The Aldis Hill Wolf Monument

This heavy marble stone on Aldis Hill marks a vanished Vermont. The inscription tells you that on this spot in the year eighteen thirty-nine, Lawrence Brainerd shot a gray wolf that had been ravaging the northeast part of Franklin County. The great beast, it says, measured six feet in length.

In those years wolves still roamed New England, preying on the livestock of frontier farmers, and Brainerd, who would later become a United States senator, climbed this hill to end the threat. Naturalists note the wolf was probably not truly the last in Vermont, but the kill loomed large enough in memory to be carved in stone. Curiously, no one is quite certain who hauled this massive monument up the hill, or exactly when. It remains a quiet relic of the day the wild was pushed out.