Vermont

Vermont is a state in the New England region of the United States. H. P. Lovecraft visited it twice, in 1927 and 1928, and later used it as the setting for his story "The Whisperer in Darkness".
Vermont's population in 1930, the year Lovecraft wrote his story, was 359,611.U.S. Census, "Resident Population and Apportionment of the U.S. House of Representatives: Vermont". Its largest city at the time was Burlington, with 24,789 residents. Vermont's capital is Montpelier, which then had 7,837 people.VT Open Geodata Portal, "VT Data - Historical Census Municipal Population Counts 1791-2020".
==Travels==
Lovecraft first visited Vermont in August 1927, one of several New England locales he saw that summer.An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, "Lovecraft's Travels". This visit produced the travelogue "Vermont--a First Impression", which first appeared posthumously in Something About Cats and Other Pieces (Arkham House, 1949).
He returned to the state at the invitation of his correspondent Vrest Orton, spending two weeks with him in Brattleboro in June 1928.
== 'Whisperer in Darkness'==
Lovecraft set his tale of a hidden alien race in "the wild domed hills of Vermont". Albert Wilmarth's impressions as he approaches Henry Akeley's home suggest how the landscape fired Lovecraft's imagination:
Lovecraft uses several real Vermont locations in his story: Akeley lives outside Townshend, a town about 15 miles from Brattleboro; one comes to his place through the "quaint, sightly village of Newfane". Wilmarth describes Brattleboro as "the gateway of a region half-bewitched through the piling-up of unbroken time-accumulations; a region where old, strange things have had a chance to grow and linger because they have never been stirred up."
The "historic and unprecedented Vermont floods" that set the plot in motion are an actual historical event.Wikipedia, "Great Vermont Flood of 1927". The Mi-Go sightings occasioned by the flood occur in real Vermont rivers; one encounter is "connected with the Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centring in the Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville."
The only other mention of Vermont in Lovecraft's fiction is in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, where the Newburyport station agent--who is the first person to tell Olmstead about Innsmouth--mentions wild tales about devil worship there, then says, "but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story don’t go down with me."
==References==
Category:Locations Incorporated From the Real World
Category:Regions/Territories