October 30, 2024 • 20 mins
Growing up on the old dirt road was an experience on its own. Meet my parents, who bought the house in 1985 having heard very little about what had gone on in the neighborhood and the house they just bought until they spoke to their new neighbors. Learn more about some of Sharon's older history, which is fascinating, before delving into more details about what happened on the old dirt road.
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(00:00):
When you find yourself traveling along an old dirt road in your town, or even in a place
(00:14):
you've never been, try to imagine the things that have happened there and who might have
lived there.
The dirt road you're thinking of might be treeline, bordered by thick forests and hills
with swamps on either side.
Or maybe it stretches off forever in a straight line through a dusty desert.
Your imagination probably doesn't take you to actors, rock stars, and even drug traffickers.
(00:35):
But there's a reason they say truth is stranger than fiction.
My name is Anthony Cerdelli.
I'm a journalist.
Well, a sports journalist living in Southern California.
I'm about to tell you a story about the dirt road in Vermont that I grew up on.
When I found out the truth behind the urban legends about this small part of Sharon, Vermont,
(00:56):
the place where I spent a lot of my childhood, my mind was blown.
This is True Stories from an Old Dirt Road.
We lived at the other end of the road, a little over two miles from where the house is.
(01:18):
I used to run down that road and ran by the house many times, but we were in the process
of trying to decide whether we were going to renovate the house that we lived in, that
we had bought.
And I thought, well, maybe, you know, I saw a for-sale sign on the property.
(01:41):
And I thought, well, maybe this is an option.
Instead of renovating our current house, why not look into buying this one, primarily because
it had a beautiful pond and I'm a fisherman.
So that really attracted me.
I liked it a lot.
For me, it seemed to be a typical old-timey Vermont poem.
(02:03):
And it just looked inviting and cozy.
I had always wanted to be home with my kids.
And somehow I find it fun to play and watch them grow up.
And we did so many fun things like going along the road and playing stick stock and catching
turtles and catching salamanders.
And I always liked being outside and in nature.
(02:26):
Mrs. Mason, the neighbor, she helped out like once a week.
She was watching you guys for a couple of hours in the afternoon.
So it was manageable, but there weren't as many distractions.
And then by the age of three, so it was just the first three years and then you started
going to nursery school.
(02:47):
Then we had to drive into town twice or three times a day, which was quite a bit on that
road.
Yeah.
Those were my parents, Tom and Andrea Ciardelli.
They moved to the house in 1985 because they decided they liked it better than the house
that they were about to renovate.
Like I had, they'd mostly only heard stories about what had happened at the house.
(03:09):
And their only confirmation of any of it was from the deed.
We didn't know initially any of it until we met our neighbors down the road with the Masons
just after we bought it.
And they told us a couple of stories, one about the drug bust and one about a Hollywood
child actor who once lived there.
(03:31):
But didn't it say when we did the title search and all of that, didn't the lawyer find out
about some of that?
Wasn't the walls name in the deed?
It might have been, but I don't remember hearing it.
The house stood out to my parents for a lot of reasons.
Being able to fish and hunt was a big plus for my dad, but that wasn't the only reason
they decided to move there.
(03:53):
It had a couple of really nice fields, had some apple trees.
70 plus acres at the time.
Yeah, 70 acres, which included the pond.
So it was an attractive place to live in at the end of an older load of demand.
When my parents moved in, they set to work making it a cozy spot to start a family and
(04:14):
updated it to their liking.
It was built in 1780 after all, and over the course of more than two centuries had seen
its share of renovations, abuse, neglect, and some interesting design choices.
There was an unused chimney that went from actually from the kitchen up through the bedroom
(04:35):
upstairs.
And so that chimney was not being used.
So we tore it down and passed the hole in the roof so that the room wouldn't have to
walk around.
Plus the bed didn't fit.
The chimney went right through the middle of the room and it was all crooked.
And in order to fit our queen size bed or double, whatever it was at the time, we had
(04:57):
to remove the chimney.
