestors came to call home.
Cindy Ellen Hill is an attorney in Middlebury.

Irish Culture in Vermont: Resources and Contacts

The Burlington Irish Heritage Festival runs annually the week preceding St. Patrick’s day. The Festival includes lectures, films, a children’s event at the Fletcher library, a ceili, and the Vermont Irish Music Showcase. Find the schedule, volunteer, or contact the Festival.

Irish Northern Aid is a nonprofit organization which works for peace in Northern Ireland by providing support to families suffering from violations of civil rights and political discrimination. Reach the Vermont unit at Graydon.Wilson@gmail.com.

Vermont’s Irish music scene is exploding. Some of Vermont’s top Celtic and Irish-American bands include O’hAnleigh, Trinity, and Atlantic Crossing.

You can also catch spectacular Celtic music on the “alternative” New Year’s Celebration >where for one low button price, more than twenty Celtic Vermont performers play at venues in the beautiful historic village of Richmond.

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