Shownotes Transcript
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So we're driving along a rural dirt road in Danville, Vermont. We've only passed a couple houses. Yeah, there's not much up here at all. Well, at least not anymore. Okay, we're going to sort of bear to the right up there and go across that intersection. Oh, cool. Look at that. There's an old wooden covered bridge in front of us. Yep, and our destination is just on the other side of that bridge. It's a one-lane bridge, but I haven't seen another car in a while. Yeah, you'll be fine.
Okay, you can pull the car in right there on the left just after the bridge, that little dirt parking area. All right, got it. All right, I don't see much here. A few grassy clearings. There's some park benches on the hill. What are we looking for? Okay, I admit there's not much to see now, but there are some hidden relics and mysteries that we'll have to search for. We've come to Danville, Vermont to explore the ruin of Greenbanks Hollow.
Hello, I'm Jeff Belanger. Welcome to episode 385 of the New England Legends podcast. And I'm Ray Ogier. Thank you for joining us on our mission to chronicle every legend in New England one story at a time. Be sure to like and subscribe to our podcast because it's free. And if you'd post a review and tell a friend or two about us, that'll help our community of legend seekers grow. And we'll go searching for the ruin of Greenbanks Hollow right after this word from our sponsor.
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Ray, remember when we were young kids, the main streets of our small towns were full of shops and diners and stores and five and dimes? Oh, yeah. My town had all of that. But then we got to be teenagers. And the big shopping malls came in. That they did. So I remember going to Danbury Fair Mall in Connecticut as a kid. It was our favorite hangout as a young teen without a driver's license.
our parents would drop us off there for hours. You know, it hit the food court, the arcade, check out the stores. I remember I used to hang out at the Auburn mall in Massachusetts. Good times. Yeah. But then, but then the shopping malls killed main street. Yeah. All of those shops and stores were left empty. It was depressing to see. It was.
But times change. You evolve or perish, and that includes businesses too. And today we're seeing the large shopping malls dwindling as people move to online shopping. And we've seen a little bit of a resurgence on Main Street as those shops and cafes start to return and cater to people who want to see and touch something before they buy it. The times in business never stay stagnant very long.
So anyway, back to why we're here in this remote section of Danville, Vermont. Ah, right, that. So you can see there's a historic marker right by the side of the road. Yeah, yeah, and it says Greenbanks Hollow, a forgotten village. And if we walk down this hill a little bit toward the stream called Joe's Brook, which used to be called Merritt's River, we can see some remnants. ♪
Oh yeah, yeah, I can see the stone foundation from a large building that was right next to the water. There are other cellar holes around here too. An entire village almost swallowed back up by nature at this point. And to find out how it got here and why it went away, let's head back to the year 1849.
It's the spring of 1849 here in Vermont. President Zachary Taylor was just sworn into office last month. The nation is buzzing about the gold rush to California. In fact, California is applying for statehood as tons of people flock there looking to strike it rich. Railroad tracks are being laid in almost every state and industry is growing everywhere. Industry around this part of Vermont is being driven by Merritt's River. Now the river flows easterly through the town and powers over 30 businesses.
Those water wheels are driving mills of all kinds. There's opportunity here, and an entrepreneur named Benjamin Greenbank knows it. Benjamin Greenbank just purchased the existing Bolton Woolen Mill that was built in 1795. The mill turns sheep's wool into cloth, then it's sold on the open market. Though the Bolton Mill isn't that large, Greenbank's plans are. ♪
In the coming months, Green Bank expands the woolen mill into a five-story factory. It's now the largest factory in the region, and Green Bank is on a hiring frenzy. Now, a factory that big requires people to run it.
In the coming months, he hires 45 people from 25 different families. With all those families moving to be near the mill, they need housing. And a store. And a school for the kids to attend. Pretty soon, Greenbanks Hollow is bustling.
The factory is processing tons of wool from dozens of sheep farmers in the region, and the giant facility is producing 700 yards of cloth daily. In only a few years, this little village has a factory, a school, a store, a post office, a gristmill, sawmill, and several houses. The thing is, this is truly a company town, meaning Benjamin Greenbank owns all of it. Not just the land. He owns the store, the school, and every other building.
One of the problems when you live and work in a company town is that you're completely beholden to your boss. Green Bank sets the price of everything, which more or less makes you an indentured servant. Still, life is pretty good in this Vermont hollow. There's work, there's shelter and food. Parents are able to raise their kids, though they're not exactly getting ahead, they're getting by. And that's the way it goes here in Green Bank's hollow year after year. It's Monday, December 14th, 1885.
Things here in the hollow are quiet. It's about 10 o'clock at night, and the night watchman at Greenbank's Woolman factory is making his rounds. He's making his way through the third floor of the building, holding his lantern and looking for any sign of trouble, but finding none. It's a quiet night. Boring, even. So the watchman sets his lantern on a nail sticking out of one of the support beams.
