Rochester Community Bulletin Board

2 hours ago

Vic Ribaudo, the Director of our Emergency Management Team, receives reports and updates from the VT State Emergency Operations Center daily. Here are some highlights from the April 2 edition:

Key Updates:
-- Stay At Home orders have been issued in at least 38 states, 48 counties, 14 cities, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
-- Major Disaster Declarations have been awarded in 30 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam.
-- Today the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide exceeded 1,000,000.

A major testing push began 3/29/2020:
-- Hospitals and Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) across the state have new test kits.
-- Drive-up testing is available at Putney's Landmark College, Brattleboro Memorial, Copley, Central Vermont,Dartmouth Hitchcock, North Country, Northwestern, Porter, Springfield, Rutland Regional and UVM Medical Centerhospitals, with variable hours.
-- Testing still requires a referral from your primary care provider.

VT numbers (as of April 2, numbers change daily)
-- Positive test results: 338
-- Total tests conducted: 4,711
-- Deaths: 17
-- Current hospitalizations:29 COVID-19 in-patients, (down 1 from April 1)
-- 42 Persons Under Investigation (PUIs) (down 10 from April 1)
-- 20 COVID-19 patients discharged ... See MoreSee Less

Rochester Community Bulletin Board

23 hours ago

Very long and thorough story in the Herald today, by Martha Slater, about all the businesses in the Valley, how they are doing, and what their hours are, much longer than I could post here. You should take it out of the paper and keep it somewhere you can refer to it when you need it. Thanks Martha and thank you White River Valley Herald. ... See MoreSee Less

Rochester Community Bulletin Board

24 hours ago

You know, after the high school closed, Dorothy Robson asked me to make a little video about the history of the school, and Nancy Wooley and Kelly Kelly and others pulled together photographs from the past and we made quite a moving little piece about Rochester’s high school and the people that had gone there over the years.

But the reason I bring it up now, is that those pictures, many from the Rochester Historical Society, were also about the history of the town itself. And any kind of review of Rochester’s past shows that it has passed through many challenges, many changes. You could say it was once a mining town, with talc mines and quarries, and a factory town, with the big floor factory where the schools are now, or a railroad town, when the Peavine railroad made its way up the valley to the little roundhouse building (still there) and the freight shed (still there) over stone trestle supports in the river, that are also still there.

The railroad was destroyed in the flood of 1927, rebuilt and destroyed again by the stock market crash of 1929. Rochester was a wool town, a dairy town, a lumber town. You can still find the ruins of a logger’s splash dam up on the Bingo, with huge old timbers and hand wrought iron spikes still holding them together under the fast running water, colder than a bankers heart.

Nancy Wooley found me a hundred year old post card, which shows a frame house, newly built and coming up the dirt road which is now route 100, is a heavily loaded hay wagon, drawn by a team of horses. I am living in that house today.

So I guess the lesson of Rochester Vermont is that It endures. The people hang together, the community continues, the seasons continue to change. And here we are now, facing something difficult, something that demands sacrifice, and the pain of isolation and fear. Let’s take a little heart from what the town has gone through before, from the strength of those old Vermonters who built Rochester and kept it going. So stay safe in your houses, don’t go to the store unless you really have to, call for us to deliver groceries if you need them, and don’t get casual about it as time drags on.

After all, this too will pass.

Rob Gardner ... See MoreSee Less