When this picture was taken in June, signs on the gates on Coburn Hill Road warned people to “keep out,” despite the fact that the road continues on as a town trail. Photo by Chris Braithwaite
CRAFTSBURY — The gates at the end of Coburn Hill Road have been a source of neighborhood uneasiness for years. Though they are unlocked and close off a road to nowhere, they represent a claim to absolute privacy that, town officials insist, isn’t supported by fact or law.
Uneasiness is heightened by the fact that visitors who venture through the gates and proceed down the town trail can expect to be confronted by men who angrily insist they are trespassing, and need to go away.
Following a confrontation in July between a group of people on motorcycles and residents of Mission New England’s property beyond the gates, the town selectmen sent a letter to Mission New England, asking it to take down the gates by August 1.
The visitors, the selectmen wrote, “have been rudely treated and threatened by members of the church. This is not the first report of abuse that we as a Select board have received.”
The Mission responded at the selectmen’s regular meeting on August 4 by offering its own version of events. According to the minutes of the meeting, Mission representative Roy Ward said “some threatening dirt bikers came up to Mission New England July fifth, knocking over people, spinning up the dirt, demanding to know where the right of way was.”
The Mission representatives also offered an exchange: it would give the town almost 84 acres of its land in return for something it has been seeking for a long time.
The Mission wants the town to permanently close, or “throw up,” the town trail through its property.
According to the minutes of the meeting, Selectman Bruce Urie said such a decision would normally require a town vote. In the absence of Selectman Susan Houston, Mr. Urie and the third selectman, Jim Jones, agreed to wait until their September 1 meeting to decide whether to rescind their order to take down the gates.
As it winds uphill towards its controversial terminus at the gates, Coburn Hill Road serves as a trail through history.
Lawrence Griggs, who lives nearby at the corner of Collinsville Road and Griggs Road, figures it must have been built to serve the needs of farmers more than a century ago.
“All those roads were built around 1865,” he said. “I don’t know how they got around before that.”
Small farms survived on Coburn Hill into the Great Depression. Henry Young lived on Wylie Hill as a boy, on the more civilized side of Craftsbury that lies east of Route 14. That’s the postcard Craftsbury of country churches, nicely restored farmhouses, the Common of course, and rolling, open vistas of dairy farms and sugar orchards. Coburn Hill Road runs roughly north and south on the west side of Route 14, a part of town marked by dense woodlands, small farms, camps, and a unique collection of owner-built homes.
But when Mr. Young was growing up in the 1930s Coburn Hill was also open farming country. He can recall looking across the valley from Wylie Hill and seeing the farm buildings.
“When I was in grade school there were four kids from Coburn Hill,” he said. “There were two Rathburns, and maybe a Hodgdon and a Coburn.”
Coburn Hill wasn’t a dead-end road in those days, Mr. Young said. His father, Henry Young the road commissioner, sometimes took his son to work with him.
“I can remember, when I was six or seven years old, he used to take a four-horse team and hone the road with a road machine,” Mr. Young said, explaining that a road machine was essentially a horse-drawn grader.
Coburn Hill Road went straight through, he said, linking up with the Town Line Road that marks the border with Albany. From there one could travel east, back to what is now Route 14.
But times were very hard when Mr. Young started grade school in 1934.
“During the Depression they moved off,” he said of the farmers across the valley. “The land went up for tax sale, and the town bought it so nobody else would buy it and move back there.”
Mr. Griggs recalls that in the 1960s, when he needed to use Coburn Hill Road to get to a logging job up toward Albany, he had to clear away trees that were growing in the road, three inches in diameter.
Trees were just about all Coburn Hill produced for decades. Mr. Griggs recalls buying land up there for $12 an acre in the 1960s, logging it off, and selling it. There’s one such piece, he said with a smile of recollection, that he bought a second time and logged and sold yet again.
Those heartbreakingly low land prices started to climb as the Northeast Kingdom attracted a new sort of immigrant in the late ’60s and ’70s — people who were willing, if not anxious, to live in a pretty basic way, in some pretty isolated places.
When an outfit called Mission New England bought a 276-acre parcel of wooded land on Coburn Hill in 1998, the price had climbed by a factor of 20 or so, to $272 an acre.
By 1998, $75,000 would look like a bargain rate for such a big chunk of land, but there was a catch.
Coburn Hill Road was not categorized by Craftsbury as Class III, the sort of gravel road that gets plowed in the winter and honed the rest of the year. It wasn’t even Class IV, the remote sort of road that’s no longer occupied year-round. Towns aren’t obligated to keep such roads open to regular car traffic, but do tend the culverts, fix the washouts, and keep them open to rugged vehicles like four-wheel-drive pickups.
Most of Coburn Hill Road is now a town trail. That means, in essence, that anybody can use it, and nobody has to fix it or keep it open in the winter.
