Not so wicked Adamant any more
Toolbox
Published: July 24, 2006
"Egad, they must be wicked desperate!"
Those were my exact words when the idea was first broached that I consider preaching at Adamant Methodist Church. I'm not, mind you, suggesting that the words "wicked" or "desperate" apply to the Adamant Methodist Church, or that I refused their offer. I did, indeed, guest preach there the other day. In a weird sort of way it felt like going home again. You see, Adamant Methodist Church was where my feeble beginnings and unfortunate endings as a churchgoer happened. I've always been a believer but we were farm people with a seven-day excuse. We lived clean, practiced honesty — figured we were earning our passage to heaven by milking cows and hefting bales, by God! The few times my family did attend church were at Adamant Methodist and for some strange reason that tiny church will forever be etched in my mind as "the little church that could." I felt both honored and a bit hypocritical to step behind its simple pulpit the other day, but was warmly welcomed by this generation of Adamant's faithful.
Adamant, the community, is a bit like a scarred-up old mongrel. Its geographic makeup is thre-quarters Calais and one-quarter East Montpelier. It has seen many a fight and has a questionable reputation. In fact the village was once so rough and tumble that it was originally called Sodom. Sodom, Vermont was home to Wicked Pond and a genetically questionable bunch of Sodomites (or as my father used to call them, "Sodom-o-cranes"), whose purpose in life was to live fast and quarry from the huge granite cache underfoot in Sodom. No one seems to know when Sodom became Adamant, but the transition is an obvious result of kinder and gentler times. The granite industry "pulled up stakes" in the early 1900s and left the area pocked with gaping holes, rusting machinery, and a gentler society — exit Sodom, enter Adamant. Webster defines the word "adamant" as "an unbreakable or extremely hard substance," words that fit Adamant, Vermont like a well worn quarrier's glove.
The Adamant of my youth was a village in transition. It consisted of an ancient co-op store, a tiny church, and a handful of well-worn houses at a junction of five gravel roads. The houses fit awkwardly beside a brook connecting an upper and lower pond. I remember one place close to the junction that had an open drain pipe protruding from its second floor. An elderly woman lived in the house and that pipe discharged in sync with nature's call, into the swampy edge of Wicked Pond. Just up the road from the store was a large wooden structure that has been key to the evolution of Adamant. In Sodom's heyday it served as a dance hall. For a while it was cleared out Sunday mornings for church service. Sodom's attitude, however, held firmly for "separation of church and dance hall"; eventually an old store was moved onto a new foundation just up the road from the dance hall and stands, to this day, as the Adamant Methodist Church.
When I was a boy, the dance hall building had become The Adamant School of Music, a fledgling summer school for piano students. It drew scorn from many of the locals who cited the New York City teachers as "long-hairs or Communists." At first they were discouraged from populating the old dance hall, much like church services had previously been. The Adamant School of Music somehow survived, however, and currently enjoys world-wide recognition. A piano-tuner friend recently told me that there are about 50 grand pianos today in Adamant, Vermont. Most of them are Steinways — several reside in Barney Hall, the place that was too much a dance hall to be either a church or a music school!
Adamant's entire personality, in fact, has changed lately, thanks to a few folks who have moved to the village and the neighborhood and "taken it under their wing." These days the brook exits the upper pond via a resurrected mill dam and veritably dances to the lower pond over stoned-up waterfalls and picturesque pools. The village houses sport new coats of paint and lend Stowe-class charm to theater performances, world-class concerts, artist studios and the annual Black Fly Festival, complete with a blood drawing from the Red Cross!
Except for some minor stumbling and a total void of fire and brimstone, my sermon about unconditional love went well that day. At the end we all shook hands and exchanged pleasantries, guided by that love, and then I went down to the Adamant Co-op, America's oldest co-op store. I bought a soda pop and strolled across the road to enjoy it by the brook. As the ancient water danced by, I could hear the sounds of derricks straining to lift huge chunks of granite, Sodom's drunken brawls and gentle hymns sung by struggling congregations. The water spoke of preachers who farm, farmers who preach, musicians, thespians, Flatlanders and vintage Vermonters. It embraced both the peaceful and the ugly; the water is the history book and today's Adamant is but one chapter, softer and gentler, but very unbreakable.
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