It was one of those dim Vermont November days, the kind when it feels like the sun never really rises, and when the thin light gives no hint of where the sun is hiding. Those dark days can trigger feelings of melancholy, despair even. In 1818, in a small Northeast Kingdom town, a day like that triggered a mysterious disappearance.
On Saturday, Nov. 7 of that year, 15-year-old Alpha Allyn was tending his family’s farm in the town of Navy (as Charleston was then named). As the oldest child and only boy in the family, Alpha often bore responsibility for running the farm, since his father was frequently out of town working as county surveyor, which he was on this particular day. Although rain fell as Alpha went about his work, he was wearing cotton clothing. Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest choice when woolen clothes were probably available and would have provided more warmth on a damp day.
After completing most of his chores, Alpha went into the house to eat. But looking at the clock, he saw he had misjudged the time; it was later than he’d realized. So, despite his hunger, he put off having supper. He had a crucial task to do.
Every day, before it got too dark, the Allyns would herd their sheep from the pasture into the barn to protect them from predators. The local bear population was large and troublesome for farmers. Just the previous year, two bears had broken into the Allyns’ barn and killed a sheep. Alpha’s father, Abner, had driven off the bears with the help of his dog. When the bears returned the next night, Abner and two of his neighbors were waiting and shot one of them.
This day, however, Alpha saw that the sheep weren’t in the field, so he followed their tracks into the woods, and disappeared.
Alpha’s mother, Anna, who was alone at home with her eldest daughter Olive grew concerned when her son didn’t return. As darkness fell, she and Olive started shouting for Alpha. Hearing no reply, they sounded a tin horn, again and again. Still no response. Sometime before morning, one of them went to the neighbors for help while the other continued to blow the horn. A neighbor offered a comforting suggestion: as it grew dark, Alpha had probably found himself near the home of Philip Davis, which was about two miles away, and was staying there for the night. He would surely return in the morning.
When Alpha failed to materialize, a friend of the family rode his horse to Davis’ home. Learning that Davis hadn’t seen Alpha, the friend rode the dozen miles along dirt tracks to Barton to find Abner Allyn at his work site and tell him his son was missing.
Meanwhile, other neighbors were also spreading the news. Someone interrupted Sunday church services being conducted at the home of gristmill owner Stephen Cole. The men in attendance immediately formed a search party and entered the nearby woods, while the women went to the Allyns’ home to see what help they could offer. The following day, women from the towns of Salem (now part of Derby) and Morgan also arrived at the homestead.
Anna may have taken solace in knowing that Alpha had been familiar with the woods from a young age. When he was five, he started attending school, which was a mile away through the woods. Since there were no houses along the route, and plenty of wild animals, one of his parents would accompany him for the first half mile, stopping at the spot where two children from another family would meet them. Apparently believing there was safety in numbers, the three boys were allowed to walk the last half mile unescorted.
No one in the area, however, would have known the woods better than Abner because of his work as a surveyor. He rushed to join the hunt for his son. The search party that day was probably relatively small, Navy being home to only 11 families. As the light began to fade on Sunday, messengers rode off to rally men from area towns, including Brownington, Salem, Irasburg, Holland and Glover, to join the search the next day.
The response was particularly strong from Barton, where the Allyns were well known. Abner and Anna had lived there and Abner had served as the first town clerk, and the couple still traveled there to get supplies.
The people of Barton remembered Anna for an act of bravery she performed there years earlier. When a smallpox outbreak hit Barton in the early 1800s, the panicked townspeople tried to stop the disease’s spread by building a plague house, also known as a pest house, to quarantine the infected. Among those consigned to it was a nursing mother, who was too ill to care for her sick baby. As a nursing mother herself, Anna volunteered to be inoculated against smallpox and then enter the pest house to care for the woman and nurse the baby.
The inoculation alone could have killed her, if she was inoculated using the live smallpox virus, as was common practice. She might have been given the safer cowpox vaccination, which American physicians were only just starting to recommend in the early 1800s because it protects against smallpox and is far less risky. Either way, Anna had to rely on others to care for her own baby, who was not yet weaned, while she helped the mother and child survive the outbreak. The baby Anna left behind was Alpha.
Alpha was the firstborn of Abner and Anna Allyn’s children, which perhaps explains his unusual name. But hope of making Alpha the first in a long line was followed by a string of tragedies. His brothers—Albro, Abner, Alwin and Albra—all died before reaching their third birthdays. However, his three sisters—Olive, Rachel and Sarah—would all live into adulthood.
It was a small miracle any of them survived childhood, given the challenges the family faced. One cold day, heavy rain forced its way through the roof of the log home, extinguishing the fire. The family relied on the flint in their only gun to kindle fires, but unfortunately Abner had just loaned the gun to a neighbor for hunting. So while Anna stayed in the bed with the children to try to keep them warm, Abner rode four and a half miles to a neighbor’s home to “borrow fire.” Because he didn’t want to explain his embarrassing predicament, Abner simply asked to borrow a gun.
