John Evarts was perhaps the first of my forbears to come to America. He emigrated from Yorkshire and settled in Concord, Massachusetts around 1638. He lived in Concord where at least two of his children were born, before moving to Connecticut around 1650. The Evarts family farmed around Guilford for the next four generations.
After a century of plowing, overgrazing, deforestation, and erosion, the soil was becoming exhausted and the population growth limited options for farming new land locally. After the revolution my progenitor James Evarts, like many of his contemporaries, moved to Vermont, looking to resettle outside the inbred cluster of farms on the coast. Jeremiah Evarts was born in 1781 to James and Sarah Todd Evarts in Sunderland, Vermont, about fifteen miles north of where I live today in Bennington.
Settlements were being developed throughout the Republic of Vermont in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Ethan and Ira Allen, who also lived in Sunderland, had travelled across the Green Mountains four years earlier to meet with fellow settlers at the tavern in Windsor to declare the creation of the Republic of Vermont, independent from the jurisdictions of New York and New Hampshire.
The Evarts family farmed in Sunderland for a few years, but found that southwest Vermont was better suited for water powered mills, such as the paper mill Anthony Haswell was building in Bennington, than for agriculture. The Evarts soon moved north and helped settle the town of Georgia in the productive Champlain Valley. By 1790, Georgia, with its timber resources and fertile soil, was one of the most prosperous communities in northern Vermont.
After a century of plowing, overgrazing, deforestation, and erosion, the soil was becoming exhausted and the population growth limited options for farming new land locally. After the revolution my progenitor James Evarts, like many of his contemporaries, moved to Vermont, looking to resettle outside the inbred cluster of farms on the coast. Jeremiah Evarts was born in 1781 to James and Sarah Todd Evarts in Sunderland, Vermont, about fifteen miles north of where I live today in Bennington.Settlements were being developed throughout the Republic of Vermont in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Ethan and Ira Allen, who also lived in Sunderland, had travelled across the Green Mountains four years earlier to meet with fellow settlers at the tavern in Windsor to declare the creation of the Republic of Vermont, independent from the jurisdictions of New York and New Hampshire.
The Evarts family farmed in Sunderland for a few years, but found that southwest Vermont was better suited for water powered mills, such as the paper mill Anthony Haswell was building in Bennington, than for agriculture. The Evarts soon moved north and helped settle the town of Georgia in the productive Champlain Valley. By 1790, Georgia, with its timber resources and fertile soil, was one of the most prosperous communities in northern Vermont.
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