Previously on “The Secret History of Vermont”

Introduction.

Origin Story

This whole thing started when some friends came to visit. We were touring about in their rented car and the conversation went like this:

“What’s the (W) symbol on this map of Burlington mean?”

(pause)

“Richard, if you’re making something up it had better include cows!”

Chapter 1: The Unfortunate Burlington Cow Wharf Incident

Back in the days when the U.S. Federal Government was disorganized and inefficient (1789 to date) it often had difficulty maintaining an adequate supply of currency. When there weren’t enough bills and coins to go around people used commodities as a means of exchange. In Vermont the primary commodities were, of course, maple syrup and cows. Maple syrup was the more liquid of the two commodities but Vermont had so many cows that it was considered at the time to be the wealthiest State.

The problem with cows is that they are large and difficult to store. Wealthy people had country estates on which they kept their cows but for everyone else an institution was created that would take cows for storage and maintenance. The institution would try to make money from its deposits in the form of milk and animal labor and would pay the owner interest in the form of calves. For logistical reasons that will shortly be apparent the first of these institutions was located on Bank Street which runs along the shore of Lake Champlain in Burlington. Eventually these institutions became generically known as banks.

People who put their cows into a bank received certificates of deposit that then circulated as a convenient form of currency. Once a year however the banks were required by law to reconcile their accounts and a massive transfer of cows would take place. When this happened the entire Town was paralyzed by huge herds of cows on the streets so Reconciliation Day was declared an antibank holiday where everyone except bank employees got the day off.

In addition to moving cows between local banks there were foreign accounts that required reconciliation. This was accomplished by loading cows on a paddlewheel boat that would take them down the Hudson River to New York City. To do this the bank built the “Cow Wharf” next to its office on Bank Street and extending into Lake Champlain. The paddlewheel boat would dock at the Cow Wharf and the cows would be driven onto it and into the boat.

Loading the cows into the paddlewheel boat was always the last transaction of Reconciliation Day and everyone would don boots and line the sides of the streets to watch the cows go by and celebrate the end of another successful fiscal year. Shortly the beer vendors decided that watching a bunch of cows walk down the street was just way too boring and business would pick up if the cows stampeded down the street and onto the Cow Wharf instead. This proved to be tremendously popular and soon young men could be seen running ahead of the cows, trying to ride them, getting horribly injured, and generally acting like they had found a particularly potent variety of mushroom up in the woods.

Women would smile and cheer the men on and think, “This is the best way to weed out the gene pool that we’ve ever devised and I see that Richard, the adding machine repairman, is having nothing to do with it. I think I’ll go over to his log cabin and seduce him. I’d better hurry. Last year he had to put out one of those “Please Take A Number” machines.”

All of this came to a screeching halt one Reconciliation Day when the paddlewheel boat accidentally docked at the Maple Syrup Pipeline Wharf instead of the Cow Wharf and no one noticed until it was too late. The year’s entire foreign account transfer stampeded into Lake Champlain and drowned. Without the annual Vermont foreign account transfer most of the businesses in New York went bankrupt which triggered a regional depression.

There was a run on the banks as people withdrew their cows fearing for the safety of their capital and many banks failed as a result. (Native Vermonters kept their own cows and weren’t affected by any of this except for one who laughed so hard when he heard about it that he fell down and broke an ankle.) The paddlewheel boat company was sued until there was nothing left but a smoking hole in the lake. Its assets were sold to a foreign firm.

The only modern evidence of The Unfortunate Burlington Cow Wharf Incident is a (W) symbol sometimes seen on maps of Burlington where the Cow Wharf used to be. The author surmises that The Unfortunate Burlington Cow Wharf Incident was made part of the Secret History by Native Vermonters as a favor to Flatlanders who were only too glad to forget about the whole thing.