|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
About Peacham, Vermont 
Caledonia County
*Area, Population and Density rankings above refer to Peacham's relative position among Vermont's 255 civic entities (9 cities, 242 towns, 4 gores and grants). Complete rankings are here.
Vermont has its share (more, perhaps) of fascinating town name stories, and Peacham is one of the more colorful. There are actually four possibilities as to how the town was named:
The fourth, however, is the one most favored by locals: In 1726 the English playwright John Gay wrote what has become his best-known work, The Beggar's Opera, a slightly scandalous parody of grand opera. The beautiful actress Lavinia Fenton played the role of Gay's enchanting Polly Peachum with such success that the piece remained popular in England for over fifty years (in recent times Gay's plot has been revived by Bertolt Brecht in The Threepenny Opera). Gay later wrote a sequel, Polly, banned from the stage but widely read in both England and America. The British nobility was aghast when Charles Paulet (1685-1754), the third Duke of Bolton and eighth Marquis of Winchester, married Fenton. The average citizen was thrilled with the marriage; she was, after all, the personification of Polly Peachum to many. She was forty-three to the Duke's sixty-six, and had been his mistress for years; theirs seems to have been a story-book romance. As the Duchess of Bolton, Lavinia's death in 1760 might have gone unnoticed, but she was Polly Peachum to so many people that she was mourned on both sides of the Atlantic. When The Beggar's Opera was brought to the Colonies in the early 1760's, it achieved as much success as it had 35 years earlier in England. The aging Benning Wentworth, caught up by the romance of the Polly Peachum-Duke of Bolton story, may have named the town to honor the late Duchess. He had named one Vermont town (Bolton) and possibly a second (Pawlet) for members of the Duke's family.
Material excerpted or adapted from Esther Munroe Swift's
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Activities & Points of Interest
Goings-on in and near Peacham | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Contact Info Emergency Services (Statewide): 911
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Churches, Ministries, Charitables United Church of Christ : United Church of Christ |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Schools Caledonia Central Supervisory Union 802-684-3801 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Neighboring Towns | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This is a basic geographic reference, intended to show relative location of adjacent towns. Directional accuracy is limited to 16 compass points. There isn't even the slightest suggestion that one can necessarily travel directly from one town to the next (as in "You can't get there from here").
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Utilities Notes about utilities:
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