And dad and I worked with insulation, insulated the roof to make it a little bit warmer, and
just little by little made it more cozy.
The house was in, I think, structurally in fairly good shape, but the interior was pretty
in places pretty bad.
(05:18):
There was like a linoleum floor in the kitchen that was torn to pieces and was really, really
dark.
It didn't get much daylight in the house, but the rooms were impressive with the big
beams and just had a great, great feel to it and a lot of wood, which at the time we
both liked a lot.
(05:38):
It was cozy inside, but it was pretty wild outside, which is why my parents loved it.
Living in rural Vermont, you might have some tenants and neighbors of the animal kingdom
that don't always agree with your wishes.
There were just the snakes that were and still are hanging around because of just the way
(05:59):
the land is there.
And the ones in the water tank down in the cellar, which we found snake skins right next
to the water tank.
On more than one occasion, there were big snakes in the water tank, usually adders,
who were harmless to humans, but that didn't really relieve the shock of seeing them in
our house.
Then there was the beaver incident.
(06:22):
Our pond had a beaver, or so we thought.
It kept making dams in the culvert, which is a pipe that funneled the brook running
out of our pond under the dirt road.
After a few flooding incidents, my dad had to do something.
The beavers kept making dams right in the middle so you couldn't reach it.
They started at one end, the nearest end, but then I would get down and dig it out.
(06:46):
But they kept moving towards the middle of the road so you couldn't reach it.
And so we had to call the town.
And the town told us that they would dig out the culvert, clear the beaver dam out of it.
The first day, we're going to hire a trapper to trap the beavers.
And we thought that there were maybe two or three beavers that we would see swimming around
at night, but he trapped 11 beavers.
(07:08):
One summer when I was six or seven years old, my parents thought they'd pull a prank on me.
Your major hobby was going out to the pond with a net and catching frogs and salamanders.
We were Christmas shopping up in Burlington in a little store that had figurines made
out of porcelain.
And they had a perfect imitation of an African bullfrog.
(07:32):
So I thought, well, maybe if I bought that, I could play a joke on you.
And so for the week before, I kept on saying, Anthony, did you hear that big bullfrog?
That I put it out there, you know, not happening.
My parents felt so bad about that.
They got me my first pet lizard to mend the fences.
So I got the last laugh there.
Do you remember when the skunk got into the dark kennel?
(07:55):
We woke up in the morning and I thought I had left something rubber on the heater.
But we went out.
The smell was very intense.
So we went out to let the dogs out of the kennel behind the garage.
And somehow a poor skunk had gotten into the kennel, I think, before we put the dogs in
at night.
And they shredded the skull.
(08:17):
The smell was impossible.
And we both had this collar of red.
It was disgusting.
It was truly disgusting.
That pond was where I learned how to skate, and eventually it led to my love for ice hockey.
Your mom was a great skater.
And so when on the days that you could clear the ice, the snow from the pond, and it was
(08:43):
nice to skate on, we would go out there and you and Willie would skate around.
And we got you a hockey stick so you could prop yourself up.
And unbeknownst to us, hockey was one of the most popular sports in the region.
So there are plenty of people and kids your age were buying.
(09:04):
So we signed you up for ice hockey.
Living in that rural community, my parents got to know and rely on their neighbors, some
who were involved in these stories themselves, including Bob Mason, whose son Dennis you
heard in the first episode.
I used to drive Grammy's old Ford LTD, which sort of swam from side to side on a road without
(09:30):
snow and mud.
And we must have had a light snowstorm or something.
And I was driving towards Sharon and I could not keep the car on the road.
It just veered into the ditch.
And my first encounter with Mr. Mason was he had to get his tractor out and pull me
out of the ditch.
He was a nice guy.
He was helpful and friendly.
(09:54):
After all the love and care that went to the home and the fond memories, my parents couldn't
bring themselves to sell it, even when we had to move away.
See Sharon only had school up to the fifth grade.
So when it came time for me to go to school, instead of sending me there, I went to elementary
school a couple of towns away in Hanover, New Hampshire.
