William John Anderson started his orchard in 1911 on his father’s farm behind Shoreham’s St. Genevieve’s Catholic Church. By the late 1920s Anderson’s Diamond A Orchard had expanded along Route 22A and was one of the most highly regarded in the state. At one time Anderson was cultivating 3,500 trees. In 1935 he was elected president of the Vermont Horticultural Society. He had his own packaging plant, and in 1943 he harvested 40,000 bushels of apples from his orchard. Photograph courtesy of Shoreham Historical Society
This article is by Nancy Graff, of Montpelier, who is a freelance writer and editor. In This State is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places.
William John Anderson, of Shoreham, lived a robust and successful life until his final years. Personable and intelligent, he made his way in Vermont during the first half of the 20th century as one of the state’s few highly visible African-Americans.
He faced prejudice, of course — during his years serving in the Vermont Legislature, he was refused lodging at the Pavilion Hotel and the Tavern, both in Montpelier — but he made a name for himself as a gentleman and a businessman, bullying his way through his life’s slights and holding his head high.
Anderson was active in civic affairs and a popular public speaker. He served on the local school board for three years and as town auditor for one. In 1944 the residents of Shoreham elected him to the first of two terms in the Vermont House of Representatives by landslide votes of 216-4 and 92-1. Photograph courtesy of Shoreham Historical Society
A self-made and self-taught orchardist, Anderson planted short whips of his first apple trees on his father’s farm in Shoreham in 1911. He named the orchard Diamond A for “Anderson.” By the early 1930s he could stroll among 3,500 flourishing apple trees on a sunny hillside near the shores of Lake Champlain. He was among the earliest and most successful orchardists in Shoreham, which eventually became an apple-growing powerhouse.
Anderson is not widely remembered in Vermont although his story is an important one in the narratives of African-American Vermonters. The resources necessary to tell his story are slim. The Shoreham Historical Society, located in a squat stone former schoolhouse, has had only a handful of papers. Until now.
Earlier this fall the society received a copy of a letter Anderson wrote in 1944 to a former teacher, a note of thanks that enriches our understanding of the African-American experience in one of the whitest states in the country.
A former president of the society, Susan MacIntire, says she hopes the letter will help lift Anderson from obscurity and give him a proper place in Vermont history.
Anderson’s story starts during the Civil War when his father, a 17-year-old escaped slave, found refuge with the 11th Vermont Infantry. Here is where the Anderson family’s experience as free immigrants begins.
Being an immigrant to Vermont is a difficult enough, says Peter Gilbert, director of the Vermont Council on the Humanities. “And the experience hasn’t changed much. It means making your way in a strange life.”
After the war Anderson’s father came north to Shoreham with one of the officers of the unit. Anderson married a French-Canadian woman who was part Native American, and they started a farm in Shoreham, where they and their two exceptional children were the only people of color.
William Anderson specialized in growing MacIntosh and Northern Spy apples. Ironically, one legend has it that the Northern Spy apple acquired its name after a Union spy was caught eating one well behind the Confederate lines. A Confederate officer recognized the apple as a variety grown only in the far north and captured the man. No one knows whether Anderson chose to grow Northern Spy apples as a testament to his past or because they are favored eating apples, spritely flavored with a flesh that snaps.
Susan MacIntire, a 30-year president of the Shoreham Historical Society, holds a scrapbook compiled by William John Anderson’s daughter-in-law. The page on display shows a portrait of Anderson, a scene that includes Anderson as a child playing on the town green, and Anderson working in his apple packaging plant, which still stands north of town. MacIntire actively seeks anything related to the Andersons for the historical society’s collection. Photo by Nancy Graff
A random survey proves Susan MacIntire’s point that William Anderson is not widely known today even in his hometown. At the nearby Maplefields, not one person in six had any idea who William John Anderson was even though they were standing less than 50 yards from his old orchard. Neither did the man shuttling crates of apples to a truck at Vermont Refrigerated Services. It occupies the former site of the Shoreham Cooperative Apple Producers’ Association, whose large sign at the other end of the building is splayed across rafters like a drying rag.
The resources to effect this resurrection of Anderson’s reputation are slight. The nearby Shoreham Historical Society is set up for meetings now and has no set hours for visitors, but town artifacts are distributed among several glass cases. The few objects in the society’s collection that pertain to Anderson are a scrapbook, compiled by his daughter-in-law, a 14-page biography of Anderson written by his sister-in-law, and some photographs. Now there is the recently acquired letter, a four-page gem that will sparkle in the town’s history.
Other evidence of Anderson’s former presence in town are both more visible and less protected. The house he shared with his son has been split in two, and the sections relocated to a small development. His apple packaging plant is about to disappear behind a new health clinic. His father’s house looks like any other house on the street.
Anderson’s nondescript barn sits on land owned by a bank, which has built a branch beside it. The Anderson family graves are marked with simple stones in a cemetery west of the village. The orchards themselves, which started behind St. Genevieve’s Catholic Church and ran northward, are tattered and wild, overgrown with dense forest. There are no historic markers, no signposts, no brochures to introduce this extraordinary man.
William Anderson escaped slavery in the South during the Civil War and came north afterward because of a friendship with a member of the 11th Vermont Infantry to start a new life in Shoreham. He married Philomen Langlois, a French Canadian woman who was part Native American. In this house, still standing on Route 74 east of town, he helped raise two exceptional children. Photograph by Nancy Graff
Yet he was exceptional. Born in 1874, he went to school locally until he went off to Mount Hermon, a boarding school in Massachusetts. To make ends meet, he worked in the school laundry. In either 1897 or 1899, he was hired across the lake at the grand Hotel Champlain, where President William McKinley set up a summer White House at the hotel, and during one of those summers Anderson was hired as the president’s doorman.
McKinley took an interest in the young man, encouraged him to aim high, and Anderson returned to school after his final summer at the hotel and became manager of the laundry. He soon started the apple orchard to become his own boss.
Over the course of his lifetime, he met three other presidents, became president of the Vermont Horticultural Society, served two terms in the Vermont Legislature, worked parallel to George Aiken in pomological experimentation, and was granted special membership in the Masons.
Fluent in French and English, he was a popular public speaker throughout the region until his death in 1959. He worked with U.S. Sen. Warren Austin to create a school for the Tuskegee Airmen so that like white soldiers who graduated from the nation’s military academies, these African-American pilots would leave the service with an education. At a time when many southern African-Americans were migrating to northern cities in search of opportunities, Anderson was already a member of the middle class.
“We look for exemplars in our lives,” says Peter Gilbert, “people who can show us something important, even transcendent.”
McKinley was such a model to Anderson. In encouraging the young man to achieve more, Gilbert says, in effect “William McKinley assured him ‘You have value, you have strength and dignity.’”
The copy of the letter that arrived at the Shoreham Historical Society tells us that Anderson, despite his success, still faced racism. He succeeded where others would have failed, thanks, in part, to a young white teacher in the stone schoolhouse who took a special interest in him. At age 67, Anderson had not forgotten how she modeled a good life for him.
He likened his teacher’s role to that of the stake and rope that bind crooked apple stock until it grows straight on its own. “I think that is the part you played in my life,” he wrote. “You were the one who directed my thoughts when I was young (that). . .enabled me to be strong.”
Nancy Graff of Montpelier is a freelance writer and editor.
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