He called to her from the stove. “Snow might get in the way tomorrow. Sure you feel up to it?”
The delays before her responses were growing longer, as though she were communicating with him across greater and greater distances. “I don’t think I’d miss it for the world.”
He felt a proud tingle behind his eyes, the warmth of nascent tears. “No, Mother, I don’t trunk you would.”
Tom Duggan was being honored that next day for having saved Gilchrist from extinction. The town had originally been founded in 1788 by Colonel Coleman Gilchrist, one of Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys, a band of civilian revolutionaries who fought to preserve the independence of the New Hampshire Grants, as Vermont was then known. The Boys joined the American effort during the Revolutionary War, winning a key battle alongside Benedict Arnold at Fort Ticonderoga. Colonel Gilchrist survived a lead ball through his lung in Quebec, and after Arnold’s treasonous plan to surrender West Point to the British was uncovered, the colonel was engaged by Thomas Jefferson himself in an effort to recapture the traitor. Failing in that enterprise, Colonel Gilchrist retired his commission and settled in the area with his wife, Marguerite Estelle Duggan.
Now in its third century of existence, Gilchrist had seen prosperity come and go. The railroad boom of the late nineteenth century had lasted no more than two decades into the twentieth. The millworks had failed to survive a third generation. Mining briefly revived the town in the 1950s and ’60s — but it was an asbestos mine, and the good times were not to last.
Forgotten among the boom years of the 1980s was the economic downturn of small-town America. Money that flowed vitally through arterial city streets recirculated there without reaching the extremities, and by the end of the decade many rural communities had turned necrotic and began to die. Geography also had a hand in Gilchrist’s recession. The high, cloud-snaring mountain peaks to the west, north, and east isolated the town, and the nearest state highway was nothing more than a two-lane road with the number 17 posted next to it, fifteen minutes on the other side of brake-wearing Planter’s Rise. So there was little hope of Gilchrist refitting itself to appeal to the recreational dollar, as had the thriving ski resorts to the south, or luring a light manufacturing plant, as had Essex Junction with IBM. In truth, many Gilchrist residents would rather have watched the town fade quietly into history than endure the lifestyle changes commercial solutions would have engendered. And so into the last decade of the twentieth century, Gilchrist continued to wither on the vine.
The town’s financial woes came to a head in late 1991. There were only three public streetlights in Gilchrist, all of them posted around the historic town common. Tax revenues for that fiscal year were such that, not only was the town unable to pay the electric bill to keep the streetlights shining, but it lacked even the funds to afford the service charge required to shut them off. Gilchrist was broke and in trouble. The migration of younger families to more centrally located towns, coupled with the depressed local economy, rendered Gilchrist “tax-base poor.” State aid dwindled, and in the final accounting the three-member board of selectmen came up $49,344.84 short of anticipated revenues, which for a town of Gilchrist’s size meant bankruptcy and certain ruin. Long-delayed maintenance on public buildings had become a safety concern. The church cemetery was nearing capacity. The town truck needed a new slide-in sander, the cost of which the Department of Public Works — a seventy-year-old diabetic named Dickie Veal — officially tagged at “pricey.” And $763.14 raised at bake sales and barbecues was not enough even to fund the volunteer fire department. But the most severe blow came in the form of a town referendum in early March of 1992 when cash-strapped residents decided they could not afford to contribute any additional local aid, forcing a vote to deny tax-limit overrides for Gilchrist’s two most expensive municipal institutions, the police department and the board of selectmen. A mostly quiet crowd followed Police Chief Roy Darrow down Main Street that evening after the meeting and watched him padlock the tiny clapboard station-house. The four-member force was officially disbanded and the Vermont state police were alerted. The next day, with a few strokes of the ceremonial town quill, Gilchrist’s government was downsized to exactly two employees: a jack-of-all-trades administrative clerk, and an emergency town administrator nominated from among the three selectmen.
That town administrator was Tom Duggan. A selectman for twelve years, he had devoted much of his life to the town and was known for his levelheadedness and a shrug-and-roll-up-his-sleeves attitude. The business of saving the town required the patient temperament of a man accustomed to heating soil before digging graves below the frost line.
Tom Duggan took to his duty piously. He spent all his off-days researching the matter, driving west to the university in Burlington, usually in the Fleetwood but occasionally in the hearse. He would bring books and notes back to Mae’s Pantry, nursing a wedge of lemon pie by the front window, and voices would hush out of respect and newspapers would stop rustling as he pored over figures, a two-inch-long pencil in his cramped hand.
At a special town meeting convened on the common on a cool evening that June, Tom Duggan faced the gathered townspeople from the crumbling front steps of the town hall. He was exhausted from checking and rechecking his math late into the night. Word had spread throughout town that he had a miracle bailout proposal that would be Gilchrist’s salvation.
It was a kind of industrial plant, he announced. So specialized an industry that highly trained technicians would relocate with it, thereby eliminating the obstacle of attracting new workers. The plant was virtually guaranteed never to go out of business, as there was an unyielding demand for the service it would provide. In fact, it was recession-proof, a unique business invulnerable to changing economic concerns, public fashion, even competition. And as it provided a service, rather than a manufactured product, there would be no negative environmental impact whatsoever.
At that point people were shouting questions. What was this revolutionary new industry?
A federal correctional facility, he told them. A United States penitentiary.
He quickly laid down some background in the face of their stares. The business of American justice was a growth industry doing one hundred billion dollars-plus annually. One out of every four males in modern America had an arrest record. This fact so clouded the minds of those gathered, whose own doors were never locked and whose own children never disappeared, that he had to repeat it twice. More prisons had been constructed in rural areas during the previous fifteen years than in the past two centuries. Communities that had sued the government in the 1980s to keep prisons out of their backyards were bidding for such projects now, requiring reliable sources of tax income in order to survive. Prisons were to millennial small-town America what military bases had been during the Cold War. The domestic “War on Crime” had created a public works project of immense financial proportions. The urban crime wave had become a rural bonanza.
Through inquiries to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the agency responsible for maintaining federal correctional facilities nationwide, Tom Duggan learned the BOP was exploring sites for two new penitentiaries in the northeast. Based on similar projects across the country, he pegged the construction cost at roughly $120 to $130 million, payable by the federal government, bringing Gilchrist some $275,000 in annual taxes right off the top, with various generous “hidden” financial benefits to follow. What gave Gilchrist the edge on competing communities, he argued, was the wealth of town-owned land lying fallow to the north and northeast, arguably Gilchrist’s sole marketable asset. His recommendation was that one hundred acres be offered to the federal government free of charge. Existing access roads and local utilities would have to be modernized to accommodate a state-of-the-art prison facility before a bid would even be considered, necessitating an approximately one million dollar bond issue — an enormous financial gamble for the town. And Gilchrist would be competing against other aggressive and similarly desperate small towns in neighboring New England states. But Tom Duggan viewed the prison as a last ditch effort.