Archive - Apr 2011
April 25th
GOSHEN/HANCOCK — Goshen residents last Thursday evening received some unexpected news: after years of waiting, their town was wired for broadband Internet service.
At a community broadband meeting at the Goshen Town Hall, FairPoint Communications representatives Beth Fastiggi and Sabina Haskell announced that, starting on Friday, town residents would be able to subscribe to high-speed Internet services.
And Fastiggi, vice president of FairPoint Communications in Vermont, said broadband coverage to parts of Hancock also went live that day.
FERRISBURGH — A Ferrisburgh resident who works to help Vermont businesses grow will receive a national award next month in Washington, D.C. that recognizes not only his career accomplishments, but also his extensive community service and his work in Montpelier on behalf of small businesses.
The Small Business Administration recently named Fresh Tracks Capital LC co-founder and managing partner Cairn Cross its “National Financial Services Champion.”
MONTPELIER — Vergennes Union High School sophomore Kaitlin Leroux-Eastman on April 14 won the title of Vermont Boys & Girls Clubs Youth of the Year, becoming the fourth member of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Vergennes in the past five years to claim that honor.
Leroux-Eastman, 15, was the youngest of the half-dozen local clubs’ Youths of the Year vying last week in Montpelier for state recognition. She and her competitors were judged on club and community service and their personal character and poise.
MIDDLEURY — As director of the Rokeby Museum, Jane Williamson knows a lot about how slaves moved covertly from South to North via the Underground Railroad.
But as the nation prepares to mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War that would end slavery, Williamson wants people to know what Addison County residents — and national figure Frederick Douglass — did overtly in an effort to end indentured servitude before hostilities began on April 12,1861.
April 21st
According to the heated rhetoric coming from certain quarters, United States citizens are laboring under a steadily increasing tax burden that is likely to bury us all under a mountain of debt and crush our hopes and dreams.
We all know of “wild” animals particularly adapted to human-made environments. Consider black bears in Adirondack state parks, deer in New Jersey suburbs, pigeons in the city and the ubiquitous raccoons. This winter an opossum was living in our woodpile until the pile got too low, and then it moved into our garage.
This past week I had an opportunity to witness another example, though one somewhat more surprising (at least to me).
ADDISON COUNTY — After two years of rock bottom prices, business is looking up for many Vermont dairy farmers.
Cornwall dairy farmer John Roberts, who with his wife Lisa milk 200 cows at Butterwick Farm, said that this week his milk pulled in $23.19 per hundredweight (cwt) — more than double what it was fetching just two years ago, in 2009.
“It’s a big step forward,” he said.