When it was time for middle school, we had to move to Hanover for me to keep being able
(10:16):
to go to school there.
So we did.
So we kept the house and Sharon.
It's fortunate enough to not having to make the decision.
The place was our place, our first place that we put a lot of work in and that felt right
and where you guys started your lives.
(10:37):
And we just, it never occurred to us that we ought to sell it.
And we did rent it on a few occasions, but we also renovated it at least two times.
And at the end we decided not to rent it anymore and just use it ourselves.
I never wanted to go back because by the time I was in my teens, I was bored by the place.
(10:58):
Even living in Hanover, home of Dartmouth College and a population of about 10,000 people
felt like a metropolis to me.
But Sharon, as it turns out, is a historic place.
Now that I'm older, I appreciate its history, among many of the other things about the town.
The town of Sharon was created in 1761, part of the New Hampshire grants.
(11:20):
You see, back then Vermont wasn't a state and the colonial governor of New Hampshire,
Benning Wentworth, gave away plots of land in its territory for people to settle.
The problem was that land was also claimed by the province of New York.
Anyway, a bunch of stuff happened that you can read about in Revolutionary War books
and Vermont became its own state in 1791.
(11:43):
That is, by the way, 10 years after my house was built.
But before Vermont officially became a state, things were going down in the town of Sharon
and the neighboring town of Royalton.
One of those things was the Royalton Raid.
In October of 1780, 300 members of the Mohawk tribe of Native Americans, along with seven
members of the British Army, raided the towns of Royalton and Sharon, along with neighboring
(12:06):
Tunbridge.
The raiders burned the towns and took 32 prisoners, killing four of them during the raid or during
their escape to Canada.
The raiders were pursued by the local militia, but escaped successfully.
Most of the captives eventually escaped or were freed, but the towns were heavily damaged
and the psychological scars were deep.
(12:27):
That wasn't the only interesting thing to happen in Sharon.
Another of Sharon's claims to fame is its link to Mormonism.
That's because it was the birthplace of the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith.
Smith was born there in 1805 on the border of South Royalton and Sharon.
You may have known that, but here comes the crazy part.
Smith left Sharon with his family in 1816 after the family's crops failed.
(12:51):
Why?
Because 1816 was known as the Year Without Summer.
It was called that because a volcano named Mount Timbora, which was all the way in Indonesia,
erupted and plunged the earth into a volcanic winter.
It decreased the earth's average temperature by as much as one degree Fahrenheit, which,
while it doesn't seem like much, had huge effects on the northeast and the crops in
(13:13):
New England.
That's not all.
There's another interesting story about someone from Sharon.
How about the story of Charlie Parkhurst?
Parkhurst was born biologically female, but identified as a male.
He ran away from home and eventually became a famous stagecoach driver in California.
Stagecoach driving back then was the primary means of transportation before railroads became
(13:35):
commonplace.
The job was notoriously very dangerous and Parkhurst earned a reputation for his abilities.
But Parkhurst has another claim to fame.
Since he identified as a man and dressed convincingly as such, he was able to vote in the presidential
election of 1868.
This was before the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, granting women the right to vote.
(13:58):
Parkhurst's biological gender wasn't discovered until after his death in 1879.
The events I just told you about in episode one are not as well known as Joseph Smith,
the Royalton Raid, or Charlie Parkhurst, but they had big impacts in their own right.
That brings me back to the Brandon DeWilda story from last episode.
As you likely remember, DeWilda bought our future house in 1964.
(14:21):
He was an actor.
He found fame at eight years old as a cast member in the wildly successful Broadway show,
The Member of the Wedding.
That set him on a path to some early TV appearances and a career in film, where in 1953, at age
10, he played little Joey Starrett in the western Shane.
For that role, he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards.
(14:44):
He didn't win, but the nomination catapulted him even further into stardom.
He co-starred in movies with John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Patricia Neal, Rock Hudson, Paul
Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Warren Beatty, Karl Malden, Angela Lansbury, and more.
