The Sound of Music<\/em>, settled near Stowe a few years after coming to the United States in exile from their native Austria.\u00a0 And, plainly, succeeding generations have prospered.\u00a0 In the village of Stowe itself, we took considerably more time examining the little Roman Catholic chapel \u2014 Blessed Sacrament Church.\u00a0 We also spoke at some length with a painter-restorationist who was working on its facade.\u00a0 My wife and I were both smitten with it, and I plan to write something about it in the near future.\u00a0 (We bought a book about the chapel and its remarkable history, but I obviously haven\u2019t had time to read it yet.)<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then we proceeded back to the general area of Sharon, Vermont.\u00a0 We drove through Tunbridge, where Joseph Smith Sr. is said to have first met Lucy Mack.\u00a0 We also drove over to nearby Hanover, New Hampshire, the site of Dartmouth College.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve long wanted to see Dartmouth.\u00a0 The fellow who was arguably the outstanding student in the high school class ahead of mine went off to Dartmouth and, during a return visit to California, tried to persuade me to go there, as well.\u00a0 And I very nearly applied.\u00a0 I\u2019ve wondered, since then, how my life would have been different had I gone to Dartmouth for my undergraduate studies, instead of BYU.\u00a0 Of course, that can never really be known.\u00a0 And we\u2019re prone, when musing about such things, to imagine a hypothetical alternative life in which we still have every good thing that we actually do have in our real lives plus<\/em> the additional benefits that we would have gained from that hypothesized alternative biography.\u00a0 But, of course, that cannot possibly be true.\u00a0 Every door that we walk through inevitably closes other doors to our entry.\u00a0 Had I gone to Dartmouth, I wouldn\u2019t have met the friends and the faculty that I came to know at BYU.\u00a0 Presumably, I wouldn\u2019t have met my wife.\u00a0 And on and on and on.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
It almost makes one think of a famous poet with strong ties to Vermont \u2014 Robert Frost, who is buried in Bennington and who himself attended Dartmouth \u2014 and of perhaps his most famous poem, \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,<\/span>
\nAnd sorry I could not travel both<\/span>
\nAnd be one traveler, long I stood<\/span>
\nAnd looked down one as far as I could<\/span>
\nTo where it bent in the undergrowth;<\/span><\/p>\nThen took the other, as just as fair,<\/span>
\nAnd having perhaps the better claim,<\/span>
\nBecause it was grassy and wanted wear;<\/span>
\nThough as for that the passing there<\/span>
\nHad worn them really about the same,<\/span><\/p>\nAnd both that morning equally lay<\/span>
\nIn leaves no step had trodden black.<\/span>
\nOh, I kept the first for another day!<\/span>
\nYet knowing how way leads on to way,<\/span>
\nI doubted if I should ever come back.<\/span><\/p>\nI shall be telling this with a sigh<\/span>
\nSomewhere ages and ages hence:<\/span>
\nTwo roads diverged in a wood, and I\u2014<\/span>
\nI took the one less traveled by,<\/span>
\nAnd that has made all the difference.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
From Dartmouth and Hanover, we drove to Lebanon, New Hampshire.\u00a0 Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith and their family were living in Lebanon when Joseph Jr. contracted typhus fever and nearly lost his leg to a resultant infection with hematogenous osteomyelitis.\u00a0 It was a Dr. Nathan Smith, the founder of Dartmouth Medical College \u2014 no relation to Joseph Sr. or Joseph Jr. \u2014 who saved Joseph Jr.\u2019s leg by means of an experimental surgical practice that he himself had developed.\u00a0 (He was decades ahead of his time.)\u00a0 This, I have to confess, puzzled me for a while.\u00a0 Thoughtlessly \u2014 some quality time spent with a good map would probably have cured my con fusion \u2014 I placed the surgery in the Palmyra area, and I wondered why a physician would come all the way from up in New Hampshire to perform such an operation on a seemingly insignificant boy.\u00a0 But the site of the Smith home in Lebanon is perhaps as little as two or three miles from the current site of Dartmouth\u2019s medical school.\u00a0 And that\u2019s why Hyrum Smith, Joseph\u2019s elder brother, actually attended Dartmouth College for a short while.\u00a0 (He may also have been the family\u2019s means of making contact with Dr. Nathan Smith and securing his services.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Finally, we headed further down the road to Brattleboro, Vermont.\u00a0 A curious footnote to this place is that two Nobel laureates in literature have made it their home:\u00a0 Saul Bellow perhaps not so surprisingly \u2014 it\u2019s a remarkably pleasant and beautiful place \u2014 but also the British writer Rudyard Kipling.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Brattleboro, Vermont<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 On Saturday, en route from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, we stopped off at Sharon, Vermont, at the birthplace of the Prophet Joseph Smith.\u00a0 Although I had visited all of the other major eastern Church historical sites multiple times, I had never previously gone up to Sharon.\u00a0 (It\u2019s a bit of a geographical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1809,25115,25118,25121,11030,380,13357,13360,2905,1812,1815,7113,19669,25133,788,55,1667,25124,24955,17942,20386,25127,25130,24926],"class_list":["post-92653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints","tag-dartmouth","tag-dartmouth-college","tag-hanover","tag-hyrum-smith","tag-joseph-smith","tag-joseph-smith-jr","tag-joseph-smith-sr","tag-latter-day-saint","tag-latter-day-saints","tag-lds","tag-lds-church","tag-lebanon","tag-leg","tag-mormon","tag-mormonism","tag-mormons","tag-nathan-smith","tag-new-hampshire","tag-sharon","tag-surgery","tag-typhoid","tag-typhus-fever","tag-vermont"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>