The Founding of Stowe
Near Stowe, Vermont
Stowe was established as a settlement in seventeen ninety-four when Oliver Luce and his family moved to the Little River valley and built a homestead. Other families followed within months, drawn by land grants that New Hampshire Governor Benning Wentworth had issued to proprietors years earlier, before Vermont had separated from New Hampshire's claims and established itself as an independent republic in seventeen seventy-seven.
The name is generally traced to a place called Stow, and the spelling later gained an extra letter.
For its first century, Stowe was an agricultural town: dairy cattle, sheep, maple sugaring, and the hard work of clearing and farming the valley floors and lower hillsides. The mountain above town was a presence but not yet an economy. Hikers began arriving in the middle of the nineteenth century, drawn by summit views that on a clear day could reach New Hampshire's White Mountains, and a summit house stood on Mount Mansfield by the eve of the Civil War. But the full transformation of Stowe into a destination came later, when skiing arrived in the nineteen thirties and remade the town's relationship with winter, turning something to endure into something to celebrate.