But the 1960s were a turning point for DeWilda and the country.
(15:04):
The onset of the Vietnam War and the 1960s counterculture influenced DeWilda heavily.
He tried to forge a career in music, befriending a long list of influential musicians, one
of whom would visit the house in Sharon.
He struggled with the mold Hollywood had typecast him in, and he started partaking in many of
the activities the mid-60s are remembered for.
(15:26):
That might have included doing psychedelics and psychedelic art.
The wood interior bedroom, the doorframe had three or four layers of rather psychedelic
colors all over it, light blue and green and yellow.
It's really hippie rainbows.
Yes, DeWilda was into psychedelics and art, and most likely painted the doorframe to my
(15:50):
old bedroom.
He did it with friends, including Graham Parsons, who visited the house in 1966.
Parsons was a legendary musician, and although he might not be a household name today, he's
remembered as a pioneer of country music, helping to launch the career of Amy Lou Harris.
In 2010, Rolling Stone named him the 87th greatest musical artist of all time.
(16:13):
His entry was written by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.
I heard of Graham Parsons because of the Burings, but had no idea about the other bands that
he was involved with.
Not only him, but also DeWild.
Just made the house more interesting.
Strangely, just half a decade or so later, a seemingly completely unrelated group of
(16:36):
showbiz types started to visit the house next door.
Like I told you in episode one, the house just down the road and across the street housed
a recording studio by the name of Sun Treader.
Sun Treader was founded by John and Jerese Bergstrom, a married couple with musical aspirations
that decided to build a recording studio in the middle of nowhere.
That was mentioned too, like we did.
(16:57):
It was a silent studio, but I couldn't picture what that actually meant.
It was a somewhat strange, modern-looking building, or just not a typical Vermont building,
but I had no idea what that meant.
That studio wasn't just some hole in the wall for the local cover bands to make a record.
(17:18):
This studio was designed by John and Jerese and was state-of-the-art, and their clientele
reflected that.
As I mentioned, they recorded Foghat's Fool for the City album, as well as the song Slow
Ride, which you've probably heard on a classic rock station or two, or in the movie Days
in Confused.
They also recorded with Arlo Guthrie and Melanie.
(17:39):
There were even a few special visitors who didn't record at the studio, but visited
friends there.
But we'll get to all of that, as well as the interviews with John and Jerese and a former
member of Foghat in episode 4.
Then there was the drug bust.
In 1979, three men rented my future childhood home, the one Brandon DeWilda had once owned,
but not in 1979, and proceeded to set up a massive drug trafficking operation.
(18:03):
They would drive pickup trucks with caps on them into the garage slash barn next to the
house, fill it with marijuana and hashish, and send it on from there to be distributed
in major cities in the Northeast.
After a tip from an informant, the state police and one DEA agent investigated the operation
surveilling the house round the clock for six weeks.
After the investigation was over, they busted the traffickers.
(18:27):
On the night they went to arrest the suspects, they stopped at a local diner where my future
babysitter Mrs. Mason met them.
She made sandwiches.
She told us all about it.
She was all excited when she could tell a story.
She worked at Brooksies, the little snack bar restaurant down in the middle of Sharon.
(18:49):
She said that one night when she was working her shift, that the state police called Brooksies
and ordered 50 sandwiches and a couple of gallons of coffee to be ready at around midnight.
Didn't say why, but that was the night that they raided the house.
That's just the tip of the iceberg for this story.
(19:11):
Or maybe one leaf of the weed plant, so to speak.
Stay tuned for the details of this whole story in episodes five and six.
That's it for this episode.
In episode three, you'll hear the full story of Brandon DeWilda and what he did at the house
in Sharon.
You'll hear from friends of his, all four musicians, some quite successful, about Brandon's
(19:32):
life and what it was like for a group of adventurous young men in the 1960s in Sharon, Vermont.
You can find this podcast on every major podcast hosting site, like Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
and more.
If you like it, please share it with others.
