Vermont

January in the Green Mountains has never been gentle. It strips away comfort, soft thinking, and easy assumptions. In that kind of cold, people tend to tell the truth, or at least the version of it they are willing to live with. On January 15, 1777, a group of settlers gathered in a small courthouse in Westminster and did something the American story still struggles to categorize. They declared independence, not from a distant king alone, but from a neighboring colony that claimed ownership of their land, their labor, and their future. This is not a tale of powdered wigs and polished speeches. It is a story rooted in mud, timber, disputed deeds, and men who had already learned that law could be used as a weapon. Vermont did not drift into independence on a philosophical breeze. It fought its way there through land disputes, court orders, whippings in the woods, and blood spilled on courthouse steps. The revolution here was practical before it was idealistic. For fourteen years, Vermont existed as something awkward and unresolved, a republic without recognition, a state before it was allowed to be one. In that space, it experimented boldly, sometimes uncomfortably, with ideas of liberty, labor, and power. This video walks through that uneasy birth, not as legend, but as lived history, fingerprints still visible on the banister.