Planning to spend about two weeks at Killington, I decided
to get a short term membership at a gym in Rutland, the center of which is 18
miles away from Sasquatch Lodge on the east side of Killington mountain . There
may have been something closer at one of the resort accommodations at
Killington, but I have little time for poorly equipped gyms with very short
hours. The Gymnasium (the gym’s name) in Rutland fit my needs perfectly for
$30/week and was never the slightest bit busy.

Rutland is officially the third most populous town in
Vermont with around 20,000 people, 16,000 in the city limits and the remainder
in the rest of the township. I thought it was second biggest in the state after
Burlington but South Burlington is slightly bigger. That’s pretty tiny, huh? It
shows you just how rural a state Vermont remains.

As far as I can tell, Rutland seems like a very livable kind
of a place. It’s small town center is reasonably lively and attractive for a
town of under 20,000. I recall the days when I was young and my parents
believed you couldn’t get anything of value out in the country. The quality of
the food, meat, and produce was bad, the medical services were poor, the… .yadi,
yadi, yadi! How much of that was just my
father’s New Yorker prejudice against “the sticks” and how much was still true
at the time (1970s-ish) I can’t say for sure, but it’s not the case nowadays.
Sure, there’s not as big a selection of restaurants as in a big metropolitan
area or even a lively college town, but the quality and variety of the fresh
food in the grocery stores in Rutland is as high as what I encounter in Denver
or New Jersey.

I had long heard that Vermont was the only state without a
Walmart, but that’s definitely not the case anymore since there’s one in
Rutland. Maybe it’s part of the plan to keep town centers busy, but the
shopping center that includes a Walmart in Rutland is right next to the
downtown on what I suspect was a disused industrial area or maybe a railyard.
It seems a little odd.

One of Rutland’s few real attractions is a small Norman
Rockwell Museum with an extensive collection of his works. The Rutland Museum
is only a private collection . The official Norman Rockwell Museum including his
studio is located in Stockbridge, Massachusetts which I visited in 2012. I
decided to stop at this one for old time sake, though. Way back in autumn of
1989 between finishing college and getting my first job, I took a long weekend leaf-peeping
trip to Vermont with my parents, and we visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Rutland.
My mother was quite fascinated with it, while my father was thoroughly bored. This
stop at the museum brought back memories of that trip I took with them almost
27 years ago.



Rutland is near the center of a valley that has several
nicknames which revolve around its marble quarrying industry, such as Marble
Valley and Stone Valley. Vermont’s unique geology is such that several large
veins of marble run north to south through the western part of the state from
Dorset and Danby in the south north to the Burlington area. Rutland and
surrounding towns such as Danby and Proctor are the center of the largest marble
producing industry in the U .S. On one of my drives around the area I stopped at
the Vermont Marble Museum, located in the old mill of the Vermont Marble Company
in Proctor. It’s geological and historical exhibits and films were actually
quite interesting, particularly for me the parts about the diverse immigrant
groups the marble industry attracted to the region, similar to mining towns in
Colorado – Poles, Slovaks, Swedes, and Finns as well as French Canadians,
Irish, Scots, and Italians common elsewhere in New England. Most of the major
marble monuments in the U.S. ranging from the columns of the Jefferson Memorial
to the Tomb of the Unknown Solider in Arlington National Cemetery are from the
area. Interestingly, the eastern side of Vermont has extensive deposits of
Granite with the Barre area being one of the largest granite quarries in the
U.S.

Being in Rutland on many days of my stay in Vermont, I took
several drives into the countryside west, southwest, and northwest of town
towards the New York border through some very bucolic countryside of small
villages with white churches and village greens, dairy farms, and covered
bridges . While the landscape is hilly and scenery pretty, it’s much less rugged
than the Green Mountains which run north-south through the center of New
Hampshire. Nos ski mountains and posh resort towns here, just old-fashioned
looking countryside. The scenery has probably changed significantly over the
years, though, in the sense that the traditional styles of barns and silos that
once dominated the landscape are becoming obsolete and less common, lost in
favor of modernized agricultural operations.