It's a story I'm passionate about telling and I'd love as many people to hear it as
possible.
(19:53):
Finally, if you can, please give it a good rating so that more people can discover it.
Until next time.
When you find yourself traveling along an old dirt road in your town, or even in a place
(00:14):
you've never been, try to imagine the things that have happened there and who might have
lived there.
The dirt road you're thinking of might be treeline, bordered by thick forests and hills
with swamps on either side.
Or maybe it stretches off forever in a straight line through a dusty desert.
Your imagination probably doesn't take you to actors, rock stars, and even drug traffickers.
(00:35):
But there's a reason they say truth is stranger than fiction.
My name is Anthony Cerdelli.
I'm a journalist.
Well, a sports journalist living in Southern California.
I'm about to tell you a story about the dirt road in Vermont that I grew up on.
When I found out the truth behind the urban legends about this small part of Sharon, Vermont,
(00:56):
the place where I spent a lot of my childhood, my mind was blown.
This is True Stories from an Old Dirt Road.
We lived at the other end of the road, a little over two miles from where the house is.
(01:18):
I used to run down that road and ran by the house many times, but we were in the process
of trying to decide whether we were going to renovate the house that we lived in, that
we had bought.
And I thought, well, maybe, you know, I saw a for-sale sign on the property.
(01:41):
And I thought, well, maybe this is an option.
Instead of renovating our current house, why not look into buying this one, primarily because
it had a beautiful pond and I'm a fisherman.
So that really attracted me.
I liked it a lot.
For me, it seemed to be a typical old-timey Vermont poem.
(02:03):
And it just looked inviting and cozy.
I had always wanted to be home with my kids.
And somehow I find it fun to play and watch them grow up.
And we did so many fun things like going along the road and playing stick stock and catching
turtles and catching salamanders.
And I always liked being outside and in nature.
(02:26):
Mrs. Mason, the neighbor, she helped out like once a week.
She was watching you guys for a couple of hours in the afternoon.
So it was manageable, but there weren't as many distractions.
And then by the age of three, so it was just the first three years and then you started
going to nursery school.
(02:47):
Then we had to drive into town twice or three times a day, which was quite a bit on that
road.
Yeah.
Those were my parents, Tom and Andrea Ciardelli.
They moved to the house in 1985 because they decided they liked it better than the house
that they were about to renovate.
Like I had, they'd mostly only heard stories about what had happened at the house.
(03:09):
And their only confirmation of any of it was from the deed.
We didn't know initially any of it until we met our neighbors down the road with the Masons
just after we bought it.
And they told us a couple of stories, one about the drug bust and one about a Hollywood
child actor who once lived there.
(03:31):
But didn't it say when we did the title search and all of that, didn't the lawyer find out
about some of that?
Wasn't the walls name in the deed?
It might have been, but I don't remember hearing it.
The house stood out to my parents for a lot of reasons.
Being able to fish and hunt was a big plus for my dad, but that wasn't the only reason
they decided to move there.
(03:53):
It had a couple of really nice fields, had some apple trees.
70 plus acres at the time.
Yeah, 70 acres, which included the pond.
So it was an attractive place to live in at the end of an older load of demand.
When my parents moved in, they set to work making it a cozy spot to start a family and
(04:14):
updated it to their liking.
It was built in 1780 after all, and over the course of more than two centuries had seen
its share of renovations, abuse, neglect, and some interesting design choices.
There was an unused chimney that went from actually from the kitchen up through the bedroom
(04:35):
upstairs.
And so that chimney was not being used.
So we tore it down and passed the hole in the roof so that the room wouldn't have to
walk around.
Plus the bed didn't fit.
The chimney went right through the middle of the room and it was all crooked.
And in order to fit our queen size bed or double, whatever it was at the time, we had
(04:57):
to remove the chimney.
And dad and I worked with insulation, insulated the roof to make it a little bit warmer, and
just little by little made it more cozy.
The house was in, I think, structurally in fairly good shape, but the interior was pretty
in places pretty bad.
