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Spring
As Vermont's shortest and most unpredictable season, spring gave rise to few unique leisure pursuits but instead was conducive either to winter or summer activities, weather permitting. Many winter indoor preoccupations -- reading, music, card playing, children's games -- constituted domestic leisure time well into April. Unlike winter, when suitable snow and ice conditions made transportation easy and enjoyable, Vermont's notorious "mud season" could make roads impassable and attendance at community events often suffered. Outdoor activities -- skating, sledding, sleigh-riding, tobogganing -- continued until the last good snows. With the arrival of warmer weather -- mud season permitting -- Vermonters took to the fields, forests, hills, mountains, rivers and lakes, easing into recreational pursuits of summer. Although restricted, and sometimes put on temporary hiatus during Lent, popular social activities -- parties, sociables, entertainments, and balls -- continued, albeit with a more sober tone and usually justified as benefits -- and weather permitting. Vermont's sense of geographic and social isolation diminished rapidly after the Civil War. Veterans returned home with a worldview drastically altered by their experiences. The pages of popular journals, periodicals, and catalogs were filled with new information and changing ideas. The railroad made travel out of state easier for Vermonters and brought entertainers, lecturers, and exhibitions of regional, national, and international renown into local communities. Residents of Addison County, especially the well-to-do, the middle class, and Middlebury College students and professors, emulated not only fashionable dress and mores, but the latest leisure activities as well. Lawn games such as croquet, introduced in the late 1860s, and tennis, in the 1870s, became immediately popular with both sexes. In the 1880s, roller-skating became the popular craze, with two rival skating rinks in Middlebury and a third in East Middlebury, operating year-round and competing to offer the most exciting and unusual forms of entertainment. Cycling, introduced in the form of the high wheeler in the mid-1880s, brought with it a new sense of freedom and mobility. The safety bicycle took hold in the early nineties and by the end of the decade, cycling had become a mania. With the first real signs of Spring (often as late as May), Vermonters took to roads, sidewalks and any suitable surface, and cycled through the summer and autumn until the arrival of the first lasting snow. Since its wide acceptance after the Civil War, baseball became perhaps the most consistently welcome harbinger of spring recreation. The only team sport to establish wide popularity in the nineteenth century, baseball was popular with both sexes - for men to play and women to watch. It was certainly the least elitist and most democratic of outdoor games and hence the most American. In the last decades of the century, increasing numbers of Addison County residents turned out to see the Middlebury College team play teams from local communities as well as the high school and UVM. The annual Middlebury College Junior Exhibition,
held at the end of the winter term, had been considered the epitome of local
entertainment since the early nineteenth century. These student displays of
rhetoric and oratory with musical interludes heralded the traditional farewell
to winter and festive welcome to spring. A high point of the social calendar
in Addison County, Junior Ex (as it was known familiarly) was, of course,
followed by a Promenade concert, or ball, "after which the audience struggled
home over muddy roads in the early spring evening" (David Stameshkin,
The Town's College).
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