Marc Clerk
Sutton Flats has been through crucial disruptions since its origins. The hamlet, born with a set purpose, stayed on course for its first eighty years but has sought its destiny for the last one hundred. Metamorphosed from chef-lieu of the Township of Sutton into an autonomous Sutton Town in 1896 and fused back again in 2002, it is today on the cusp of still more change, moving it even further away from its beginnings.
The settlement, which started as a crossroads, saw its definitive geographic presence laid out from the 1820s to the 1870s, a physical layout which remains: Sutton’s streets, Maple, Pleasant, Main, Academy, and Western are today as they were then.
In 1847, Provincial Surveyor Orville Wells projected the future of Sutton. Wells wrote:
“[Sutton]…from its peculiar position in the Township, and with respect to the roads passing through it, must hereafter constitute, as at present, the chief business place thereof.”
The village did in fact become a supply centre for the farmers in the surrounding township. When the landsmen needed nails, an axe-handle, barbed wire, or a threaded bolt, or their wives flour, sugar, salt, sewing thread, or buttons, they came to Sutton Flats. And too, when their children and children’s children were baptized, married, or buried it was to Sutton they came.
Socially, the budding settlement was composed of New England expatriates who had a common language, practised variants of Protestant religions, and possessed a well-engrained appreciation for schooling, reading, communal values, and Colonial architecture.
Housing and churches, general stores and mills were built according to New England designs. The 1860s brick store, such as the former Boright & Safford’s on Sutton’s Main Street, could be found in Richford, Enosburg Falls, Montpelier or Manchester in Vermont. Clones of our dignified white clapboard United Church can still be admired in the vales and hilltops of little towns in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Sutton was, in all respects, a New England village.
The arrival of French Canadians in the 1840s had little initial effect on the already established social structure of the place. They lived on the periphery of things on the mountainside East of the village centre, isolated by language, religion, and mores from the general population. Cyrus Thomas commented on that fact as he witnessed their wood-clearing operations on the mountainside above the village in 1868.
Then in 1871, the Roman Catholic Church was built, following the dictates of Monseigneur Bourget, on the hill overlooking the village. From that time on, things were different. Shopkeepers haltingly practised “Bonjour Madame” and “Belle journée?” to their new French-speaking customers. That is about as far as things went. Bilingualism remained very much one-sided.
Sutton’s streets were redolent with farm odours. Farmers from the flatlands of the township brought into the village the particular smells of their surroundings, of their work. Their clothes, boots and wagons bore the stink of manure, sweat, pigsty, cow-barn, horse urine and muck. The village itself did not always have the bouquet of roses. A municipal by-law, passed in 1875, called for the spring-cleaning of septic reservoirs or privies out behind each home, twenty or so years before the general water supply and sewage system was built.
Sutton Flats was a place of noises too. O’Neill’s smithy near the Billings place was the source of clanging iron for horseshoes or long barn-door hinges. Up the mountain road Olivier Godue formed his wheel rims and casket hinges. After 1870 the sounds of the SECR train, whose strident whistle and bell warned of its arrival and departure, were added to this mix.
Sutton’s life was altered by the arrival of the railway. Rails brought more and different goods, visitors, cardsharps, strangers, and newspapers. It brought news of fashions in clothing. The railway caused the attention of the village’s merchants and the general economy to divert from its original purpose of outfitter to the township’s farmers to the more urban one of supplying fancy goods and “niceties” for its residents.
Their peers chose Sutton’s municipal administrators, selected equitably from merchant residents of the village and farmers from the township.
Sutton suffered its most dramatic disruption in 1898 when forty or so of its best buildings went up in flames. Dr Cutter, jr. lost his pleasant clapboard house on the corner of Main and Mountain. His father’s old hotel, built in the 1840s and then owned by Mr. Hunt, disappeared. Olmstead’s elegant general and grain stores burned to the ground on the southeast corners of the same streets. Hawley’s millenary store became a black burnt-out foundation across from Greeley and Thompson’s store near the Town Hall. All buildings running northward from Hunt’s hotel to the corner of Depot Street became smoking stone foundations. The CPR station and its storage shed disappeared into piles of brick rubble. Lebeau’s Hotel, the bakery, the tannery on Pearl Street, suffered the same fate.
The Wheeler photographs taken the day after the fire show the devastation along Main, Depot, and Mountain Streets. Beyond the stark ruins, in the background of these emotion-filled and beautiful images, are to be seen the still-existing homes, churches and schools of Sutton.
Happily the community had had an active and assiduous insurance man. George Dyer had sold fire insurance to most of the village’s proprietors. A few days after their loss most owners had received compensation. The sound of hammer and saw reverberated along the village’s streets as, in 1899 and 1900, more than forty buildings were rebuilt.
Regrettably the flames had destroyed Sutton’s proprietors’ standards of style, charm, and materials. The architectural quality of the village was altered for all time. Residents forgot the sense of where they had been living all their lives. The fine Cutter home was replaced by a two storey, flat-roofed, boxlike affair. Along Main Street were built a series of false-front stores reminiscent of facades from Wild West and Wells Fargo images. Of all the replaced buildings, only Dr. MacDonald’s home respected its original Second Empire style.
A December 1907 booklet, the Sutton Parish Magazine, contained advertisements touting the goods of the newly rebuilt stores. The farm-oriented trade is no longer addressed. Offerings are directed at elegant town folk. Flannery’s store promotes Groceries, Fruit, Confectionery, Crockery and Glassware. Boright & Safford state that their specialties are Men’s Clothing and Women’s Shoes. Howard Bresee does painting and paper-hanging. Amédé Lebeau has foregone the hotel business and now sells paint, wallpaper, tinware, shoes, and rubbers. Sutton Printing Co. promotes photo supplies, souvenirs, and books.
