Another Story Behind A Story

Farr House as it still looked when I ate dinner there.

The Memoirist, a Medium publication that is new to me, just published my memoir Eating at Shirley
Farr's House in which I write about very much enjoying a restaurant in a mansion I later learned was once owned by someone who might not have been happy about me being there.

Once again, there is an interesting story beyond the story in the story.

In the Beginning

This memoir began as an essay for the one graduate course I took more than twenty years ago, an essay writing course at the University of Connecticut taught by Sam Pickering. Now, Pickering is the author of a few books of essays, but you can't find much about him on-line. Given the little I know of him from that class, I am not surprised. He did not seem to be an Internet-embracing kind of guy. At that point, none of the historical material was in the essay. The essay was about a local rube (me) who managed to get into a wealthy person's house by way of the restaurant someone had opened in it after her death, enjoy the place, and then it became even more of a wealthy person's place, ruining my bliss.

The History Involved

To make a long story short(er), the history involved in this story relates to the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. There were eugenics fans all over the U.S, and the world, since some draw a line between American eugenics and the Nazis. You don't need to know much to think, Gee whiz, don't these things sound kind of similar? The Nazi connection may be why I never heard of eugenics while I was in high school or college, where I was a history minor. Even though I was in Vermont, which definitely was definitely up to its neck in eugenics. Who wants to have been involved with something with possible Holocaust connections?

What Does Eugenics Have to Do with Me Eating Sticky Buns in a Mansion Turned Restaurant?

Well, it turns out the Shirley Farr of My Dinner at Shirley Farr's was active in Vermont's eugenics movement. How active, you ask? Go ahead, ask. She funded what was known as the Vermont Eugenics Survey for eleven years. She spent between fifty and sixty thousand dollars on it back in the nineteen twenties and thirties when fifty to sixty thousand dollars was real money. 

This survey studied a number of generations of families someone had identified as having issues a society didn't want to encourage, issues eugenicists believed were genetic and could be stopped  immediately if these people weren't allowed to reproduce. A number of these families happened to be poor, happened to be Abenakis, or happened to be French Canadian. 

Because, you know, nothing goes wrong in white anglo saxon Protestant families. Absolutely nothing.

Now, I didn't learn anything about the eugenics movement and Shirley Farr until I decided to look her up on-line either while I was writing the original essay or thereafter. And even then, it took a while for me, a second-generation American on my father's French-Canadian side to go, "Wait. Gail. Isn't it odd you were eating dinner in that woman's house? And you took your kids there?"

Still More to the Story!!!

So that was going on in my head, off and on, over the last twenty years. But I did nothing with it because I had books to write that wouldn't sell and humor writing to get started on.

Then earlier this year I decided to start cleaning my massive professional files. My plan was to save anything I thought I could still do something with and toss the rest. I didn't get far, because I found some undergraduate writing that I used for a humor piece and this graduate material about Shirley Farr.

And the rest was doing research to get specific info on Farr, revising to create a little bit of a braided format, and finding an appropriate illustration.

Now I'm done.

The University of Vermont has a great deal of information about the eugenics movement in Vermont. A great deal. So much.