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Charles Burt
(1804-1876)
Edna Towne
(1816-1896)
Oscar W. May
(Cir 1835-)
Emma Atkins
(1840-)
Francis Orell Burt
(1849-1902)
Lillian A. May
(1861-1895)
Craig O. Burt Sr
(1882-1965)

 

Family Links

Spouses/Children:
1. Emily K.

Craig O. Burt Sr

  • Born: 2 Oct 1882, Vermont
  • Marriage (1): Emily K.
  • Died: Apr 1965, Vermont at age 82
picture

bullet  General Notes:

1900 Stowe, Lamoille county, Vermont
Frank O BURT 1849 VT
Nettie 1856 VT
Barbara 1884 VT
Wayne 1885 VT
Marjorie 1890 VT
Rebecca 1892 VT
Craig at age 17 appeares to be living out of the HH

1910 Stowe, Lamoille County, VT - All born in VT.
(Frank now deceased? Nettie died 1905)
Craig C. Burt age 27. c 1883 VT HOH
Barbara M. BURT(sister) 1885
Marjorie BURT(sister) 1890
Rebecca BURT(sister) 1892
Wayne married with wife Alice and indicated as HOH

1920 Stowe, Lamoille County, Vermont
Craig O BURT 1883
Emily K. 1887
Hela S. BURT 1914
Craig O Jr BURT 1915
F. Carl BURT 1917

1930 Stowe, Lamoille County, Vermont (all born VT)
Craig O BURT 1883
Emely 1886
Helene BURT1914
Craig BURT Jr 1915
Carl F. BURT 1917
David 1921

