MOSQUITOVILLE — Though a handful of outdoor events were canceled in Vermont in recent weeks to prevent the spread of a rare but serious mosquito-borne illness, none were crossed off the calendar in this tiny Barnet village that straddles the Ryegate line.
Then again, there was not a lot in Mosquitoville that could be canceled. Its major intersection, located at a turn in Barnet’s three-mile Mosquitoville Road, which forms an unpaved “T” with Ryegate’s North Bayley Hazen Road, comprises two houses and a cemetery. A short walk away, the Walter Harvey Meeting House hosts a few events each year.
Though many Vermonters may not have heard of it, Mosquitoville’s pesky moniker has repeatedly drawn attention from bloggers across the internet, landing it on lists like “These 50 Town Names In The USA Sound Like A Joke But They’re All Real.”
Tony Faris, 77, who grew up across from the meetinghouse and has lived on the Barnet side of the T-shaped intersection since the ’70s, said it’s not unusual to hear a car brake and its doors slam before someone scurries to the road signs to snap a picture.
So what’s behind the name? And as mosquitoes swarm New England headlines due to a rise in eastern equine encephalitis, which in severe cases can be fatal, have Mosquitoville’s residents taken any extraordinary precautions?
“No, I’ve swatted mosquitoes all my life,” Faris said on a sunny afternoon in his front yard last week, waving to familiar faces in nearly every car that passed.
His 62-year-old brother, Ted Faris, still lives in their family home across from where their great-grandfather preached for 46 years. Emitting a giggle not unlike that of the TV character Ron Swanson, he said of the neighborhood’s mosquitoes: “We only have good ones.”
The Farises point to Mosquitoville’s surrounding wetlands, acres of breeding ground for buzzy blood-suckers, as the name’s likely inspiration. Jewett Brook, which connects to Harvey Lake, cuts through the center. A long-gone lumber mill left remnants of a pond, according to David Warden, president of the Barnet Historical Society.
While motorists might miss cattails from the dry dirt road, the neighborhood gets soggy, said Debbie Streeter, who lives across from Tony Faris on the Ryegate side. Sitting on her front porch, she used her large dogs, Arlo and Quinn, as measuring sticks, describing how muddied their bellies and sides become when they walk through her field after rain.
Warden, who co-founded the historical society in the 1960s, couldn’t definitively pinpoint the origin of Mosquitoville’s name. (“It’s rare that anyone asks,” he said.) His money’s on the swamp, but he had another guess: Such a phrase “infers a very small place,” he said, “and that little village there” meets the definition.
The village’s roots connect to the Revolutionary War, when George Washington OK’ed cutting a military road on a route first used by Native Americans, as detailed by historian Mark Bushnell. The effort to connect Newbury to Canada was abandoned, and what is now North Bayley Hazen Road was nicknamed “the road from nowhere to nowhere,” Bushnell wrote.
Encouraged by Col. Alexander Harvey, Scots fleeing religious persecution settled Ryegate and Barnet and established congregations of Reformed Presbyterians, also known as Covenanters, according to a historical pamphlet produced last year by the association that manages the Walter Harvey Meeting House.
Walter, who was Alexander’s son, bought the land for the building in order to accommodate a growing Covenanters community in the “Harvey neighborhood” after he’d established an inn, the pamphlet said. The meetinghouse was constructed in 1831, with membership rising and falling before the congregation disbanded in 1970. Today’s association was formed to manage the meetinghouse five years later.
Ted Faris, the organization’s clerk and a professional welder, commuted barefoot across the road to the meetinghouse as he warmly welcomed an unannounced reporter on a tour of the building last week. He rattled off facts about the Covenanters, who eschew ornate decor and sing Psalms a cappella, and recalled the childhood feeling of seeing a particular light on at the church during evening meetings, signaling something “big city” — serious business — was afoot.
These days, he said, the meetinghouse typically holds two services a year. It’s hosted weddings, funerals and the Scottish-American religious tradition known as the Kirkin’ o’ the Tartan. It even welcomes buses of Amish tourists, whom Ted Faris said feel at home amongst the religiously persecuted.
Though his appears to be the best-known Mosquitoville, it’s not the only one — not even in Vermont. Tony Faris, who helped construct Vermont’s interstates and traversed the state for Carroll Concrete, pointed to a Mosquitoville in the Barre area, which Google Maps shows as a tenth-of-a-mile pathway south of Graniteville. There’s also an East Mosquitoville Lane in Maine (but apparently no “west” counterpart), a 10-person Skeeterville in Texas and numerous Mosquito Lakes, Mosquito Creeks, Mosquito Peaks and colloquial “mosquitovilles” across the country.
Indeed, in the 1977 book Vermont Place Names: Footprints of History, Esther Munroe Swift wrote that “this kind of nickname has generally been used in derision, and it is thought that this was the case in Barnet,” though she too thought it was possible that the town’s “somewhat swampy” surroundings explained its usage there.
Can we be sure? After about 15 minutes in his yard, Tony Faris hinted with a smile that he knew the full story but declined to share. He recounted a different tale about the village’s earlier hyper-local nickname, “Tattleville,” apparently given by an old Civil War veteran inspired by women gossiping on their porches — within earshot of passersby.
As far as its evolution to Mosquitoville, he said, “it’s intriguing to a reporter or something like that, I realize,” but others had tried far harder to pry it loose.
That history, he signaled, was a secret he would keep.
The Vermont Department of Health has “strongly recommended” limiting exposure to mosquitoes, particularly from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. and in the high-risk areas of Alburgh, Burlington, Colchester, Sudbury, Swanton and Whiting, until the first hard frost. For details in the latest advisory, click here.
Read the story on VTDigger here: The mysterious origins of a tiny Vermont village called Mosquitoville.