Lina Foster started awake. A scream had roused her, a girl crying for her mother. She thought of her own daughter, who was ill, but the cry came again from outside the house and a horse and carriage clattered onto Barber’s Bridge.

Almon and Emeline (Alice Meaker, Part 3)

Vermont is known for the beauty of its woods and mountains, but the cost of that beauty is often forgotten. For much of our history, Vermonters endured unimaginable hardship and poverty that limited opportunities for growth and preserved, as if unchanged, the landscape of today. Their suffering is always with us, written on the land, inscribed in cellar-holes and graveyards and orchards gone to wild. Welcome to These Dark Mountains.&nbsp;