(05:18):
There was like a linoleum floor in the kitchen that was torn to pieces and was really, really
dark.
It didn't get much daylight in the house, but the rooms were impressive with the big
beams and just had a great, great feel to it and a lot of wood, which at the time we
both liked a lot.
(05:38):
It was cozy inside, but it was pretty wild outside, which is why my parents loved it.
Living in rural Vermont, you might have some tenants and neighbors of the animal kingdom
that don't always agree with your wishes.
There were just the snakes that were and still are hanging around because of just the way
(05:59):
the land is there.
And the ones in the water tank down in the cellar, which we found snake skins right next
to the water tank.
On more than one occasion, there were big snakes in the water tank, usually adders,
who were harmless to humans, but that didn't really relieve the shock of seeing them in
our house.
Then there was the beaver incident.
(06:22):
Our pond had a beaver, or so we thought.
It kept making dams in the culvert, which is a pipe that funneled the brook running
out of our pond under the dirt road.
After a few flooding incidents, my dad had to do something.
The beavers kept making dams right in the middle so you couldn't reach it.
They started at one end, the nearest end, but then I would get down and dig it out.
(06:46):
But they kept moving towards the middle of the road so you couldn't reach it.
And so we had to call the town.
And the town told us that they would dig out the culvert, clear the beaver dam out of it.
The first day, we're going to hire a trapper to trap the beavers.
And we thought that there were maybe two or three beavers that we would see swimming around
at night, but he trapped 11 beavers.
(07:08):
One summer when I was six or seven years old, my parents thought they'd pull a prank on me.
Your major hobby was going out to the pond with a net and catching frogs and salamanders.
We were Christmas shopping up in Burlington in a little store that had figurines made
out of porcelain.
And they had a perfect imitation of an African bullfrog.
(07:32):
So I thought, well, maybe if I bought that, I could play a joke on you.
And so for the week before, I kept on saying, Anthony, did you hear that big bullfrog?
That I put it out there, you know, not happening.
My parents felt so bad about that.
They got me my first pet lizard to mend the fences.
So I got the last laugh there.
Do you remember when the skunk got into the dark kennel?
(07:55):
We woke up in the morning and I thought I had left something rubber on the heater.
But we went out.
The smell was very intense.
So we went out to let the dogs out of the kennel behind the garage.
And somehow a poor skunk had gotten into the kennel, I think, before we put the dogs in
at night.
And they shredded the skull.
(08:17):
The smell was impossible.
And we both had this collar of red.
It was disgusting.
It was truly disgusting.
That pond was where I learned how to skate, and eventually it led to my love for ice hockey.
Your mom was a great skater.
And so when on the days that you could clear the ice, the snow from the pond, and it was
(08:43):
nice to skate on, we would go out there and you and Willie would skate around.
And we got you a hockey stick so you could prop yourself up.
And unbeknownst to us, hockey was one of the most popular sports in the region.
So there are plenty of people and kids your age were buying.
(09:04):
So we signed you up for ice hockey.
Living in that rural community, my parents got to know and rely on their neighbors, some
who were involved in these stories themselves, including Bob Mason, whose son Dennis you
heard in the first episode.
I used to drive Grammy's old Ford LTD, which sort of swam from side to side on a road without
(09:30):
snow and mud.
And we must have had a light snowstorm or something.
And I was driving towards Sharon and I could not keep the car on the road.
It just veered into the ditch.
And my first encounter with Mr. Mason was he had to get his tractor out and pull me
out of the ditch.
He was a nice guy.
He was helpful and friendly.
(09:54):
After all the love and care that went to the home and the fond memories, my parents couldn't
bring themselves to sell it, even when we had to move away.
See Sharon only had school up to the fifth grade.
So when it came time for me to go to school, instead of sending me there, I went to elementary
school a couple of towns away in Hanover, New Hampshire.
When it was time for middle school, we had to move to Hanover for me to keep being able
(10:16):
to go to school there.
So we did.
