(HOST) Lately commentator Tom Slayton has been remembering author and historian Ralph Nading Hill and his determined search for the Burlington home of Ethan Allen.
(SLAYTON) It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time, years ago, when almost nobody went to the Burlington Intervale. Nobody, that is, except a few birding nuts – and Ralph Nading Hill.
Hill, who was a leading Vermont historian, went there because he was looking for an important Vermont historical site – the last home of Vermont hero Ethan Allen.
This was in the mid-1970s. Hill was convinced he could find the homestead because of research he had been doing, digging through old maps, deeds, and books. He roamed the Intervale farmland, and eventually his search focused on an old farmhouse sitting on a rise above a bend in the Winooski River.
Even though it wasn’t an absolutely perfect match, Ralph Hill was pretty sure he’d found the right house. He admitted that some of his evidence was circumstantial, even a bit vague. But the house itself was in the right place, according to those old deeds and maps.
However, it was bigger than the description of Allen’s small, two-story cottage. And what Hill could see of it had pretty obviously been built in the 19th century, not the 18th. After some inspection, though, he found that there was an older, smaller house hidden as a part of the newer building: the older house was an ell, and most of the 19th century building had been added onto it.
One thing you could say about Ralph Nading Hill – he was tenacious! Eventually, with help from the State of Vermont, he established a foundation that bought the property. Over several years, he oversaw removal of the newer elements of the building and the restoration of the smaller, older cottage. In 1987, the Ethan Allen Homestead was opened to the public. Hill, sadly, had died a month before the opening.
About that same time there began to be rumblings from some other historians who said that Hill was jumping to too many conclusions. There were soft spots in the evidence, some said. There was no conclusive proof that the Intervale house had been Ethan Allen’s.
However, more research was done, and finally the evidence was overwhelming. An article by two historians published in 2003 said it was pretty clear: Ralph Hill had been right. The house was, almost certainly, the last home of Ethan and Fanny Allen. The only thing researchers faulted the Burlington historian for was that a restoration of the interior that Hill oversaw probably made the homestead look too nice.
Ethan Allen and his family probably lived, they wrote, "…in cramped, cold conditions that we would find rough today, even for a camping trip." But, they added, modern historical methods confirmed Ralph Nading Hill’s gut conclusion that the house in the Intervale was, in fact, Ethan Allen’s. The prominent historian H. Nicholas Muller even said that the humble cabin was Vermont’s equivalent of Mount Vernon.
And the ghost of Ralph Nading Hill, having been proved right in his last, most significant contribution to Vermont history, was almost certainly smiling.
Tom Slayton is editor-emeritus of Vermont Life magazine.