Place and Purpose: the Magic of Mildred Orton '28

 

By any measure, it could be said that Burr and Burton alumna Mildred Ellen Orton ’28 spent her life judiciously and prudently, as any true Vermonter might strive to. Yet, at every turn, with every story, there is an undercurrent of enjoyment and outright fun that speaks to an enviable fullness of her days. Arguably, one of her most public accomplishments is her role in co-founding the Vermont Country Store with her husband, Vrest Orton in 1946. But if we started there, the picture of Mildred’s life would certainly be less than complete. 

 

Mildred died on May 6, 2010, just nine months shy of her 100th birthday. Throughout her near century of life, Mildred’s influence spanned generations and reached around the world - courtesy of her role at The Vermont Country Store. Yet, so much of her lasting legacy is enjoyed by those of us right here in the Northshire - in her deeply seeded Vermont roots and sense of place. 

 

This year, we celebrate 175 years of women at Burr and Burton, commemorating the intrepid 16 women who joined the ranks of the male students at Burr Seminary in 1849, building the foundation of Burr and Burton for the generations of women to come. 

 

In honor of this important anniversary, we look to the example that Mildred set throughout her life: as a sixth-generation Vermonter, as a student, an entrepreneur, as a wife and mother, an author, and as a community leader. She worked hard, she served others, she shared her knowledge, and she never missed an opportunity to share her special brand of Vermont hospitality with everyone she met. Her life was one of purpose, and for those who knew her, her organizational skills and quick mind set her apart. 

 

“She had this enormous capacity to bring people together and get on the same page,” said Lyman Orton ’59, Mildred’s son and proprietor of the Vermont Country Store. Lyman took over as President of Vermont Country Store in 1975 and served in that capacity until passing the business on to his three sons. 

 

On the summer day we met to discuss his mother’s legacy, Lyman generously shared photos that his mother curated, original copies of old catalogs, and an impressive collection of computers and adding machines used back in the day by his parents and himself. Our walk through Mildred’s life feels like time spent with a wise relative - someone who gives us the best advice on how to create a life and truly live. It is easy to imagine some of the sage lessons that Mildred might have passed on to us from her century of life experience. 

 

Arrive early…

Mildred Ellen Wilcox was born on the Wilcox family farm five miles south of Manchester on Silver Spring Lane on February 9, 1911. The third of three children born to Erwin and Maria Hamilton Wilcox, Mildred grew up sharing the dairy farm chores with her father and brothers Roger and Howard. They made door-to-door milk deliveries to local homes and The Equinox Hotel, first in a horse-drawn wagon, and later in their father’s Model T truck. 

 

Three generations of the Wilcox family lived and worked on the family farm, which was moved from its original location on River Road in Manchester to its current location in 1902 in a land swap. In a Manchester Historical Society recording of Mildred from the 1990s, she reflected on that transaction.

 

“Grandpa bought a small farm next to the Wilbur Farm. The owner of the Wilbur Farm came to my grandfather and said that he wanted to buy Grandpa’s farm,” Mildred said. “Then, the Pettibone farm came on the market, and that is this farm (current Wilcox Farm). Grandpa said, ‘If you buy the Pettibone farm, and give it to me, I’ll give this farm to you.’”

 

Mildred and her brothers shared their farm with a veritable menagerie of pets, including Roger’s pet crow. As the youngest of three, and the only girl, Mildred admired her brothers. “I had two of the most wonderful brothers in the whole world,” she said. Although, in a typical complicated-sibling-relationship manner, Lyman recounts a photograph he unearthed of his mother and her two brothers, as they are making faces at her. In Mildred’s careful handwriting, she captioned it simply, “Idiots.”

 

Mildred spent her elementary school years at the small school on Main Street, one of more than a dozen small area schools that preceded the construction of Manchester Elementary Middle School in 1932. Her school housed three grades per room, with 30-35 students in each classroom. When she was young, she and her classmates would be driven to school in an open-air, horse-drawn carriage that had bobsled skis attached in the winter. “If the weather was zero degrees or colder, we couldn’t go to school,” she said. “We’d freeze to death! So, I had a lot of absent marks in the winter, but I didn’t seem to get behind.”

 

At that time, the roads weren’t plowed. Instead, a horse-drawn snow roller packed the snow firm to accommodate sleds and sleighs. “On Dalton Hill, the road was very slanted,” she said. “Mr. Hanley, the teamster, was a heavy man, so when we got to the tippy part, he would always slide up to sit on the high part (of the seat). One day, he didn’t, and we tipped over. We kids went flying into the snow! It was all fun, nobody got hurt.”