That probably wasn’t a problem for Mission New England. Judging from web sites that feature a key member of the group, John Maniatti of John’s Gun Shop in Morrisville, they are survivalists, preparing themselves to weather the complete collapse of American society, whenever and however that might occur.
Mission New England could use its own resources to get members to and from their growing homestead on Coburn Hill.
What they wanted from the town wasn’t maintenance of the road to their place. They want the road itself, after it crosses onto their property and
The view from a few hundred feet past the gates on Coburn Hill Road.
dwindles to what is, by all accounts, flood-ruined and impassible to just about anything.
This, however, is a favor Craftsbury’s town fathers have refused to grant.
As others have followed Mission New England up the road, building or buying homes and camps along the way, Coburn Hill Road has become a problem for the Craftsbury Selectmen.
“This is the biggest headache the town’s got right now,” said Mr. Griggs. “Part of it is three rods wide, part two rods, and there’s a section that’s just one rod wide.”
(Actually, by other accounts, the narrowest section of the road is a rod and a half — 25 feet — wide. That’s a stretch of old pent road, which could be barred with an unlocked gate to keep livestock from wandering off the farm.)
Even if it wanted to bring Coburn Hill up to Class III standards and maintain it, Selectman Bruce Urie told a gathering of 32 residents and landowners in April, the selectmen would first have to convince landowners to give or sell enough property to the town to widen the full length of Coburn Hill Road to three rods.
“It’s plagued the board a long time to get settled,” Mr. Urie added, according to the minutes of the meeting.
While it was clear at the meeting that Coburn Hill’s residents want the town to do something, exactly what they want the town to do is far from clear.
One of the landowners, Steve Marckres, said later in the meeting that the road can’t be widened “unless the landowner wants to give up their right of way, and I don’t.”
Mr. Marckres, who lives well down Coburn Hill Road, closer to civilization, is the town road foreman.
“I don’t think anybody wants it a nice, nice road,” said one of its newer residents, Nick Samora. He and his neighbors could plow the snow in the winter, he added. “Just sometimes in mud season, since we don’t have a grader, I would like the town to go up there and smooth it out a little.
“I don’t want a Class III road, just want something to go on,” Mr. Samora continued. “The reason I moved up there was because there wasn’t many people up there.”
And someone identified only as “Mission NE” in the minutes renewed the group’s request that the road be closed as it passes through their property.
“From our point of view we would like the town to throw up that end,” he said. “It’s absolutely no use to anyone at that end. People go up there, think they could go somewhere and get stuck, which is why we put up the gate.”
“The town traditionally in the past doesn’t give up their right of ways, unless there’s a really good reason,” Mr. Urie replied. “We maintain right of way just because we don’t know what will happen in the future.
“Probably Coburn Hill Road is one of the fastest growing areas of Craftsbury right now,” Mr. Urie said later in the meeting.
This disagreement between Mission New England and the selectmen is reflected at the end of Coburn Hill Road. Until recently, twin signs on the gates proclaimed “Private Property, Keep Out.” But there’s no lock on the chain that holds the two swinging metal gates together.
That’s the result of a compromise the selectmen reached with the Mission in 2003.
But if town officials insist, unanimously and emphatically, that anyone has a right to go through the gates and follow the town trail north, Mission New England does not share that view. There are plenty of accounts of people who were challenged or turned away when they tried to travel through Mission New England’s land on the town trail. But there are no names or dates attached to such stories.
On a Monday in early June, this reporter put the matter to the test. Walking past the gates and a small house, he followed the rough road towards a collection of barns and houses, past fenced open woodland that was home to a considerable population of sheep and goats.
He was soon confronted by four large dogs, who were unfriendly but didn’t bite. The same could be said of a woman who interrupted her chores to tell the reporter that, whatever the town said, this was not a public right of way and he was trespassing. She was, she assured the press, much too busy to answer a few questions.
As the reporter was getting into his car a pickup came to a sudden halt on the Mission’s side of the twin gates and an angry middle-aged man got out.
The reporter was not only trespassing but also spying, the man said. “You’re lucky you didn’t get shot.”
Willy Ryan visits Mission New England in his official capacity as town lister.
“I check it out yearly,” he said. “They’re constantly building up there. They would like to throw me out. They call me ‘The Snoop.’ It’s not a real friendly place.”
On his most recent visit, Mr. Ryan said, he headed away from the central cluster of buildings.
“This guy comes roaring up behind me and interrogates me. He knew who I was.
“I said ‘I’m going to drive out there. If I find a building that needs measuring, I’m going to do that,” Mr. Ryan recalled.
“He said ‘You do that at your own risk.’”
Like others in town, Mr. Ryan recalls a time when the gates were kept locked — until a town official insisted that the lock be removed.
“It’s an ancient road,” he said of the trail through the property. “It’s tough for towns to throw up roads. People forget that towns go on for many, many lifetimes. You can’t think short-term. Right-of-ways are precious, precious property. How do you know in 50 years what the town’s needs are going to be?”