So we kept the house and Sharon.
It's fortunate enough to not having to make the decision.
The place was our place, our first place that we put a lot of work in and that felt right
and where you guys started your lives.
(10:37):
And we just, it never occurred to us that we ought to sell it.
And we did rent it on a few occasions, but we also renovated it at least two times.
And at the end we decided not to rent it anymore and just use it ourselves.
I never wanted to go back because by the time I was in my teens, I was bored by the place.
(10:58):
Even living in Hanover, home of Dartmouth College and a population of about 10,000 people
felt like a metropolis to me.
But Sharon, as it turns out, is a historic place.
Now that I'm older, I appreciate its history, among many of the other things about the town.
The town of Sharon was created in 1761, part of the New Hampshire grants.
(11:20):
You see, back then Vermont wasn't a state and the colonial governor of New Hampshire,
Benning Wentworth, gave away plots of land in its territory for people to settle.
The problem was that land was also claimed by the province of New York.
Anyway, a bunch of stuff happened that you can read about in Revolutionary War books
and Vermont became its own state in 1791.
(11:43):
That is, by the way, 10 years after my house was built.
But before Vermont officially became a state, things were going down in the town of Sharon
and the neighboring town of Royalton.
One of those things was the Royalton Raid.
In October of 1780, 300 members of the Mohawk tribe of Native Americans, along with seven
members of the British Army, raided the towns of Royalton and Sharon, along with neighboring
(12:06):
Tunbridge.
The raiders burned the towns and took 32 prisoners, killing four of them during the raid or during
their escape to Canada.
The raiders were pursued by the local militia, but escaped successfully.
Most of the captives eventually escaped or were freed, but the towns were heavily damaged
and the psychological scars were deep.
(12:27):
That wasn't the only interesting thing to happen in Sharon.
Another of Sharon's claims to fame is its link to Mormonism.
That's because it was the birthplace of the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith.
Smith was born there in 1805 on the border of South Royalton and Sharon.
You may have known that, but here comes the crazy part.
Smith left Sharon with his family in 1816 after the family's crops failed.
(12:51):
Why?
Because 1816 was known as the Year Without Summer.
It was called that because a volcano named Mount Timbora, which was all the way in Indonesia,
erupted and plunged the earth into a volcanic winter.
It decreased the earth's average temperature by as much as one degree Fahrenheit, which,
while it doesn't seem like much, had huge effects on the northeast and the crops in
(13:13):
New England.
That's not all.
There's another interesting story about someone from Sharon.
How about the story of Charlie Parkhurst?
Parkhurst was born biologically female, but identified as a male.
He ran away from home and eventually became a famous stagecoach driver in California.
Stagecoach driving back then was the primary means of transportation before railroads became
(13:35):
commonplace.
The job was notoriously very dangerous and Parkhurst earned a reputation for his abilities.
But Parkhurst has another claim to fame.
Since he identified as a man and dressed convincingly as such, he was able to vote in the presidential
election of 1868.
This was before the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, granting women the right to vote.
(13:58):
Parkhurst's biological gender wasn't discovered until after his death in 1879.
The events I just told you about in episode one are not as well known as Joseph Smith,
the Royalton Raid, or Charlie Parkhurst, but they had big impacts in their own right.
That brings me back to the Brandon DeWilda story from last episode.
As you likely remember, DeWilda bought our future house in 1964.
(14:21):
He was an actor.
He found fame at eight years old as a cast member in the wildly successful Broadway show,
The Member of the Wedding.
That set him on a path to some early TV appearances and a career in film, where in 1953, at age
10, he played little Joey Starrett in the western Shane.
For that role, he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards.
(14:44):
He didn't win, but the nomination catapulted him even further into stardom.
He co-starred in movies with John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Patricia Neal, Rock Hudson, Paul
Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Warren Beatty, Karl Malden, Angela Lansbury, and more.
But the 1960s were a turning point for DeWilda and the country.
(15:04):
The onset of the Vietnam War and the 1960s counterculture influenced DeWilda heavily.