Sutton Township’s agriculture had begun to falter around the end of the nineteenth century. The significant slowing down coincided with the calamity of the fire. Farmer’s sons left their fathers' farms to move into town to become mechanics, store clerks and butchers’ assistants.
Around 1910 horses and oxen began to gradually disappear from Sutton’s streets to be replaced by motorcars, their drivers in goggles. The art of making horse or ox-shoes became a thing of the past. Lafleur’s store, on Main Street on the south side of the Sutton River, sported a new-fangled gasoline pump.
The founding fathers had omitted allowing space for a community village green as was usual in Vermont villages. The Baptist Church tried to correct this in 1910 by donating its former cemetery on Maple Street as parkland to the town. Succeeding town councils ignored the donation. Sixty years later, in the 1970s, the opportunity to create a community park was again missed when a large Main Street space was purchased by the town near the post office. Where it might well have acted as the town common, instead it became an asphalted parking lot for out-of-town visitors.
The decline in Sutton’s economy lasted from the 1910s till long after the universal depression of the 1930s. The Second World War drew many unemployed young people away. Attempts at manufacturing of different sorts were tried, mainly in the woodworking field. Sash and door, baseball bats, bowling pins and veneer occupied a certain number of people. They all ceased operations. Sutton lost its manufacturing work force. Service trade became the norm.
In the 1940s Sutton Milk Products Company helped to stabilize the dairy production of the few townships producers and provided occupation for a number of Sutton’s population. When the Boulangers turned their attention to the ski industry in the 1960s that move provided employment in a heretofore-untapped field.
Town merchants could do little more than witness the winter sport on the mountain. Its contribution to the town’s economy was negligible. Skiers came from Montreal in the morning and left in the afternoon, buying gasoline and a soft drink as they left. Their stays were short, restrained to time spent on skis on the hills.
But skiing day-trippers began to savour the open atmosphere of Sutton Township’s empty fields and forest-covered mountains. They rented, then purchased, farm houses close-bt, then farther from the ski hills. From the 1970s to early 2000s they acquired land and built homes. Farmers and farmers’ sons now mow the lawns, clear winter snow and become handymen for urban retirees. In the town itself, former general stores or service buildings became boutiques. Boright and Safford’s general store became alternately a dry goods store, a gift shop and, lately, a bakery-delicatessen. A six-pump gasoline station, surrounded by its asphalt desert, occupies the very centre of the town. A large chain grocery store took over the small, locally owned Després grocery cum hardware cum grain store. Old homes were destroyed or moved to make space for paved parking spaces and minuscule multi-stored shopping centres. Chocolate stores, bookstores, natural food stores, cafés, delicatessens, antique stores, all owned by newcomers, replaced local residents’ places of business.
Sutton’s present-day cultural activity runs the gamut from exhibitions of local painters’ works, imported folk music, jazz combos, and poetry readings. Six competing art galleries vie for the attention of passers-by. Linguistically, on Sutton’s sidewalks little English is heard unless it happens to be a rainy Ontario or American holiday. Sutton’s present-day culture is imported and imposed, having nothing to do with Sutton’s founding people, its heritage or its future. In November 2005, the municipal council of the Ville de Sutton, made up mainly of political neophytes, was elected on a grab-bag platform of “culture”. Culture has now assumed hard-to- define implications.
Operating farms in Sutton have now dwindled from the hundreds down to a number to be counted on one and a half hands. Farming as a way of life has disappeared. Sutton’s present day landowners have large tracts of untended, overgrown fields surrounding their newly built houses, which, week-long, remain unlit and empty. Environmental and ecological matters are policed by new arrivals perturbed because mountain views are blocked by tree plantations or who object to the smell of the rare farmer’s spreading of manure. Sutton’s citizens’ groups are made up of individuals attempting to apply big city controls to the unstructured place.
The rupture in Sutton’s makeup has occurred in practically all the building blocks of its structure. Socially, architecturally, aesthetically, economically, culturally, administratively, it has today yielded its fate to urban newcomers.
Happily Sutton Town is surrounded by naturally pleasant vistas. It is situated at the base of green mountains providing joy and challenge to skiers, hikers and preservationists nationwide.
What then is to be done with the ugly duckling of a Town surrounded by such natural wonders? What concept may be put forward to reverse the trend into anonymity of this community that once had flair and charm, and is now on the verge of becoming a place without individuality?
Sutton Town’s most visual and valuable assets are the many pre-1898 buildings which survived the fire that year. The entire community, the owner-residents, the commercial establishments, the Tourist Office, the heritage societies of Sutton, may make a long-term, joint commitment towards the preservation, the valuing, the publicizing of this collection of more than eighty buildings on Main, Pleasant, Maple, Academy, Western Streets and the grist mill on Mountain Road. A few such buildings were identified six years ago with roadside plaques describing their history. That work should be completed on the balance. A walking tour of the town prepared by Sutton’s tourist office might then be expanded to cover the entire collection with appropriate documentation. Sutton’s historical society, Héritage Sutton, is constructing a large scale model of the Town of Sutton as it was before the fire. Its eighty building models are being built based on field dimensions, new and old photographs, drawings, available texts, newspaper articles and private papers. Sutton’s historical buildings, the walking tour and the model in Sutton’s Museum have great historical, architectural, educational and touristic qualities.
The realization of a community plan underscoring its historic assets will ensure that Sutton Town recovers its place in the sun.