 

In these early school years, Mildred quickly realized she had a passion for learning. She admired her third-grade teacher who also taught music, solidifying Mildred’s interest in piano, which she learned from her piano-playing mother. Due to her academic aptitude, Mildred skipped the fourth grade and quickly reached the top of the class by sixth grade - a theme that would replay throughout her life. “We had good teachers, and I liked to learn. I paid attention,” she said. 

 

Enjoy life…

At Burr and Burton, Mildred excelled academically, while continuing to find fun at every opportunity. She fondly remembers the annual Mountain Day as “the most wonderful day!” During her time at Burr and Burton, Mountain Day was held at the Dorset Quarry as well as Table Rock on Equinox and was filled with picnicking, games, and hiking. Mildred remembered picnic lunches on the lawn on campus, her favorite history teacher Pearl Blackburn, and her fiercely loyal friendships, especially with her neighbor and lifelong best friend Laura Jean Lathrop ’28. In the video interview with Mildred from the 1990s, she reflects on the photo of her class at graduation. “Those were our graduation dresses. We six all bought the same one.”

 

Growing up on her family’s farm, Mildred watched her grandparents, parents, and then her brothers reinvent and hone their business over the years - from moving the farm’s location back at the turn of the 20th century to the addition of the ice cream business in 1928. Her business acumen was born on the farm. After graduating from Burr and Burton, Mildred lived with an aunt and attended Rutland Business College. 

 

Lyman describes the moment when his mother was approached by the head of Rutland Business College months ahead of her graduation from the two-year program. “The head of the school came to my mother and said, ‘Mildred, I have a job for you with Tuttle Publishing Company. Charlie Tuttle, the founder, needs a secretary, and he wants us to send our best girl.’” Lyman said that his mother initially protested, pointing out that she hadn’t graduated from the program yet. But he said that the head of Rutland Business College told her, “‘Mildred, you’ve learned all we can teach. Take the job and come back for graduation and your diploma.’” Lyman described the weight of such an opportunity in 1930 at the start of the Great Depression. “Getting a job like that after the crash was not easy,” he said.  

 

It was at Tuttle Publishing Company where Mildred would meet her future husband and fellow native Vermonter Vrest Orton. Vrest was born in Hardwick, Vermont in 1897, the same year his father opened the general store Teachout and Orton in North Calais with his father-in-law Melvin Teachout. After serving in the AEF Medical Corp in World War I in France, Vrest came home and attended Harvard. He dropped out and moved to New York City where he spent the next decade working in publishing. He worked at Time Magazine, launched newsletters and magazines, and authored books. But he yearned to return to Vermont. He bought the brick house on the Weston village green, joined by Mildred after their marriage in 1936.

 

Lyman said the North Calais store was “a country store, but not one that catered to tourists. They catered to local people and their needs.” That early experience alongside Vrest’s marketing and publishing acumen led him to envision what would become The Vermont Country Store. 

 

Established in 1946, The Vermont Country Store got its start the year prior, when Mildred and Vrest sent out a small catalog to their Christmas card list, which promised, “36 items you can buy now: 14 for your house, 7 to eat, 3 to wear, 12 to read, all fine for gifts.”

 

“That was my father’s genius, enabled by starting his own publishing business, The Countryman Press. He started it in the garage with 19th-century printing presses, and he was a talented writer,” Lyman said. “So, he put together that little catalog, printing it in his garage shop, and the rest is history.”

 

The small 12-page catalog was an immediate success, Lyman said, spurring customers to write back saying they planned to come visit the store in the summer. “Well, we didn’t actually have a store yet - that first year, it was just the catalog!”

 

Soon after, the Ortons purchased the building in Weston, where The Vermont Country Store is to this day. And, the building “is the architectural spitting image of my grandfather’s North Calais store,” Lyman said. 

 

Lyman is proud of his mother’s role in starting and growing the business. “I attribute the success of The Vermont Country Store to her bookkeeping and business acumen,” he said. “Otherwise, my father may have spent all the money on antique cars!” Mildred served as The Vermont Country Store’s bookkeeper from the store’s inception in 1946 through 1978.

 

The Ortons got to work building their business from the ground up, solidifying their presence as “the purveyors of the practical and hard to find.” The combination of Vrest’s general store experience and marketing talent, coupled with Mildred’s business insight and deeply rooted Vermont hometown sensibility created the perfect team. One such early team project was the revitalization of the grist mill in Weston by Vrest’s father, Gardner Lyman Orton, in the 1930s. 

 

“My grandfather was the miller, so he ground the grain and bagged it up, and then we sold it in the store and the catalog,” Lyman said. “My folks started promoting whole grains while America was shifting to processed grains and enriched white flour.” 

