Travel in Time with Dan | The Davis Log House, Winooski River, Montpelier, Vermont
⚠️ Author’s Note: The following is a fictional historical interview. Colonel Jacob Davis and his nephew General Parley Davis were real pioneers who became the first people of European descent to permanently settle in the area that would become Montpelier, Vermont. Colonel Davis came from Charlton, Massachusetts, surveyed the surrounding land and forest, and built a large log house on the western bank of the Winooski River. The following winter, he moved his family into that house, establishing the first permanent European settlement in the area. Colonel Davis chose the name Montpelier — a deliberate nod to the city of Montpellier in the south of France and to the French alliance that had made American independence possible. Vermont itself had been an independent republic before joining the United States. Montpelier would go on to become the smallest state capital in the United States, with a population of roughly 8,000 people, the only state capital without a McDonald’s, and a city known for its fiercely protected small-town identity, its transparent and accessible government, and its extraordinary resilience in the face of repeated flooding — including the great flood of 1927 and another devastating flood in 2023. This imagined conversation takes place on a winter evening in the newly built log house on the Winooski River, in the first season the Davis family has spent here. The historical facts are real. The dialogue is creative fiction, inspired by the documented history of Montpelier’s founding and the character of the men who built it.
📍 Setting: The Davis log house, western bank of the Winooski River, the area that will become Montpelier, Vermont — winter, late 1780s. The house is large by frontier standards, solidly built, the kind of structure that tells you immediately the man who designed it was thinking about permanence rather than convenience. A fire is going. Outside, the wind moves through the trees with the particular authority of a Vermont winter that has no interest in your comfort or your plans. Colonel Jacob Davis… a broad, deliberate man in his fifties, with the unhurried bearing of someone who makes decisions slowly and then does not revisit them… is seated near the fire with a cup of something warm, looking at a hand-drawn map spread across his knee. Across the room, his nephew General Parley Davis… younger by perhaps twenty years, leaner, with quick eyes and the slightly worn look of a man who has been swinging an axe since before breakfast for the better part of a year… is sharpening a tool with the focused attention of someone who does not entirely stop working even when he is sitting down. They both look up as I come in from the cold, and their responses to my arrival tell you everything about the difference between them. Colonel Davis nods once, deliberately, as though he expected me. Parley grins.
Parley: Shut the door. You’re letting the only warm air in Vermont out into the forest.
Colonel Davis: (Without looking up from the map) Parley.
Parley: He knows I’m right.
Dan: (Pulling the door closed) Thank you for having me in. Colonel Davis, I want to start with you. You came here from Charlton, Massachusetts. You surveyed this land. You built this house. What made you choose this particular place?
Colonel Davis: (Setting the map aside with the deliberateness of a man who gives everything his full attention when it is time to give it)
The river. The Winooski runs through this valley and gives you what a frontier settlement needs above everything else — transportation, water, and a reason for other people to come. A settlement without a river is a settlement that talks to itself. This one will not talk to itself.
(A pause, looking at the fire)
The land is good. The forest is workable. The position is central. When Vermont needs a capital, and it will need one, this valley is where it makes sense to put it. I did not choose this place on instinct. I chose it because it answers the questions that matter.
Parley: (Not looking up from the tool he is sharpening) He also chose it because it reminded him of somewhere he’d read about in a book.
Colonel Davis: That is a separate consideration.
Parley: He named it before we built anything. Before there was a single structure standing here, before we’d cleared an acre, he had already decided what to call it.
Dan: Montpelier. Named after the city in the south of France.
Colonel Davis: (With a quiet dignity that suggests he has heard the teasing before and does not particularly mind it)
Montpellier, France, is a city of learning and culture and considerable history. More to the point, France made American independence possible. Without the French alliance, without French ships and French soldiers and French money, the Revolution does not end the way it ended. We were outmatched by the British in every conventional military measure. France changed that calculation entirely.
Naming this place after a French city is not sentimentality. It is an acknowledgment of a debt that I do not think we acknowledge loudly enough. Every time someone says the name of this capital, they are… whether they know it or not… saying thank you to France.
Parley: (Dryly) That is a very grand purpose for a name that most people around here can’t spell correctly.
Colonel Davis: Most people around here couldn’t spell Charlton correctly either. That is not an argument against having standards.
Dan: Parley, you came here with your uncle. What was it actually like, that first season? The clearing, the building, the winter?
Parley: (Setting down the tool, leaning back, the grin fading into something more honest)
Hard. I’ll say it plainly since my uncle won’t. It was genuinely hard. We came up here from Massachusetts into land that had no particular interest in becoming a settlement. The trees don’t move because you ask them to. The ground doesn’t level itself because you have a good reason for wanting it level. Everything you see in this room… (a gesture at the walls, the floor, the beams overhead)… we cut and fitted and raised ourselves. Every piece of it.
(A pause)
There were days that first autumn when I looked at what we had done and what was still left to do, and I thought that my uncle had perhaps been more optimistic in Charlton than the actual forest of Vermont warranted.
Colonel Davis: (Mildly) You never said so at the time.
Parley: I said so several times at the time. You weren’t listening.
Colonel Davis: I was listening. I simply did not find it useful information.
Dan: (To Colonel Davis) That is an interesting distinction — hearing something and deciding it isn’t useful information. Is that how you lead? By filtering out the doubt?
