Only Bevan Quinn and Lisa Walker of Guilford and Stowe (anagram: fluoridated gowns), respectively, knew the correct answers to the questions posed in the January-February 2022 (and final) issue of the VLCT News magazine. The Vermonter who disappeared in 1812 and was thought to have been rubbed out by his brothers-in-law was Russell Colvin, a classified ad published in the Rutland Herald led to his eventual discovery, and the name of the gent who claimed he saw Russell’s ghost in a dream was Amos Boorn. Splendid shamusing!
Use these clues to solve the VLCT Journal's inaugural Municipality Triviality:
- He was born on a Tuesday during the winter of 1763.
- He worked on his dad’s farm until he was 17 years old.
- In 1795, he visited a cousin in Bradford, Vermont.
- Later that year, he bought a lot of 92 acres in Bradford.
- To help pay for the land, he and his cousin made axes that “were manufactured and tempered so finely, it was said ‘there could be found no such axes anywhere’ and they were urged to make more.”
- Within the year, he completed the first edition of his product. To be perfectly blunt, it needed work.
- With 130 dollars from the sale of farm produce and stock, he purchased a third edition “in sheep” of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; or a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Miscellaneous Literature, which taught him about the product he was determined to manufacture.
- The earliest date of sale of his product that can be clearly identified is January 18, 1810, a mere fourteen days after that seal hunter, Frederick What’s-his-name, discovered Campbell Island in the Subantarctic.
- Some of the success of the gent’s fledgling industry was due to the sponsorship of Vermont Supreme Court Justice Nathaniel Niles of West Fairlee.
- He was three times married and died at the age of ninety-two years and twelve days.
Who was the manufacturer and what did he manufacture?
Email your answers to dgunn@vlct.org. My answers, the culmination of days of tireless research, will be revealed in the April issue of this fine online publication (infantile bunion police).