 

Mildred set about developing wholegrain recipes in the oven of her wood-burning range in the kitchen. She then wrote a cookbook, Cooking with Wholegrains, published in 1947 by Farrar, Straus of New York. Still in publication today, the jacket reads, “This short, charming little primer in whole grain cookery was first published… long before healthy eating was a national obsession.”

 

Mildred brought her cooking and baking skills to a small, four-stool lunch counter that was located in the store. “There was a little grill to cook hamburgers and hot dogs, and she would bake a ham and wholegrain bread to serve at the lunch counter,” Lyman said. As with so many things that Mildred touched, she inspired Lyman and his sons to enshrine her name in 2010 with Mildred’s Dairy Bar, located next to the Weston store, and Mildred’s Market in the Rockingham location. 

 

Share your knowledge…

Mildred’s main job at The Vermont Country Store was as the head bookkeeper and overall business manager of the company. Lyman recalls many days in his youth, some when he was no older than five, when he would help his mother in her work. “One of my first jobs as a little boy was to endorse the checks with a hand rubber stamp,” he said. “I thought it was great fun! And, then she taught me how to use the adding machine for the checks,” Lyman said, pointing out one of the vintage adding machines on display at The Vermont Country Store Manchester offices. 

 

“She insisted I learn how to use it by touch, so she made this little cardboard shield that she taped to the side of my head, so I could not see the keys on the adding machine, which was placed so I could touch the keys with my right hand but not see them. She instructed me, ‘Don’t peek at the keys!’” 

 

Once Lyman got his driver's license, he was in charge of taking the daily cash and checks from the store and catalog to the Factory Point Bank in Manchester on his way to high school at Burr and Burton Academy. He’d drop it in the night deposit chute. “That solid brass keyed door is still in place on the outside of the old bank building that now houses a restaurant,” he said. “My mother instructed me, ‘Don’t wait until after school because you shouldn’t just leave the cash in the car all day,’” Lyman said. 

 

Take care of your neighbors…

In addition to raising her sons Lyman and Jeremy, and her work as the business’s bookkeeper and chef, Mildred made time to serve her community. She served on the Weston Library’s board and as the president of the Farrar Park Association, the nonprofit organization that owns the Weston Green. The association was incorporated in 1886 with the land deeded from local owner Oliver Farrar’s frog pond. “People who lived around the Green could keep a cow there for milk,” Lyman said. 

 

The association was incorporated by nine women trustees, dubbed the “nine old ladies.” Mildred was appointed president soon after she arrived in town. “I think she may have been president until she died because it was pretty much a lifetime appointment,” Lyman said. In her volunteer capacity, Mildred and her fellow trustees managed the park and tended to the majestic maple trees. They once stopped an ill-conceived plan to turn it into a ball field, and quite literally, ran security over the park when the popularization of personal metal detectors in the 70s and 80s brought treasure seekers to the green with destructive shovels. 

 

“I have an image in my mind of Irene Richardson (one of the trustees) coming from her house, wagging her cane at this guy who was out in the green with his metal detector digging up the sod,” Lyman said. 

 

Be proud of where you come from…

It’s hard to imagine that Mildred had access to the same 24-hour day as the rest of us. Between her volunteer work, cooking, baking, cookbook writing, and bookkeeping, the job she always made time for, the one she took the most pride in, was raising her children with the same sense of place and grounding that she had growing up. 

 

Lyman remembers, “We town kids were pretty much free-range, and that was fantastic. The one thing my mother harped on was to not play in the West River, as it used to be contaminated with farm waste. ‘You’ll get Polio!’ she exclaimed, as that was before the vaccine,” he said. 

 

Every summer Saturday, Lyman and his brother would spend the day at the Wilcox family farm, playing with cousins. “She always talked about how much she loved the farm,” Lyman said. “To her deathbed, it was always the thing she talked about and had the best memories of.”

 

At age 98, Mildred accepted Lyman’s invitation to accompany him to Burr and Burton’s Reunion in 2008, the only alumnus ever to attend an 80th Reunion. “I asked her to go - my Reunion was really irrelevant, and she was the belle of the ball!” Lyman said.

 

It is rare indeed to leave such an indelible mark beyond one’s immediate family. Mildred Orton’s easy hospitality and her unfailing generosity of spirit are apparent to anyone who sets foot inside The Vermont Country Store. What a gift to experience her legacy in real time. In the 1990s video interview, as the picture fades, Mildred lifts her gaze from her childhood photo albums to offer her guests a plate of cookies, evidence of her rare gift for consummate yet simple generosity.