Howard
Coffin, historian and author, will be speaking on “Vermont Women and the Civil
War,” Sunday, April 6 at 3 pm in the Willey
Building in Cabot. This event was postponed last week because of inclement
weather. Howard is a seventh-generation Vermonter, an author and
historian, whose area of expertise is the Civil War. He is the
author of four books on the Civil War: “Something Abides: Discovering the Civil
War in Today’s Vermont”; “Full Duty: Vermonters in the Civil War; Nine Months
to Gettysburg”; and “The Battered Stars”, as well as “Guns Over the Champlain
Valley”, a book on military sites along the Champlain Corridor.
With
nearly 35,000 of the state’s able-bodied men at war, Howard speaks about how
women took on farming, worked in factories, served as nurses in the state's
military hospitals, and more. At least one Vermont woman appears to have
secretly enlisted and fought in a Vermont regiment.
Admission
is free and the talk is sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council and the
Cabot Historical Society.
This picture is of Clarina IreneHoward Nichols, a women born in Townshend, VT., who was a newspaper editor, writer, activist, lobbyist and public speaker during the years of the Civil War.
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It looks like our weather may be showery on Sunday, but nothing like last week when we had to reschedule Howard's presentation. I would advise staying on paved roads getting to Cabot, not going over Cabot Plain or following Brickett's Crossing Road to 215. The back roads in town are passable, but not pretty.
If you haven't sent in your Ice-Out Tickets, you are out of luck as of midnight last night! The contest closed as of midnight, but the flag is still up and the clock is still ticking! As soon as anything changes, I'll let everyone know, but right now we just wait for Mother Nature to decide.
There isn't a lot of melting going on here today. I was outside a little before noon and although the sun was nice and bright, the wind was really cold. We still have a fair amount of snow and we are expecting more tonight, but then it will turn to rain and hopefully launch us into weather that is more like the spring we've been waiting for. I'm ready.
Although there is open water in the first two ponds, the big pond looks pretty solidly frozen. However, the sun does have heat in it and even with cool temperatures ( only 34F at 1 p.m.) there is some melting going on. Much of the new snow we got this past weekend has gone - just in time for another fresh coat tonight! There is still old snow left on the shady sides of hills and in the woods. If, as forecast, the snow turns to rain tomorrow, whatever snow we have will likely go quickly and the ice on the pond will begin to show signs of departing.
In the meantime, I heard a robin chirping away happily earlier this morning. There haven't been as many birds at my feeder today and I think that's because they are finding plenty of natural food now there is some bare ground again. I may put my feeder out again tomorrow if there is snow on the ground, however, I think the birds will be fine without my help from now on. I can finally clean the window where the feeder was. They are really messy eaters and oil from the seeds flying around smudges the window glass. It's been too cold to try to do much about it, but the first warm day we get, I'll clean it up.
It's lunch time and the mail just came, so I'm off to the mailbox and then will settle down with a bite to eat. I hope your day is happy, safe, and uneventful except for something wonderful.