BARNARD

A short history of Barnard

The town was chartered on July 17, 1761, by a New Hampshire Grant. It was named "Bernard" after one of the five grantees of the town, Sir Francis Bernard, 1st Baronet, who was governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay from 1760 to 1769. The town's name was changed to Barnard some time before 1810.

In 1928, Nobel Prize–winning novelist Sinclair Lewis bought Connett Place with a total 300 acres (1.2 km2) and adjacent Chase Farm. He named the property Twin Farms and used it as a vacation house during the 1930s and 1940s with his wife Dorothy Thompson.

In 1941, German playwright Carl Zuckmayer, a refugee from Nazi Germany whom Dorothy Thompson had helped to get into the US, rented Backwoods Farm, with its farmhouse from 1783 nowadays owned by Hannah Kahn and a total 180 acres (0.73 km2), from Joseph Ward (of Maynes & Ward hardware store on Main Street in Woodstock, Vermont) for 50 dollars a month. Zuckmayer worked this property as a farmer until 1946 and wrote the play Des Teufels General (The Devil's General) there. His autobiography A Part of Myself (1966) deals extensively with these years. Zuckmayer's wife Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer also wrote a memoir of their time in Barnard: The Farm in the Green Mountains (Die Farm in den grünen Bergen).

Adapted (trimmed) from the Wikipedia article Barnard, Vermont, revision 1378487237 by its contributors, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.