Colonel Davis: (Considering this carefully)
No. Filtering out doubt is how you walk off a cliff with great confidence. What I filter out is the doubt that has no constructive direction. Parley telling me the work is hard, well, that is correct information, and I know it is correct because I am doing the same work. It does not change what needs to be done. It does not suggest a different course of action. It is simply true and not useful, and dwelling on it costs energy that the work needs.
Now… if Parley had said the river is in the wrong place, or the soil cannot support what we need, or the position is not defensible… that doubt I would have heard differently. That doubt points somewhere. The doubt that only says this is difficult does not point anywhere I am not already standing.
Parley: (To Dan, with a kind of fond exasperation) He was like this in Charlton too. Drove my father absolutely mad.
Dan: Let’s talk about the name Vermont chose for itself during its years as an independent republic, and what that independence meant. Vermont was its own country before it joined the United States. Does that feel like ancient history from where you’re sitting, or does it still feel recent?
Parley: (Immediately) Recent. Very recent. I grew up in that independence. It wasn’t abstract to us. It was simply how things were. Vermont made its own decisions. Vermont answered to Vermont.
Colonel Davis: That spirit does not leave a people quickly. (Quietly, looking at the fire) It is, I think, part of why this valley will make a good capital. The people who settle here will have that independence in their bones. They will expect their government to answer to them, not the other way around. They will walk into the capital building and expect to understand what is happening inside it. They will not tolerate a government that puts distance between itself and the people it serves.
Dan: Accessible leadership.
Colonel Davis: (Nodding slowly) A leader who cannot be reached is not leading. He is simply occupying a position. Real authority comes from the willingness to be present to the people who gave it to you. The capital I am imagining for this valley… the government that eventually sits here… should be the kind that a farmer can walk into on a Tuesday morning and find out what his representatives are doing with his taxes. That is not a radical idea. That is simply what government is supposed to be.
Parley: There are a lot of governments that would disagree with you.
Colonel Davis: There are a lot of governments that are wrong.
Dan: This place you’ve built here on the Winooski… there will be floods. Not soon, but eventually. The river that makes this valley valuable will also make it vulnerable. What do you say to the people who will live here and face that?
Parley: (A beat, looking at the sound of the river just audible beneath the wind outside)
That is the bargain, isn’t it? The river gives you everything and it takes things back sometimes. You don’t get one without the other. I’d say to them what I’d say to anyone who builds on good land that has a cost: know the cost, build accordingly, and when the river takes something, build it again. The valley is still worth it. The river is still worth it. The hard thing about living somewhere good is that good places ask something of you in return.
Colonel Davis: (Simply) You do not abandon a sound position because the position is sometimes difficult. You build better. You learn what the river does, and you account for it, and you stay. Leaving is easy. Staying and rebuilding is what builds a city.
Dan: Last question for both of you. People will live in this valley for centuries. They will govern themselves here, flood and rebuild here, argue about what to name things here. What do you want them to know about this night, this house, this beginning?
Colonel Davis: (A long pause, the map on his knee, the fire between us)
I want them to know that the beginning was chosen. Not stumbled into, not settled for… chosen. Every aspect of it. The river, the position, the name, the permanence of the structure. Someone looked at this wilderness and saw a capital city, and then came here and started building it. That is not arrogance. That is what vision requires. You must be willing to see the thing before it exists, and then to do the unglamorous work of making it real.
(Quietly)
And I want them to know that the name means something. That every time they say Montpelier, they are connected… whether they know it or not… to a France that believed in American freedom enough to fight for it. That connection is worth remembering. Small places are not isolated from the larger world. They are part of it, and the best of them know it.
Parley: (After a moment, the grin returning but softer now)
I want them to know the logs were heavy. (A beat) I want them to know that real things are built by real people doing real work in real cold, and that nobody who builds something worth having gets to skip the part where it is difficult. The city they live in started here, in this room, with two men from Massachusetts and a river and a Vermont winter.
(He picks up the tool again, looks at it)
And I want them to know it was worth it. Every log. Every frozen morning. Every time I thought my uncle was out of his mind and didn’t say so loudly enough for it to matter.
Colonel Davis: (Without looking up from the map, with the faintest possible suggestion of a smile)
You said it plenty loudly.
The fire crackled in the Davis log house on the Winooski River, and outside, Vermont pressed in with all the cold indifference it has always applied equally to everyone who has ever tried to build something permanent in its forests.
They did build something permanent. The log house became a settlement, the settlement became a town, and the town became the smallest state capital in the United States. It’s named after a city in southern France, sitting on a river that would flood it twice and watch it rebuild twice, fiercely protecting a small-town identity that includes, to this day, the only state capital in America without a McDonald’s.
Colonel Jacob Davis saw the capital before it existed and walked into the wilderness to build it. General Parley Davis picked up an axe and made it real. Between the vision and the work, a city was born.
The Winooski River is still there. The capital is still there. The open government that Colonel Davis imagined… where citizens walk in on a Tuesday morning and find out what their representatives are doing… is still there.
The leadership lesson lives in both men, and it takes both of them to complete it. Davis the elder: real leadership is accessible, not distant. A government that puts walls between itself and the people it serves has forgotten what it is for. Davis the younger: real things are built by real people doing real work, and no vision, however sound, builds itself. Someone has to pick up the axe.
Montpelier, Vermont. Population 8,000. The smallest capital. The most fiercely independent. Named for France. Built by two men from Massachusetts with a river and a plan and a very long winter ahead of them.
The logs were heavy. It was worth it. 🏛️🌊
Travel in Time with Dan is where travel, history, and leadership come together. Uncovering History. Inspiring Leadership.
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