Oh no! The night watchman meant to hang the lantern on a nail, but he missed. Yeah. The lantern just crashed to the floor, and now there's a fire spreading as the oil from the lantern burns on the floorboards of the factory. The factory floors have been soaked with decades of oily lanolin, which comes out of the sheep's wool. The lanolin is flammable, and now the fire is quickly spreading throughout the floor. The night watchman knows this fire is beyond his ability to contain it, so he runs for help.
The fire is spreading quickly through the third floor spewing smoke and firelight into the night. Employees living nearby and even Mr. Greenbank whose house is nearby sees the fire. They all come running to the factory building.
Desperate, they fight the fire with buckets of water, with bags of sand, and anything else they can use. But years of oil have soaked into the wood. The fire is spreading to the floors above and below. To make things worse, they started the hydrant that feeds from the nearby river, but there's a gearing inside that's stuck, so no water's coming out. Within a few more minutes, it's clear that entering the building to fight this fire isn't going to be possible.
The situation is looking bleak. The heat and fire are so intense that those gathering begin to remove any items and goods they can from the store and houses across the street from the factory. The heat and flames are definitely going to jump the road.
It only takes a few hours for the factory to be reduced to ashes, as well as the post office and store, two houses, including Mr. Greenbank's home, and the wooden covered bridge. With the bridge gone, Greenbank's hollow is cut off from some of the other buildings and the rest of Danville.
By morning, it's clear Green Bank's hollow is never going to be the same. There's talk of rebuilding. After all, everyone lost their livelihood. It may not be perfect, but it was a job that provided for families. But Benjamin Green Bank knows if he needs to rebuild, he might as well look at all of his options. He could rebuild here, sure, but maybe there's a better place.
After exploring other options, Green Bank sees an opportunity to build a factory about 75 miles south in Enfield, New Hampshire. That location will offer him access to the railroad, and that could mean even bigger business opportunities for him. So Green Bank packs up and moves south. The folks left behind in Green Bank's hollow have nothing. There aren't many job opportunities with the factory gone, and finding work elsewhere is easier said than done.
Some of the locals rebuild the store and rebuild a smaller version of the gristmill, but it's not enough. In the coming years, the population dwindles as people move away for other work opportunities until finally, the empty buildings are left to rot away. And that brings us back to today. Most of Green Bank's hollow residents moved away within the first three years of the fire. The rest hung in there for almost 20 years more. The school closed its doors in 1912, and once the last people walked away...
What was left rotted away until only the cellar holes remained. Another part of this story we should mention is the wool supplies changed quite a bit since the time the factory was built in 1849. There were tariffs on woolens that were lowered in 1846. That stimulated foreign trade and increased demand, which was a good thing for a number of years. But it also meant woolen manufacturing was popping up all around the United States in great numbers.
The other problem was that the number of sheep to supply Greenbank's factory steadily declined to the point where rebuilding in the same spot didn't make much business sense either way. So everyone who lived and worked there more or less lost their livelihoods. And that's a scary thing. The way of life you knew, your job, were all gone in just a few hours. Now today we can walk around and see the foundation remains from another time and another way of life.
So this sign reads, B, Green Bank's Residence. There's a square cellar hole in what's left of the foundation. So I guess this is where the boss lived. It was. Now, we already saw the large foundation down by the stream that was the woolen mill. On the other side of the bridge, there's more foundations, including a boarding house and the post office.
The Danville, Vermont Historical Society has marked each foundation with a sign to tell you which foundation was which building. Today, Greenbanks Hollow is a ghost town, a reminder of what can happen when an industry of business collapses overnight. These markers and foundations are like a tombstone to remind us that no job and no way of life lasts forever.
No, it doesn't. And that takes us to After the Legend, where we take a deeper dive into this week's story. Sometimes we're off course. After the Legend is brought to you by our Patreon patrons. This group is the ultimate New England Legends insiders. They support us financially in everything we do, whether it's our hosting, marketing, or travel expenses, or supporting our charity, Zombie Prom, like they did last week.
It's just three bucks per month, and for that, you get early ad-free access to new episodes, plus bonus episodes and content that no one else gets to hear. They also get discounts on tickets and merch. Please go to patreon.com slash newenglandlegends to sign up. And to see some pictures of the historic Greenbanks Hollow, click on our link in our episode description. Go to our website and click on episode 385.
I mean, this must be very common around the United States or the world, really, especially back then when they didn't have access to like a proper fire brigade, you know? Well, yeah. And the buildings were all wood. And one of the things that I thought was interesting about this is I've heard of lanolin, right? Lanolin is an oil. You can actually buy it. It comes from sheep's wool and sheepskin. It keeps them warm and
but I didn't realize it was flammable. Not good for a woolen factory. A wooden woolen factory, right? So all this wood has got decades of lanolin oil soaking into the wood. So once it catches fire, it's like a candle wick. Did we not know enough about wood back then? No.