He tried to forge a career in music, befriending a long list of influential musicians, one
of whom would visit the house in Sharon.
He struggled with the mold Hollywood had typecast him in, and he started partaking in many of
the activities the mid-60s are remembered for.
(15:26):
That might have included doing psychedelics and psychedelic art.
The wood interior bedroom, the doorframe had three or four layers of rather psychedelic
colors all over it, light blue and green and yellow.
It's really hippie rainbows.
Yes, DeWilda was into psychedelics and art, and most likely painted the doorframe to my
(15:50):
old bedroom.
He did it with friends, including Graham Parsons, who visited the house in 1966.
Parsons was a legendary musician, and although he might not be a household name today, he's
remembered as a pioneer of country music, helping to launch the career of Amy Lou Harris.
In 2010, Rolling Stone named him the 87th greatest musical artist of all time.
(16:13):
His entry was written by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.
I heard of Graham Parsons because of the Burings, but had no idea about the other bands that
he was involved with.
Not only him, but also DeWild.
Just made the house more interesting.
Strangely, just half a decade or so later, a seemingly completely unrelated group of
(16:36):
showbiz types started to visit the house next door.
Like I told you in episode one, the house just down the road and across the street housed
a recording studio by the name of Sun Treader.
Sun Treader was founded by John and Jerese Bergstrom, a married couple with musical aspirations
that decided to build a recording studio in the middle of nowhere.
That was mentioned too, like we did.
(16:57):
It was a silent studio, but I couldn't picture what that actually meant.
It was a somewhat strange, modern-looking building, or just not a typical Vermont building,
but I had no idea what that meant.
That studio wasn't just some hole in the wall for the local cover bands to make a record.
(17:18):
This studio was designed by John and Jerese and was state-of-the-art, and their clientele
reflected that.
As I mentioned, they recorded Foghat's Fool for the City album, as well as the song Slow
Ride, which you've probably heard on a classic rock station or two, or in the movie Days
in Confused.
They also recorded with Arlo Guthrie and Melanie.
(17:39):
There were even a few special visitors who didn't record at the studio, but visited
friends there.
But we'll get to all of that, as well as the interviews with John and Jerese and a former
member of Foghat in episode 4.
Then there was the drug bust.
In 1979, three men rented my future childhood home, the one Brandon DeWilda had once owned,
but not in 1979, and proceeded to set up a massive drug trafficking operation.
(18:03):
They would drive pickup trucks with caps on them into the garage slash barn next to the
house, fill it with marijuana and hashish, and send it on from there to be distributed
in major cities in the Northeast.
After a tip from an informant, the state police and one DEA agent investigated the operation
surveilling the house round the clock for six weeks.
After the investigation was over, they busted the traffickers.
(18:27):
On the night they went to arrest the suspects, they stopped at a local diner where my future
babysitter Mrs. Mason met them.
She made sandwiches.
She told us all about it.
She was all excited when she could tell a story.
She worked at Brooksies, the little snack bar restaurant down in the middle of Sharon.
(18:49):
She said that one night when she was working her shift, that the state police called Brooksies
and ordered 50 sandwiches and a couple of gallons of coffee to be ready at around midnight.
Didn't say why, but that was the night that they raided the house.
That's just the tip of the iceberg for this story.
(19:11):
Or maybe one leaf of the weed plant, so to speak.
Stay tuned for the details of this whole story in episodes five and six.
That's it for this episode.
In episode three, you'll hear the full story of Brandon DeWilda and what he did at the house
in Sharon.
You'll hear from friends of his, all four musicians, some quite successful, about Brandon's
(19:32):
life and what it was like for a group of adventurous young men in the 1960s in Sharon, Vermont.
You can find this podcast on every major podcast hosting site, like Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
and more.
If you like it, please share it with others.
It's a story I'm passionate about telling and I'd love as many people to hear it as
possible.
(19:53):
Finally, if you can, please give it a good rating so that more people can discover it.
Until next time.
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