Fall, 2009

By Geoffrey Norman
Photography by Hubert Schriebl

There is a particular ridge that straddles the border between New York and Vermont where I find myself spending a fair amount of time in the fall, hunting for grouse and woodcock. Everything lives on this ridge-deer, turkeys, moose, bear and all manner of smaller animals. There is good cover with plenty of water and food. Lots of berries and gnarly old apples growing on the trees in an old, gone-by orchard that is still hanging on. And more nuts than I've seen anywhere in Vermont. The butternut trees grow down at the base of the ridge, along the bank of a small stream. Higher up, there is a stand of shagbark hickory.

As often as I have walked under those trees, I've picked up fewer than a dozen hickory nuts to stick in my vest pocket and inexpertly smash with a hammer when I get home. For a long time, I thought it was the squirrels that had beaten me to the hickory nuts. They have to make a living in the woods, after all, and I'm just out there for recreation. So they get out earlier than I do.
But the squirrels do have a human competitor for those hickory nuts. For a long time, I didn't know this. Then, one day when I was hunting the ridge with a friend, we walked through that stand of hickory trees and, as usual, there wasn't a single nut anywhere on the ground. » read more

Until lately, the woods behind my house had always seemed a tranquil place. The kids would play down there for hours when they were small, building forts and damming the stream to make swimming holes. I go down there to walk or to pick mushrooms.

But my view has changed. Those few acres are no longer an enchanted woods. They are a dark and dangerous forest. Wicked, hungry beasts live there.

Perhaps I should start at the beginning. » read more

By Louise Jones
Photography by Hubert Schriebl

The house was built in 1806 in the middle of Rupert, on the present corner of Routes 153 and 315. Known as the Carver house, it's a handsome white clapboard farmhouse with a porch on two sides and barns in back and across the street, but it was sadly dilapidated. Then a few years ago I noticed a crew working on it. Great, I thought, someone has bought it before it collapses. That someone was Christopher Kimball, cookbook writer and the man behind two acclaimed cooking magazines, the sixteen year-old Cook's Illustrated and the five year-old Cook's Country. He also oversees the PBS television shows based on the magazines. America's Test Kitchen from Cook's Illustrated is filmed in the company's headquarters in Brookline, Massachusetts, but the new America's Test Kitchen from Cook's Country is being filmed in the Carver house. PBS comes to Rupert!

"I always liked this house and when it came on the market a few years ago I bought it," Chris told me. "Then, when I decided to change the venue for the Cook's Country TV shows-take it out of the Boston area-it seemed like a good place." Chris Kimball spent his childhood summers and holidays in Sandgate, where his parents owned a small farm. He and his wife Adrienne and their four children have continued the family tradition at their own Sandgate farmhouse and he's a popular figure in the area. He supervises Sandgate's annual summer pig roast and attends the Rupert firemen's carnival and barbecue. His editor's letter at the front of each magazine issue is invariably set in one of the two towns. » read more

By Kathleen James
Photography by Hubert Schriebl

When Seth Bongartz was hired as executive director of Hildene in January 2002, he presented the board of directors with two theoretical options. Like many house museums across the country, Hildene was at a crossroads, suffering from declining attendance and revenues. Option one: Draw a 20-acre circle around the historic home and gardens, and sell the rest of the land to fund an endowment. Option two: Put the entire 412-acre landscape to work. Bongartz and the board picked the latter, and a new chapter in Hildene's history had begun.

"Looking back at Hildene 200 years from now, the greatest chapter will always be the first," says Bongartz. He's talking about the 1970s, when a grassroots group of volunteers raised enough money to buy the Lincoln family estate and turn it into a nonprofit museum. "It was an absolute miracle that they saved this place. They did everything right. They saved the house and gardens and they got the job done." » read more