WEATHERSFIELD — Longtime locals still recall the dark night of Sept. 12, 1964, when farmer Romaine Tenney held up a lantern at the only home he had known since his birth in 1900.
The property had never been wired for power. But that wasn’t why the 64-year-old lit the flame.
Bulldozers were hours away from plowing through to pave the way for Interstate 91. In anticipation, Tenney shuttered himself inside and set everything ablaze.
“When I came out of my front door a mile away, I knew it was a big fire,” Rod Spaulding, then a 23-year-old volunteer first responder, recalled to this reporter on the 50th anniversary in 2014.
Ginger Wimberg was a teenager growing up in New Jersey when she picked up the paper and grimaced at the headlines — “State Took Farm, But Over Man’s Dead Body” was just one — published nationwide.
“I can remember just where I was sitting when I read this,” Wimberg, who would move to Vermont and become president of the Weathersfield Historical Society, recalled 10 years ago. “It just stuck out to be so sad.”
This month, Tenney’s story lives on as one of the most haunting moments in the state’s ever-evolving timeline. Yet upon the 60th anniversary, you won’t see much of a memorial, save a plaque near the sole remaining tree stump at what’s now a park-and-ride lot off Exit 8.
As the decades motor by, travelers who stop don’t hear as many memories. Both Spaulding and Wimberg died earlier this year, decreasing the number of residents who can tell the tale.
“There definitely are still people in town who knew Romaine,” Ellen Clattenburg, the current historical society president, said in an interview. “But there are fewer and fewer.”
In young President John F. Kennedy’s space-age New Frontier, Romaine Edwin Tenney was defiantly old-fashioned, family members and friends recalled. Always sporting overalls and a bushy beard in photographs, the bachelor farmer milked and maintained a herd of dairy cows without electricity, truck or tractor, relying instead on a few horses and his own two hands.
Seemingly everyone else was driving forward. Eight years earlier, in 1956, Congress decided to fund a National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Budgeted at a cost of more than $1 million a mile, it was said to be the largest public works project ever attempted on Earth.
For Vermonters at the time, it sounded like science fiction. Only 9% of their roads were paved, state records show, while 51% were gravel and 40% were classified as partially improved or primitive.
Weathersfield farmer Romaine Tenney, known for his overalls and bushy beard, talks with a right-of-way agent in the spring of 1964. Photo courtesy of the Vermont State Archives and Records Administration
Workers broke ground on Interstate 91 at the Massachusetts border in 1957 and finished the first stretch — 6 miles up to Brattleboro — a year later. In 1961, then U.S. Sen. George Aiken celebrated the highway’s arrival in his hometown of Putney, where the road covered the cellar hole of his childhood home.
“It isn’t given to everyone in his lifetime to help dedicate a monument over his own birthplace,” Aiken was quoted by local papers at the opening. “We’re on the verge of the greatest development Vermont has ever seen.”
Some 30 miles north, Tenney didn’t share the same enthusiasm. His father had bought the family farm in 1892 and little had changed since, his nieces and nephews recalled. Tenney didn’t have a toaster, let alone a television. Everything he needed was already there.
Highway surveyors saw things differently. Tenney’s nephew, Rod, had a friend on the crew scoping out the route.
“It was toward the end of the day, and people were ready to call it a day and go home,” Rod Tenney told Yankee magazine upon the 50th anniversary. “The guy in charge said, ‘We’ll get just one more site. We’ll just shoot it on that barn down there.’ And that’s how the Interstate highway ended up going right through the middle of the property.”
Maps confirm the siting, if not the story behind it.
The government has the authority under “eminent domain” to take private property for public use if it gives the owner “just compensation.” The state offered $10,600 for the farm; a jury upped that to $13,600, newspapers reported at the time. Told to move by April 1, 1964, Tenney watched as workers prepared to blast dynamite.
The farmer didn’t budge.
On Sept. 11, authorities, armed with a court order, began clearing out his buildings.
The farmer didn’t budge.
On Sept. 12, shortly before 3 in the morning, firefighters heard the wail of an alarm. Spaulding, one of the first to reach the blaze, discovered the cows, horses and dogs set free — and the doors to Tenney’s house seemingly nailed shut.
“We broke in, but it was so smoky we had to get out,” Spaulding recalled in 2014.
The next day, newspapers reported on people searching the woods for Tenney as firefighters sifted through the charred remains.
“We found a bed frame, a gun and some bones,” said Spaulding, who went on to serve 68 years on the volunteer fire association, including almost two decades as chief.
Tenney had told many: “I was born here and I will die here.”
The story made national news, only to be replaced two years later by headlines of Aiken cutting a ribbon to open Exit 8 — the strip of asphalt that sliced Tenney’s farm.
The Weathersfield Historical Society has received calls from researchers and reporters ever since. The Associated Press, for example, shared the story coast to coast on the 15th anniversary.
“Nobody ever said they were sorry,” Romaine’s now late sister-in-law Peggy Tenney was quoted in the 1979 article.
Yankee magazine published the most extensive history in advance of the 50th anniversary.
“You can’t just move him out like you would a younger man,” the now late former Deputy Sheriff Robert Gale was quoted in 2013. “Think of it: Here’s a highway that’s costing a million dollars a mile, and they can’t find the money to take care of an old man.”
A maple tree stump at the Interstate 91 park-and-ride lot off Exit 8 is the last remnant of the Tenney family farm. Photo by Kevin O’Connor/VTDigger
The New York Times visited in 2021 to report on the state deciding to remove the last remnant of the Tenney farm — a dying maple tree — only for a worker to retain the stump.
“Everything else had been taken from him,” the newspaper quoted Steve Smith, who was 8 when Tenney died. “I just figured, why take that?”
This year, Burlington animator Travis Van Alstyne released the short film “Love of the Land,” which sums up Tenney’s life in eight minutes. In an age of Snapchat and swipe left, such lookbacks are increasingly rare.
“We rely so much less on storytelling,” Clattenburg said at the historical society, “and grandparents remembering how it used to be.”
And so Tenney’s chiseled name rests undisturbed on a nearby cemetery stone.
“Guardian of his land,” it says, and “friend to all.”
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Read the story on VTDigger here: 60 years later, a Vermont farmer’s tragic tale lives on. But for how much longer?.