Barre, Vermont: A Fistfight, or the Highest Bidder

Barre, Vermont, may owe its name to a fistfight on a barn floor in 1793. The town’s own records tell a quieter story: the name went to the highest bidder.

Nobody liked Wildersburgh

The town didn’t start out as Barre. Zadock Thompson, in his 1842 gazetteer of every town in Vermont, says it was chartered in 1780 “by the name of Wildersburgh.” The settlers weren’t fans. “This name being unpopular with the inhabitants of the town,” Thompson writes, they called a meeting in 1793 at Calvin Smith’s house to pick a new one and send it to the legislature.

Several names came up, Paris and Newburn among them, and the town was going to vote. Then two men took over the debate. Capt. Joseph Thomson (the book spells him Thompson, too, a few lines later) came from Holden, Massachusetts, and Jonathan Sherman from Barre, Massachusetts, and each wanted his hometown’s name.

Settled across a pole

So the meeting agreed to let them box for it. The rules, Thompson says, were that they’d “fight across a pole,” and if one knocked the other down, anything went after that. Everyone moved out to a new barn shed with a floor of rough hemlock planks.

Thomson landed the first big punch and put Sherman on the floor. He climbed on top and swung at his head, but Sherman kept dodging, and most of the blows hit the planks. Meanwhile Sherman was working on his ribs from underneath. Before long Thomson was groaning. Sherman rolled him off, jumped to his feet and, as Thompson tells it, shouted that the name was Barre, by God.

The petition went in for Barre, and the legislature approved it that same year. Thompson got the story from Dr. Robert Paddock, the town doctor, who saw the fight and was still living when Thompson wrote it up. The next day, Paddock said, Sherman came to him to have the hemlock splinters pulled out of his back and backside.

What the town clerk wrote down

Here’s the thing: the town record that made it into print doesn’t mention a fight. In 1882, the Washington County volume of Abby Hemenway’s Vermont Historical Gazetteer printed a history of Barre by Carlos Carpenter, and he copied a vote from a town meeting held on September 3, 1793:

“Voted, that the man that will give the most towards building a meeting-house in said town, shall name the town, and the town will petition the Legislature for that name.”

The name was auctioned off. Ezekiel Dodge Wheeler made the top bid, Carpenter writes, “and said Wheeler named the town Barre.”

Which story wins

You’ve got two accounts, and neither one mentions the other. The auction comes straight from a town vote that Carpenter quotes word for word, so it’s the stronger record of how the name was made official. The fight comes from an eyewitness, but it reached print almost 50 years later, secondhand through Thompson. The sources don’t say whether the fight happened before the vote, instead of it, or not at all.

Neither account explains the name itself. Henry Gannett’s 1905 survey of place names for the U.S. Geological Survey does: Barre, Vermont, was “named from the town in Massachusetts,” the same town Sherman came from in Thompson’s story. That town, Gannett says, was named for Col. Isaac Barre, “the friend of America in the British Parliament.”

Respelled in Illinois

If you look up Barry, a city in Pike County, Illinois, in Gannett’s book, you’ll see it was “first named Barre, from the town in Vermont,” until the Post-Office Department changed the spelling. Somebody fought, or paid, for that name in 1793, and a federal office still rewrote it.

Sources & further reading

• Zadock Thompson, History of Vermont, Natural, Civil, and Statistical (Burlington, 1842), part 3, pp. 9-10. Chartered in 1780 as Wildersburgh; the 1793 meeting; Thomson from Holden and Sherman from Barre, Mass.; the boxing match “across a pole” on a hemlock floor; Sherman’s claim of the name for Barre; Dr. Robert Paddock as eyewitness and the splinters.
• Carlos Carpenter, “Barre,” in Abby Maria Hemenway, ed., The History of Washington County in the Vermont Historical Gazetteer (Montpelier, 1882), p. 23. The town vote of September 3, 1793, auctioning the right to name the town, and Ezekiel Dodge Wheeler naming it Barre.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 37. Barre, Vermont, “named from the town in Massachusetts”; Barre, Mass., named for Col. Isaac Barre; Barry, Illinois, first named Barre from the town in Vermont.
• GNIS feature 1456274 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record and coordinates for Barre.