Another time, in the dead of winter, the family awoke to find the roof on fire. Abner and Anna had small children to care for, as well as a fire to fight, so they carried a bed outside and set it in the deep snow, then tucked their children tightly into it to keep them from falling out. They managed to remove the entire roof before the rest of their home caught fire. Abner still had to ride a team of horses 12 miles to Barton to buy lumber, while Anna had to care for children when their home had no roof, but at least the house was saved.
People knew that tragedy could strike at any time, but when the first day’s search for Alpha turned up nothing, Alpha’s friends and family were tortured by visions of the dark woods, of killing cold and deadly predators. Vermont was home not only to bears, but also wolves and mountain lions. “As the men came in Sabbath night to wait until morning, the anguish of the family was such as language entirely fails to portray,” a history of the town states. “News of death would have been a partial relief.”
On the second morning after Alpha’s disappearance, a group of men from Brownington and towns to the south met in Brownington and “entered the unbroken forest,” as the town history explains, while another group composed of men from Navy, Salem, Morgan and Holland entered the search area from the north. The searchers agreed only to fire their guns if they found the boy, whether he was alive or dead.
Stephen Cole and his 17-year-old son, Winthrop, who was a friend of Alpha, were part of this second group. As they crossed a brook, Winthrop noticed tracks he believed belong to Alpha. Other men dismissed the claim, saying they were animal tracks, and remained on their original course. Winthrop, however, persuaded his father and two other men to follow where the tracks seemed to lead. As they went, they blew a horn to signal their change of directions to others. To their surprise, an unnatural screech came in reply. They blew their horn repeatedly, but heard no more responses. They decided to walk toward the source of the sound anyway.
Searchers elsewhere in the forest heard a shot rip through the November air, followed by several more. Men who were nearby hurried toward the source of the shots, while others headed to the Allyn homestead to await news. Their arrival, or perhaps the sound of distant gunfire, had left the waiting women and children “in anxious suspense.” Hours passed. Finally, a cluster of men was spotted, coming from the direction of Philip Davis’ home. Among them was a horse carrying Alpha Allyn, alive but physically broken.
“A warm bed was in readiness for him,” the town history states. “From frost in his clothes, and from soreness of his body, it was impossible to remove them but by cutting them off.”
Word spread of how he had been found. Winthrop Cole’s intuition had proven correct. Following the strange screech, Winthrop, his father and two other men discovered Alpha unconscious, lying on a log. What, they wondered, had made the noise?
The men struggled to rouse Alpha. It took two hours of shaking and vigorously rubbing his body before he was somewhat alert. He had lost all track of time. Thinking he had been in the woods only one night, he refused food, saying he would eat something warm when he got home.
But he couldn’t walk. So the men took turns carrying him on their backs, “which was a bad task for the men,” the town history reports, “and more so for the boy, he having been so terribly chilled, and then so hard rubbed to bring up a reaction, that when he came to feeling he was conscious of unendurable soreness of his flesh.” Alpha begged them to stop regularly, “movement so hurt him.”
They rested at the Davis homestead, where Alpha agreed to eat some food and, after initial protests, to drink some liquor, which “the men thought necessary to revive him.” From there, Alpha was placed atop a horse and carried home.
“To attempt a description of the scene of the long lost son, and brother, restored to them alive, would be useless,” the author of the town history vignette writes. “It was a grateful rejoicing, but with fear and trembling lest he might not rally from the shock.”
Alpha did rally from the shock, and gradually pieced together what had happened. He explained that after walking into the woods in search of the sheep, he had become disoriented. He came upon a brook and thought he recognized the spot, so he set off in a straight line that should have taken him home, only to eventually find himself back at the brook. Panic seems to have set in. He ran around trying to find his way out of the forest for most of Sunday. Then he lay down on a log to rest his exhausted body. He thought he had only been there for a moment before his rescuers found him; it had been an entire day. Alpha had no recollection of hearing the searchers’ horn or of replying. However, he did remember being extremely cold and delirious and yelling, in a voice cracking from dryness, to his sister, asking her to bring him his mittens.
The incident left Alpha with some aches—he “never fully recovered from the effects of the shock,” the town history reports—but he lived a full life, which stretched over another six decades, during which he married a woman from Montpelier, helped raise a large family and became a leading citizen in the small but growing town of Charleston.
It was Alpha himself who wrote the history of Navy/Charleston for Abby Hemenway’s Vermont Historical Magazine in 1869, but he declined to include the story of his own disappearance and discovery as part of the story. When Alpha’s last surviving sibling, Rachel, learned of the omission, she felt “it was not right.” Rachel had long ago left Vermont to become a doctor and was living in Lowell, Massachusetts, but she believed the history of her hometown wouldn’t be complete without mention of “one of the most startling events ever experienced here.” She wrote the story herself and submitted it to Hemenway, who published it as an addendum to the town history.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Then Again: Disappearing in November.