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(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)

Nathan Perkins dreaded this mission. It would take him far from his comfortable home and into what he feared was a dangerous and untamed land. But as an evangelical minister, Perkins believed he had no choice. It was his duty to spread the faith in the wilderness, which in this case was Vermont.

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On April 27, 1789, Perkins bid a tearful goodbye to his wife and children and rode off on his horse, not sure when or whether he would see them again.

We know of Perkins’ mission, and his feelings about it, thanks to the unusually frank journal he left behind. As a wealthy and well-regarded conservative Congregationalist minister, Perkins was used to the comforts of the civilized world of Hartford, Connecticut. He was hardly prepared for the deprivations he would meet along the road.

Reading Perkins’ journal, it’s easy to grow tired of his nearly constant complaining, but we are fortunate that he recorded his experiences and opinions. Through all his grumbling, we can glimpse one man’s view of the early days of Vermont. Actually, it is a relief to read opinions in an 18th-century journal, even if they are offered by a dyspeptic writer. People of that time period often kept frustratingly minimalistic journals, recording only the most mundane of facts. “Rain today. The Johnsons visited,” is the sort of detail they typically offered.

Perkins, however, didn’t mince words; he unleashed them in torrents, expressing his shock and dismay over what he regarded as the crude and godless conditions he encountered during his travels. “The evening passed in dulness & insipidity,” he wrote after his first night on the road, clearly confident his hosts would never read his journal. “Poor Supper—wretched breakfast—tea paler than water—Sugar heavier than lead.”

And to think he was only in southern Massachusetts when he wrote that. How he must have dreaded what lay ahead for him once he reached the wilds of Vermont.

That first night, he later realized, was when he “began to experience that hard & coarse fare which, wasted away my flesh & made me often, often regret my tour.”

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His tour would take him along the approximate path of present-day Route 7. He would enter Vermont at Pownal and visit Bennington and Manchester before reaching the Burlington area, where he lodged at the home of Gov. Thomas Chittenden in Williston. The state was still nominally independent, having declared itself free of Britain 12 years earlier. It would be another two years before it officially joined the United States.

Perkins describes the region as a wasteland. The desolation Perkins saw wasn’t for lack of people — Vermont’s population stood at about 85,000 — but rather for lack of proper religion and refinement. “I have rode more than 100 miles and seen no meeting house!” he wrote in despair at one point.

Reading Perkins’ journal takes getting used to. To our eyes, his spelling is odd, his capitalization sporadic and punctuation bewildering. Since spelling hadn’t been standardized, he can hardly be faulted. In fact, years later he would be one of the original subscribers to the first American dictionary produced by his former student Noah Webster.

Perkins often used dashes where we would use a comma and skipped any punctuation where some break is needed to ease comprehension. Also, in true 18th-century style, he used the word “ye” where we would write “the.” Despite the stylistic differences, his feelings remain clear.

It’s hard to misconstrue entries like this one from May 1: “Friday entered ye State of Vermont—a bad appearance at ye entrance, Pawnal ye first town, poor land—very unpleasant—very uneven—miserable set of inhabitants—no religion, Rhode Island haters of religion—baptists, quakers, & and some Presbyterians—no meeting house.” (The Rhode Island comment apparently refers to that colony’s founding by opponents of the strict religious doctrines of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.)

At a particularly low point during this time in Vermont, Perkins wrote: “Words cannot describe ye hardships I undergo, or ye strength of my desire to see my family. … How affectionately do I remember them, hundreds of times every day, & shed a tear, in ye woods—got lost twice in ye woods already—heard ye horrible howling of ye wolves. Far absent—in ye wilderness—among all strangers—all alone—among log-huts—people nasty—poor—low-lived—indelicate—and miserable cooks.”

If the food in Vermont disappointed Perkins, so did the drink.

“I suffer as much for ye want of drink as any thing,” he wrote. “Brook-water is my chief drink. The maple cyder is horrible stuff—no malt in ye Country.—Their beer poor bran beer.”

