my name is elizabeth come and i'll be guiding you through another episode of memory i was drawn to uncover some of the changes and collect a few stories hidden along one of the most central roads in richmond route to thomas hark director and founder of the vermont youth conservation corps talk to me about finding and restoring the west monitor barn so i came along and immediately fell in love with this barn we brought our board members here we all fell in love with the barn but really  all propped up with you know timber on the inside it was it was it took a bit to build us really see boy this this could be us right this hundred year old barn it's really b vermont and everyone was all excited because this barn was rising again the barn was completed in two thousand and five the view i c c moved in shortly after thomas shared some of the great stories about the barns previous owners the what comes there are two brothers the welcome brothers like all good brothers they you know battled it out you know they had a competition constantly the older brother built that barn over there and it was a big barn east monitor barn and then three years later the younger brother built this barn but they had less money and so the barn wasn't as big as that barn but he could let his older brother outdo him so he built  made his barn taller and so the story goes that we were told by a and old farmer they said the brothers argued year after year whose barn was bigger and probably no one won the debate but we understand that's why the that's why the couple isn't here just because the younger brother had to be outdone by his older brother i know and then in the one nine hundred forty seven a gentleman was eighty years old who came to some event we're holding out here and he's sitting by himself and i was talking to him and he left as you're heading towards the mobil station he would walk out here before sun up every day work twelve hours and then walk home every day and i did that because he had a crush on the farmer's farmer's daughter thomas  recounted what it was like dealing with hurricane irene when irene came along we felt really fortunate we had crews in the area and of course vermont pretty much shut down for the two or three week period our crews were able or able to send them into the richmond they would we'd feed them at bridge street cafe each morning they'd have a good hard you know good healthy you know breakfast at the diner there they'd walk a couple of blocks down the street in their uniforms dirty and body really talking with thomas was a lightning and his story is truly brought the historic would come family to life i also talked with tom of the chief of the richmond fire department i asked tom to tell us a bit about the origins of the fire station has been here since one hundred seventy one the old fire station collapsed to the town look for a new place to build one and the slam became available and so they put the fire station here oh i was us standing on the steps of my folks store when i heard a noise i looked up in the roof of the old fire station just collapsed around all the apparatus it was there that was an upstairs in the old fire station and it was used for teen center boy scouts all kinds of activities and that was really what crumbled was the up stairs tom also talked about what route to used to be like the the move to used to be right where we are now and when the interstate went through in thousand nine hundred sixty four they moved to down  closer to the road tracks when we first built the fire station for about a year and a half we couldn't use it because the state would another shoes a driveway because of the steep pitch and we had to get special permission from the state to do it and even to this day it's a problem sometimes we can't get the trucks back in after a snowstorm we have to wait for the highway department to come flower force we need the whole structure i think of the streets changed when i was growing up it was all lined with elm trees like west main was  a beautiful canopy of elm trees and when the dutch elm disease came in all the elm trees had be cut down so that kind of changed things and it was me quite a bit definitely the traffic is picked up a lot we used to sit sixty's and seventy's and just don't see that anymore i also met with catherine cardio a longtime resident of richmond i've lived here in richmond now forty seven years as of this coming november and i've lived in this house all the time i've lived in richmond she recounted what she knew of the past owners of her house the shepherds and the father originally owned  in the sixty's and he had to have been in his eighty's by then and ironically about twenty years later i took care of the wife who was about at that time one hundred five years old who was in a nursing home being cared for and she didn't like the idea of the nurse caring for her as living at arles i also asked her to talk a little bit about how the neighborhood has changed the original harrington's was just a small little a cottage that you see there it was there and it used to be a little restaurant snack bar that was open only in the summers when the traffic went surreal but the business was there all year round and it was really fun they used to have like the penny candy that you see in all the country stores  stayed vacant for a short time and then a body shop point in there my gosh of a traffic a strange tremendously and you could see the whole evening sometimes and maybe see two or three cars go by but now it's continuous traffic  finally i want to see harriet riggs the primary author of the much loved book richmond for mind a history of more than two hundred years i talk to her about a relic she's keeping in her house a quilt that's over one hundred fifty years old there was a quilt that was put up for auction and it looked at it before the auction started and i found out that it was made by virtue and women and there was no date but a real signature quilt has different handwriting and these were all in the same handwriting so i don't know whose handwriting it is but because i was familiar with some of the names and when number of names at different times but richmond hotel was one of them and when franklin roosevelt was president of the united states his wife eleanor came with her driver and they had tea there and then she liked it so much the chief returned and it's been said that the proprietor was that he would drum up a little business by advertising that eleanor roosevelt stopped there so he put that on the menus and then when she came again he had to go around and get all those aunts and remove them so she wouldn't see them gordon brown who was a friend of ours here he was taking care and he was driving them across the road to go  and that's eleanor roosevelt was travelling at that particular moment so she had to wait for gordon's cows to cross the road there was a caravan of elephants and they were probably going towards a player so they came from burlington and there was a covered verge of customer no skipper by the checkout house and the authorities for some reason would let the elephants go through so they all of us had to go into the water and they really enjoyed going through because i love the water and it's flash and spray each other and and the owners had a hard time getting them out of the water i felt lucky to map out some of the most interesting tidbits of routines history to share with you there are many other iconic places along which one section of route two to be explored these include but are not limited to the entries barn the cemetery the park and ride and the kitchen table also we touched briefly on the history of the checkered house bridge but there is much more to it than that one elephant crossing