"My sympathies are all for the workingman, being one myself and with all my kith and kin of that sort … I was brought up on a farm and know something about how to plant corn, to pull flax, and to dig potatoes… I know it was a great disadvantage to me that I could not go to school, for I never have been to school since I was fifteen years of age. To obtain the little education I have, it has cost me many evenings, Sundays after church, and scraps of time that could be devoted to it, involving far more labor than it would have necessitated if I could have been sent to proper institutions of learning to have acquired a liberal education."

Justin Morrill

an immersive documentary on the life, times, and legacy of Justin S. Morrill

John Freitag, Stafford Town Historian, Eric Bishop von Wettberg, Chair of the Department of Animal and Veterinary Science, Director of Agricultural Experiment Station, and Professor , University of Vermont, Trina Gay, Landscape Architect

“His loyalty to Vermont never lessened. He took pride in her history, her beauty of mountain, stream, and valley, and in her people of whom he was himself so splendid a specimen… many Vermonters find a local paradise in every valley and upon every hilltop, where the homestead is decorated by rollicking brooks and tree-arcaded roadways, ancient orchards, and fragrant clover-nooks, the well-tilled fields and the giant sugar maples, and where a virtuous, thrifty, and hardy race, untempted by other attractions, find few occasions to quit their quiet surroundin even for health or pleasure. Stable as their mountains, summer or winter, here they are never unhappy. With the thermometer annually ranging from 30 below zero to 95 above, why should Vermonters seek a change of air?

No one could live in Vermont, certainly not in any of the four southeastern counties, without being interested in farming. Orange County and Strafford in particular was an almost purely agricultural district and remains so to this day. Morrill had been familiar with farming from his infancy; all his dreams of the quiet, studious, contemplative life had a farm in Strafford as their setting… We shall probably understand him better, both in his achievements and his limitations, if we think of him as applying to the great affairs of the nation the lessons of his country store, his farm, and his house.

The Life and Public Services of Justin Smith Morrill

William Belmont Parker, 1924

“The perpetuity of our free institutions, as well as the national prosperity and happiness of the people, can be best promoted by promoting the instruction and knowledge of the rising generation…of all the world, the United States can least afford to neglect the general and thorough culture of its people. Circumstances have made this question at the present moment of the very gravest urgency….if we are in large measure what our fathers have made us, the next generation will be sure to be more or less fashioned by those who today provide and direct our systems of education.”

THE JUSTIN MORRILL PROJECT…


The American Antebellum period had not previously been top-of-mind for me, but the more research I did on Justin Smith Morrill, the more I found clear - and fraught - parallels and lessons that helped me see the current moment more clearly. 

A Connecticut Yankee raised in the shadow of the University of Connecticut, my first employment was haying and sugaring. I eventually completed my doctorate at the University of Kansas, and then had the good fortune to migrate to Vermont - in reverse of those early radical abolitionists who settled Lawrence, KS to bring her into the union as a free state.

My life has been nurtured by the Land Grant Colleges, though I was unaware of how or why they came to be. This project, as with all projects worthy of sincere effort and a good amount of time well-spent, has given me perspective and has provided me with some insight to my own journey. Perhaps our histories burn more brightly within us through discovery and plain good luck.

The massive accumulation of wealth among a few in the “Gilded Age,” the deadly exploitation of industrial workers, the anti-immigrant hysteria, and the decimation of native peoples in the “expansion West,” reached out to me with ghostly - indeed bloody - tendrils, signing, in their silence, our current condition. This project could not have been more relevant and enlightening. 

The glaring contradictions of principle and practice, of fervor and callousness, of lofty ideals dampened by their restriction to a privileged few, served as guideposts - and flashing red lights - for me in this moment when techno-oligarchs amass unlimited powers that reach across international boundaries and scoff at any construct of law or ethics, were beacons for that which we each have, intrinsically, within us to grow our own powers. We are indeed a complex species, and perhaps Darwin was, in fact, correct… but then again, we are capable of so much more. 

I write this with joyful appreciation of the many contributors to this project, through whom I have found renewed hope and a clearer vision of the influential and important role of our Great State of Vermont and its hard-working, sincere, and welcoming daughters and sons. 

Vermonters seem to always show up when American Democracy needs the path forward cleared… from Ethan Allen to Bernie Sanders. And as we celebrate the legacy and ongoing influences of Justin Morrill in education, science, and government herein, despite all the ugly missteps and misconceptions engendered by the radical, even vicious, but nonetheless pervasive, transformation of the mid-1800s, perhaps it is our Northerly orientation, our clear night skies in January, the maple sap of March, and the Canadian wildfire smoke in July, that keep us humble.

Here, we still take Town Meeting Day as a celebration of our small and “slow democracy”, work the fields, and do our important scientific research, thankful for the natural beauty that surrounds, sustains, and inspires us… and we make great beer.

In this immersive website, born of just a few months of research, you will meet some of the folks who make “stuff” happen here in the name, and often because of, the legacy of Morrill. His reach is long, his presence felt, his guidance sought. 

There were so many who supported this project – farmers, scientists, educators, students – mostly just because we are Vermonters and know full-well what is at stake when corruption and greed poison the trust inherent in public service.

I am no historian; just a media artist and educator whose goal here was to bring some of our conflicted past into the present; to shine a creative light upon it, to learn, wonder, and critique; to find relevance and solace, and, above all, to celebrate where we have been so we can make decisions, collectively, about where we might want to go together into the future.

Special thanks and heartfelt appreciation, though, need to be made explicit… for the grant that funded this project awarded by the Chancellor’s Office of the Vermont State University, to my research and production assistant from the Community College of Vermont, where I teach, Annika Crego; to the board members of the Friends of the Morrill Homestead and their Executive Director, Kumari Patricia; to John Freitag, Stafford, Vermont’s Town Historian; to Laura Trieschmann at the Vermont Department of Historic Preservation for supporting the on-going revitalization of Morrill’s home and gardens in Stafford; to Steve Picazio and his crew at the Leahy Library of the Vermont Historical Society in Barre, and to my many mentors, colleagues, collaborators, soothsayers, fellow-provocateurs, witches, and union comrades here in the North Country. 

And last, but most important of all, to you… I hope you enjoy this offering…. and I thank you in advance for the time you might spend here.

I remain, as always, grateful for another day here in Vermont…

Stephen

Land Acknowledgement

In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which distributed public domain lands to raise funds for fledgling colleges across the nation.

The Morrill Act worked by turning land expropriated from tribal nations into seed money for higher education. In all, the act redistributed nearly 11 million acres — an area larger than Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. But with a footprint broken up into almost 80,000 parcels of land, scattered mostly across 24 Western states, its place in the violent history of North America’s colonization has remained comfortably inaccessible.