The few Vermonters whom Perkins considered cultured were apparently the exception to the rule. He judged Moses Robinson, chief justice of the state Supreme Court, “a man of sense & religion.” He stayed with the family of Timothy Brownson, one of the first settlers of Sunderland, and found them “kind.” But they were also “destitute of all taste & polish.”

Despite the hardships faced by these rough frontier sorts, Perkins credited the women with being happier than the refined ladies of Connecticut:

“When I go from hut to hut, from town to town, in ye Wilderness, ye people nothing to eat,–to drink,–or wear,– all work, & yet ye women quiet,–serene,–peaceable,–contented, loving their husbands,–their home,–wanting never to return,–nor any dressy clothes; I think how strange!—I ask myself are these women of ye same species with our fine Ladies? tough are they, brawny their limbs,–their young girls unpolished – & will bear work as well as mules.”

Connecticut women, Perkins complained, have nice clothes, good roads and carriages to transport them, yet still they are unsatisfied. They are “vile,” “guilty” and “ungrateful to providence,” he wrote. Much like Perkins himself, it is tempting to think.

If you are starting to wonder whether Perkins had issues with his wife, you might be right. “Could my Lady so agreeable & pleasant to me, only see & endure what I have, how contented – how easy – how thankful would she be!” he wrote. (For her part, Katherine Perkins’ life was hardly free of worries; she bore him nine children.)

For all his talk of backwoods coarseness, Nathan Perkins suggested that the hardships of living in a wilderness had burnished Vermonters’ characters. “Woods make people love one another & kind & obliging and good natured,” he wrote. “They set much more by one another than in ye old settlements. Leave their doors unbarred.”

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If he found some virtue among Vermonters, he saw a greater reason for concern. To him, many Vermonters were irreligious — that is, not Congregationalists. They numbered among them Quakers, Anabaptists, Episcopalians and Universalists. Worse, “almost all ye men of learning” were deists, whose belief in God was based on reason and personal experience, rather than on revelations to prophets, holy texts or religious authority.

For an evangelist, Vermont would be a tough nut to crack.

“Colchester & Burlington all deists & proper heathen,” he wrote. “… People pay little regard to ye Sabbath, hunt & fish on that day frequently. Not more than 1/6 part of ye families attend family prayer in ye whole State.”

(Perkins would no doubt be disappointed that today Vermont ranks last in the nation in terms of how important religion is in people’s lives, according to a study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.)

While in Sunderland, he had seen the onetime home of his nemesis, the state’s most famous heathen. “Here lived formerly ye awful Deist Ethan Allyn … who delighted in calling himself ye old philospher.”

But Perkins was confident his mission was having success. He preached about six days a week, in large barns and tiny backwoods cabins. Preaching in Williston, he found the “(a)udience peculiarly attentive.” He helped a group in Essex write a covenant and form a church. “The people deeply affected,” he observed. “Tears flowed plentifully.”

Perkins wrote that his audiences “were charmed with my sermons & my delivery” and that he received compliments that “would be vain in me to repeat.” Then he repeated them: “Such as ye very first-rate – philosophical – Deep – penetrating – a great Scholar – angelic – The angel Gabriel could not go before him …”

But Perkins said he was above such praise. He had “a higher end,” and that was “to alarm ye Conscience … to give ye nature of true Religion.”

Riding near Essex, he wrote, “my horse got away & steered for Hartford. he had undergone hardships enough he thought.”

Perkins had had enough too. He had been braving Vermont for a little over a month. Soon he would start his journey south and reach home two weeks later. But before he left the Burlington area, he had one more visit to pay.

“Arrived at Onion-river falls & passed by Ethan Allyn’s grave,” he wrote. Allen had died in February of that year. “An awful Infidel,” Perkins continued, “one of ye wickedest men yet ever walked this guilty globe. I stopped & looked at his grave with a pious horror.”