SSDI for DOB DOD

WE LIVED IN STOWE: A Memoir by Craig O. Burt
Introduction by Ellen Burt
Craig Oscar Burt, the author of these memoirs, was born in Waterbury Center, Vermont on October 2, 1882. As a small child he moved to Stowe Hollow, and then later to Stowe, where he was still living at his death in 1965. He died having lived the whole of his eighty-two years of existence within ten miles of his birthplace.
One result of having lived in so small geographical compass was a deep attachment to place. His memoirs are punctuated with evocations of Vermont: in the accounts of logging or skiing, as the backdrop to his dreams and business ventures, or as the setting where he perfected techniques for doing everything from rolling logs or making dams to breaking horses. Another result, no less evident to the reader, was a considerable knowledge of the distinguishing traits of everyone and everything that lived in the area. Attesting to this curiosity about his fellow inhabitants are stories of tracking deer and of riding with the post, vignettes of a startled beaver or a lynx transfixed, a description of trees impelled into anomalous movement, an anecdote about being trapped in a rickety sugar house by a maddened bull, or affectionate portraits of loggers and friends. The many-faceted picture of small-town America in the early twentieth century that comes out of Craig Burt's curiosity about the world around him is one of the pleasures of reading these memoirs.
In a man so in tune with the changes in the familiar, it is not surprising to find an awareness of what was foreign to his context. Craig Burt's ability to catch and get across the nuances of difference varies. Sometimes it is interfered with by terms and a sensibility that feel dated to us. He can think about groups of people in stereotypical terms or fetter a good story with an old-fashioned morality. To Craig Burt, loggers, like skiers, were all "red-shirted, red-blooded men in the forest" (137). A black man brought to Vermont as a boy by a returning Civil War soldiers, is made to speak in the accents of a player in a minstrel show.
More often, he does manage to perceive and express fine distinctions. That ability lies behind the theme of change that runs throughout the chapters, and makes for the sharp detail around which a memory focuses. We can see it in the "cotton ball" in the mouth of an alarmed water moccasin, or in the remembered swear word-"con dum it"-which escapes George Sanborn (96) as his toe is broken. His nose for difference lets Craig Burt describe the workings of a machine or the makings of a strap. Hence the pages that follow serve as a valuable record of a period's way of doing things. His children and grandchildren all have memories of his teaching them techniques: be it to carve a willow whistle, to fix a steak for a picnic at the Ranch Camp, to trifold a letter, to teach a horse "to lay down on command."* The "how" of things was something he wanted to know and to pass on.
*One granddaughter told this story. "Grandpa came out West for a visit, shortly after my horse Tammy had her colt. He spent a morning with me, and told me about a horse he'd had.that he taught to lay down on command. He demonstrated with Tammy. He held up her front hoof until she got tired. And then he tugged on the reins, sort of tipping the horse over. The other leg would fold up and the horse would lay down. Then he went on to say he hadn't realized he'd taught his horse to lay down on command. But one day, talking with a friend he absent-mindedly tugged on the reins and the horse lay down. Now his horse knew how to lay down, and he wanted to test the horse's obedience. He took the horse out into a stream and made him lie down in water over his head, and then got the horse up. I attempted to teach my own horse Tammy to lie down. It takes an awful lot of patience and a certain amount of strength to teach horses to lie down. I never did manage quite to do it."
Craig Burt brought his own particular perspective to the place he occupied. He was an enterprising man, and-extrapolating from his boast as a five-year-old that he would bring an electric railroad to Stowe-an enterprising boy. We see his business ability in his practical approach to what he perceived as the town's moral and financial depression following World War I. His answer, arrived at with a few other citizens, was to hold a winter carnival, a move that started Stowe on the road to becoming an important ski destination. His account of the development of the Trout Club and the building of its dam, of the early beginnings of the ski patrol, of the financing of ski trails, of the clean-up efforts after the flood of 1927, show him concerned with enterprise, and especially with enterprise as it involves shaping the land and the community.
He made his profit from this shaping work, although all of it was not profit that came to him in money. He clearly liked to have his hand in bringing a dream into fruition. One of his children called him an incurable romantic, and one gets some sense of his visionary side when-some years after the five-year-old dreamt of bringing a railroad to Stowe-he finds himself riding a steam locomotive into Stowe village (68) or dealing with railroad men (122). The memoirs reflect his quiet pleasure.
Something else went along with this romanticism, namely, a desire to live up to ideals or even restore ways of being that were at odds with a strict profit motive. One of his sons says that he always had the sense of growing up with one foot in the nineteenth and one in the twentieth century, in a world that was both the world he saw and a world his parents had posited. Reading these memoirs, it is hard not to be struck by the importance of an earlier vision of community, and especially of the public sphere as one in which the manly virtues were to be displayed. The hunting stories in particular, where as much delight is taken in the return to the hills of game to be stalked as in the actual stalking, shows Craig Burt's enterprising spirit to have often been expended in the service of some fictional world where people might exist in harmony with each other and in balance with nature.
His visionary side is embedded in other ways into his memoirs. It shapes the one-sided, rosy view of Stowe's inhabitants whose life, we sense, was pretty hardscrabble. There seem-incredibly-to have been no drunks, no thieves or rapists, no suicides and no abused children in the Stowe he knew. It shapes too the almost complete silence on family life and on the lives of women, as if the focus on the dreamed community entailed the omission of private considerations. Some indications suggest the private life passed over was not always a happy one. From an elliptical mention of the death of his father that brought an abrupt end to his college career, we gather that he passed through difficult moments. The illness to which he refers was a years' long depression. There is no trace at all of the bad sledding accident of his eldest son, the polio of his son-in-law, or of the mill accident in which another son lost two fingers. The decision of his children not to follow in his footsteps at the mill led to the eventual breakup of the business that was a source of private sorrow; again there is no sign of that here. His children remember his almost daily reliance on the steady counsel and perspective of two long-time friends and employees, Elmer Russell and Alden McEwen, who died around the time these memoirs were being written and neither of whom is mentioned in these pages.
His visionary side with its focus on community also affected his notion of how and why to bring skiing to Stowe. It was, for him, a way to use the place as renewable resource, to enjoy the fruits of the land without destruction. It was recreation for skiers, a way to improve the lot of the villagers, and his own. It was a way to get about on the land, to see the transformations occurring in it. Furthermore, it required a huge ingenuity-the mobilization of transportation and men and resources-to bring it about. But the point was not only usefulness-he's rather dismissive of the Swedish families in town who skied for utilitarian reasons-nor capitalistic profit-taking. Instead he sometimes seems to be looking for something like a Rube Goldberg machine-where he might get his pleasure from the utmost in activity and expenditure of energy with the least in the way of an immediate end served. As he saw it, skiing at Stowe was not meant to enrich a small coalition, but the whole community. If money could rightly be found in the town's playgrounds' budget to fund ski trails, it was because those trails were to serve those children as well as their parents or skiers up from New York. As one can imagine, this perspective was not always shared by everyone. Hence a certain justificatory edge to the memoirs, which aim to imagine a time before any quarrels and divisions over the development of Stowe, and also to explain Craig Burt's own take on things.
His idea of community also shaped his quiet charity, which peeks out at various places in the book. He believed in community service, what one grandchild called "random and often anonymous acts of charity and compassion." Here is one such act, attested to by his son-in-law Raymond Wright:Craig had a man working for him, on an intermittent basis. He had sold his farm, and was looking for another one to buy. While he was looking, he worked logging. The man had a wife and three children, and he died in May, without having found another farm to buy. The man's wife and daughter both came down with scarlet fever within a few weeks. There were two other children, aged nine and seven. It occurred to Craig, who had a tender heart, that those two children wouldn't have any firecrackers or celebration on the 4th of July. He showed up on the 4th with two little rabbits, built them a pen, and went away.
About 25 years later the nine-year-old boy became his son-in-law.

NON-GRADUATES, 1904. (Norwich University)
CRAIG OSCAR BURT.
Craig O. Burt, son of Frank Oscar and Lillian A. (May) Burt, was born
in Washington, Vermont, October 2, 1882. At an early age, his parents removed
to Stowe, Vt., where he prepared for college. He entered the Civil
Engineering department of the University in September, 1900, and remained
until June, 1902, when owing to the death of his father, he was obliged to give
up his college course and look after his business interests in Stowe.
He was a member of the firm of C. E. & F. O. Burt, extensive lumber
manufacturers, Stowe, from 1902 until 1907, when the company was incorporated.
Since this last date, he has served as treasurer of the company. He is a
Republican in politics and has held several town offices. He is a member of
Mystic Lodge, No. 56, F. and A. M., Tucker Chapter, R. A. M., Lamoille
Commandery K. T. of Morriaville, and the Mt. Sinai Temple, Mystic Shrine
of Montpelier; S X Fraternity at " N. U.' '


picture

Craig married Emily K. (Emily K. was born in 1886 in Vermont.)




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