We hear a lot these days about immigration. Heated rhetoric from Washington, D.C., tells us that we should only allow people from “the right countries” into ours; everyone else is a threat to American democracy.
The vitriol against some newcomers is considerably less noticeable here in Vermont; we generally smile when we call someone a “flatlander,” and there have been relatively few historical or contemporary Green Mountain instances of violence against individuals or groups based on their ethnicity, religion, skin color, or sexual orientation.
No society is perfect on prejudice and discrimination, but “No room for hate in our brave little state” is a motto most Vermonters embrace with enthusiasm.
This does not imply that Vermont’s record has been spotless. When our population began to stagnate in the 1830s and stayed nearly flat for a century as emigration and immigration leveled out, many of the Victorian Vermonters who stayed became anxious about who was arriving. Our best and brightest young men and women were leaving, the story went, and the newcomers were not like us.
Some Vermont Yankees looked with dismay on the Irish who came to build the railroads, the French Canadians who took jobs in agriculture and industry, and the Italians in our marble and granite quarries. Cultural and religious differences, language barriers, and varying paces of assimilation seemed like major problems at a time when Vermont’s economy was not keeping pace with national growth and prosperity.
Even Rowland E. Robinson, our blind Quaker author and one of the gentlest Vermonters of his day, worried about the social changes. “The character of these people,” he wrote about French Canadians, “is not such as to inspire the highest hope for the future of Vermont, if they should become the most numerous of its population.”
Anxiety remained high in the latter decades of the 19th century. The anarchist and socialist leanings of some of Washington County’s stoneworkers bothered a good many local Vermonters.
Reminiscing 60 years later about small-town Vermont in the 1890s, Robert L. Duffus recalled the immigrant quarrymen of Williamstown and how “Mr. Ainsworth and some of the other worthy citizens would have liked to turn the Italians into old-fashioned Vermonters.” Looking back more than a century, it’s easy to dismiss the worries as unfounded, but at the time they seemed valid, as their twenty-first-century manifestations do to many Americans today.
Some Victorian Vermont leaders thought they had a solution. Building his Rutland County marble empire to an impressive size after the Civil War, Redfield Proctor gave his hiring agents in eastern port cities instructions on what kinds of newcomers to recruit. The marble operations employed workers from nearly a dozen countries, but Proctor told his representatives to concentrate on Swedes, Finns and carefully selected Italian immigrants with experience in the stone industry. Given Proctor’s rise to wealth and power, no doubt other Vermont industrial employers of his day followed his lead.
In the late 1880s, Alonzo B. Valentine laid out a bold plan for managing immigration to the state. Civil War veteran, ex-state senator and owner of a Bennington knitting mill, Valentine became Vermont’s first Commissioner of Agricultural and Manufacturing Interests in 1888. Taking inspiration from Maine’s 1870s efforts to establish Scandinavian communities in depressed rural districts, he launched a program to settle Swedish immigrants on abandoned Vermont hill farms.
“The Scandinavian is our cousin,” he explained, “with like instincts of freedom, secular and religious.” Vermont recruiting agents went to Sweden; Valentine got Rand McNally to publish a Swedish-language map of the state; and when the first Swedish families arrived here in 1890 Valentine distributed them among farms in Weston, Wilmington and Vershire.
Things went well at first. “I visited the Swedish settlements at Wilmington and Weston,” Gov. Carroll S. Page stated in his 1890 inaugural address. “It is clearly for the interest of Vermont that we induce these people to come to our state and locate upon our unoccupied farm lands.”
Success proved illusory. Within a year or two, the lure of better wages drew many of the Swedish settlers away to work in lumber camps, quarries and factories. A few remained in Vermont, but their moving away from the hill farms broke up the Scandinavian enclaves Valentine hoped would attract more immigrants. Vermonters had to continue the search for solutions to the perceived malaise of many communities.
There are lessons to be learned from the anxieties and concerns of our Victorian predecessors, I think. Between 1850 and 1920, Irish, Italian and eastern European immigrants posed no threat to the ethos of the state; instead, their gradual assimilation and eventual participation in Green Mountain social, economic and political affairs strengthened Vermont.
That has been true throughout American history and elsewhere, and we’d do well to consider the likelihood that it will be in our time as well.
J. Kevin Graffagnino lives in Essex. He is a historian and collector of Vermont history, and has taught and lectured on various topics of U.S. and state history. He has a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and doctorate in history. Across his career, he has worked in libraries, special collections and for historical societies, including the Vermont Historical Society and the University of Vermont Library Special Collections. He is the author of many history books, including “Vermontiana.” His column will appear each week in The Times Argus and Rutland Herald, as well as The World, through 2026 as part of the nation’s semiquincentennial.