Eccentricity Fuels a Revival of Vermont’s River Towns

[groovedaddy]

BELLOWS FALLS, Vt. — Few people would describe Stephen McAllister as conventional.

After all, he once jumped out the window of his 11th-grade English class during a discussion of “Don Quixote” that he considered “particularly boring,” getting himself expelled from school in the process.

Now, Mr. McAllister has a plan that may seem as quixotic. At age 59, he has returned to this gritty river village, buying an abandoned paper mill on the Internet that he is turning into an eco-resort, a go-to place for “green marriages, green bar mitzvahs and carbon-neutral vacations.”

It is the kind of entrepreneurially eccentric idea that writers of a Depression era federal guide to Vermont found flourishing back then, especially in this southeastern sliver of the state along the Connecticut River, which has long bubbled with a kind of creative chutzpah.

Vermont, the authors suggested, was not just a state, but a state of mind.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/us/08vermont.html?_r=1&th=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&emc=th&adxnnlx=1218214830-F3joX3u7HNzN8Fwu9AO+Aw

[RadicalTexan]

1. That is awesome.

Texan considering moving to Vermont, here.