The property is currently listed at $400,600 on Craftsbury’s tax rolls.
While Mission New England clearly insists on maintaining its privacy on the land, Mr. Maniatti can be found on a number of web sites, preaching both his personal brand of Christianity and in slides shows and videos on everything from firing machine guns to bottling fresh apple cider — he wears a handgun on his hip in the cider works.
One offering on a Christian web site recalls setting up a spot at the Barton Fair that served up cold water and gospel music, and praying for the end of the fair’s then notorious girly shows.
On another web site Mr. Maniatti and others offer advice on surviving nuclear war, building a fire, making maple syrup, killing a domestic rabbit (no tools needed) and putting up food that will last a long, long time.
“Knowledge is power,” says a slogan repeated often on the site. “Learn and live.”
Mr. Maniatti has a signature photo of himself, mounted on a palomino, wearing a white beard and a black cowboy hat, that appears both on the web and on the sign outside John’s Gun Shop in Morrisville.
The Mission’s odd combination of Christianity and survivalism was summed up by one neighbor, who was explaining why her guests were afraid to step onto the group’s property.
“They’re shooting all the time,” she said. “Every Sunday after church they shoot.”
The neighbor, Sandra Charron, hosted an event on her 80-acre lot that attracted a decidedly different sort of visitor to the neighborhood.
The Firefly Arts Collective held its annual arts and music festival on Coburn Hill for five years, beginning in 2004.
Firefly and Mission New England must have made remarkable bedfellows. Both share strong beliefs — in the case of Firefly, a belief in the power of the arts and artistic self-expression.
Both try to reach out to a larger community without surrendering their immediate, physical privacy.
In June, an inviting announcement of this year’s Firefly could be found on the Internet. Festival plans were offered in considerable detail — with one exception. There was no indication of where the event would take place.
Only people who were able to buy tickets would be told where to go. Tickets number in the hundreds, rather than the thousands, Ms. Charron said, and are sold out almost as soon as they are offered on the Internet.
Chris Costanzo, a reporter for the Herald of Randolph, was able to get in to this year’s Firefly, which was held in Bethel in early July. Two things impressed him: the level of organization, all designed “to have a minimum impact on the communities they visit.” And the artworks themselves, which he describes in terms like awesome, enchanting, and a fairyland.
Firefly’s impact on Craftsbury was so slight that, when it moved on after five years, it left behind only the vaguest impressions of what it was. Neighbors on Coburn Hill tend to refer to it as a big party. Ms. Charron said she offered tickets to some town officials, but none ever attended.
She said she also invited her neighbors, including those at Mission New England.
“I was friends with them for the first three years,” Ms. Charron said. “Maybe they were hoping to convert me. They gave me a CD of their songs. John Maniatti came over and talked with me all the time.”
But, Ms. Charron recalls, the Mission took a dislike to Firefly and began to object to the annual festival.
What Mr. Maniatti decided, Ms. Charron speculated, is that “Sodom and Gomorrah has set up next door.”
After three years on her land, Firefly moved a ways down Coburn Hill to land owned by Donly Goodridge in 2008. And this year it moved out of town altogether.
At any rate, Ms. Charron said, Firefly was looking for a larger site.
“He kind of pushed Firefly out sooner than would have been the case,” she said of Mr. Maniatti, “but we were looking to move anyway.”
Because he owns and operates some heavy equipment, Mr. Goodridge has had a working relationship with the Mission.
“I don’t get too concerned about them,” he said in an interview. “If they mind their own business and let me mind mine, I’ll return the favor.”
Mr. Goodridge observed, however, that his acquaintance with Mr. Maniatti goes back long before he built his log cabin there in 1997.
Mr. Maniatti grew up in Newport, Mr. Goodridge said, and the two went to the same 4-H club in Derby in the early 1960s.
Bruce Martin, who has also done work for the Mission, has a favorable opinion of the group. “They’ve always been very accommodating with us,” he said. “Other people have seen another side of them, but that’s the only side I’ve seen. They’re good people.”
A former town road commissioner, Mr. Martin thinks the town should take the mission up on its offer to swap 84 acres of land for the right of way.
Though he doesn’t generally favor giving up rights of way, he said, “I do there because I don’t think it’s ever fixable.”
Mr. Martin said the flood of 1997 sent “a tremendous shot of water” through the property, leaving behind territory that can’t even be crossed on a dirt bike.
“If you wanted to climb rocks it’s a good place to go,” he said, “but not with a car.”
“I see no purpose in using a right of way beyond their land,” Mr. Martin said. “You aren’t going anywhere. I would definitely trade it and sell the land.”
The 84 acres, he said, would be accessible through property his family owns near the Albany town line.
Note: A letter from Sandra Charron, responding to this article appeared in the August 26 issue of the Chronicle. Click here to read Ms Charron's letter.
Important Stories 