I think... And oil? I think they knew. And I think they knew the dangers because... I mean, they must have. But this is what we have to work with. I've done tons of stories, especially on Ghost Adventures, where...
these old West towns, they were all wooden buildings. The wood was brought in, the buildings were put up very quickly, and a fire starts in one part of town. It's windy, and it burns down the whole town. Sure. You know, you just, I mean, a fire that started two blocks away is a serious danger to your house. Yeah, in the saloon with all the whiskey. Right, yeah. You're absolutely right, though. And we take that for granted today that we've learned a lot about, you know, how you build and where you build and putting spaces between buildings just in case there's a fire, that kind of stuff.
Something else that was interesting, and I don't want to bore us with economics here, but this is a little bit in the weeds, nerdy stuff. But in 1846, under the directive of President James Polk, tariffs were lowered on a lot of manufactured goods, including woolens.
Because there was negotiations with Great Britain. And with lower tariffs, Great Britain responded by also lowering their tariffs, and that stimulated a lot of foreign trade. So basically, woolens could go—you could sell it in America, you could sell it overseas, and the business boomed. Green Bank saw that as an opportunity, and that's why he, you know, with the lower tariffs, he knew he could make more money.
Because the thing about a tariff, a tariff is a tax, and it's a tax paid by the people who import. So we're learning all about that now. We are. So a tariff means tax. It literally means tax. It is a tax that you pay when you bring something into your country. And the idea is to give an incentive to...
to, you know, to buy locally instead of buying foreign and stimulate, you know, jobs and stuff. However, this is an example where the lowered tariffs created a lot of American jobs because there was an opportunity to produce in abundance and sell it elsewhere. So that was what changed and what led to the rise of that factory. But then, you know, as more competition comes up,
then things change over time. So it's a really interesting story. And the Danville Historical Society has done an amazing job. You can go there. There's signs. There's maps. You can get little brochures with maps on it, and you can walk all the cellar holes. And there's trails, and the brook is really pretty. It's now a brook. It's not really a river anymore. And back when that woolen mill was in operation, there was a mill pond. So they had created a dam to...
fire, you know, run a water wheel. And so it's a really pretty and well-preserved walk in the past. And you can just imagine how like you had this life, you know, like you have your job. You're like, Hey, I know. All right. We're not getting rich or whatever, but we're getting by and we have a good life here and we like everybody or whatever.
And it's all over in one night. And you're so used to being there. Yeah. And now you have to maybe go to a big city where you were from a place that had a one lane bridge. Yeah. That's it. You had this simple, quiet life with your family and your kids. Away from everybody. This happens all the time. Yeah. Right. Hopefully not from a fire. It could be layoffs. Yeah. Like suddenly like your whole company is laid off or your department's laid off or whatever. And suddenly you're just like, oh my, our whole way of life. Yeah.
This is not a new phenomenon. This has happened, you know, for as long as there have been business, but it's still awful when you're, when it affects you, when you're the one that goes through it. And then, you know, of course, you know, you're like, oh, all my eggs were in that one basket. Right. That one job basket, you know, which is, which is a scary thing, but it's, it's a sort of a testament to these, uh,
These folks from a different time, different place, and you can still see it. You can walk around it. And feel it, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it is a ghost town. We read the newspaper accounts. There was no...
No mention of anyone dying in the fire. That's good. Yeah. So people did get out safely. But their livelihoods died. Their souls, in some cases, died. Yeah. Think about that, man. Especially if you'd worked there for like 25, 30 years, but you still need to work. Yeah. You're like, where do we go? What's the area like around that, outside of the bridge? Not much. Nothing, huh? Yeah. You'd really have to travel. That's a small town. Yeah. You're moving. You are going to pick up everything you have and move miles away to find some other job opportunity. Yeah.
And that's the way it went. But it's a great, it's a well-preserved place. And I did read about this. In January, they hold bonfires. Oh, yeah. And the Historical Society will hold an annual bonfire where people bring, like, you know, s'mores and marshmallows and hot dogs. That's fun. Yeah, for sure. So it's a way to... So they're celebrating it. They're celebrating it. Keeping it alive. By starting a fire. Oh, no. I didn't think of that. Yeah.
The very thing that ruined the place. But there's nothing to burn there now. It's just grass and stone, so no wood left. But they do hold an annual bonfire, which could be worth checking out if you're in the neighborhood. If you've got a story we simply must check out, please reach out to us anytime through our website. Most of our story leads come from you. Plus, we love hearing from you. Our website is also a place where you can find out where Jeff is going to be with his ongoing story tour and where you can see dates for my band, the Pub Kings. You
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