The White River Valley

A river, a scattering of villages, and the farm-and-forest country that is about as Vermont as Vermont gets.

The White River runs through central Vermont, and the valley it has carved is the setting for Randolph and a string of small towns and villages around it. This is not the postcard Vermont of ski resorts and outlet shopping. It is the working Vermont of farms, woodlots, back roads, and villages that have been where they are for a couple of hundred years.

The river

The White River is one of the longer free-flowing rivers left in the region, unblocked by major dams along much of its length, which is part of why it draws anglers and paddlers. It gathers from branches in the hills and runs down toward the Connecticut River, shaping the valley floor where the towns and farms sit. In a place this rural, the river is not scenery so much as the reason the settlements are where they are.

The villages

Around Randolph, the valley holds a set of small towns and village centers, the kind of places with a white church, a general store, a town hall, and not a lot else, which is exactly the point. Each has its own character and its own stubborn independence. Taken together they make up the community that a regional paper, a school district, and a shared landscape hold loosely together.

A working landscape

What ties the valley together is that it is still, largely, a working landscape. Dairy farms, sugar bushes tapped for maple in the spring, woodlots, and small enterprises fill the country between the villages. It is beautiful, but it is not a museum. People make a living here, and that gives central Vermont a groundedness the resort towns can lack.

Central Vermont in one word

If you had to sum up the White River Valley, "unhurried" would do. It is a part of the state that never went in for the big-tourism model, and it is better for it. For the town at its center, see Randolph, and visiting for the practical side.