[joe moving]

yeah i understand. I go through the MLS and say "nope, nope, no good, nope, nope" for most of the houses under 300 and even up here.

[GeoffD]

Originally Posted by harry chickpea

"What do people do in Stowe to afford $600k homes?"

Some of them have inherited those homes through multiple generations, but can no longer afford the taxes. Some of them are trust fund babies. Some are just rich.

It is a beautiful area. Prices are a bit lower if you get out of the immediate area.

The Act 68 state school tax is means tested so some residents of limited means in paid-for homes can still afford the property taxes. The municipal part that isn't means tested is a very small percentage of the residential property tax bill.

Stowe is commutable for professionals who work in Chittenden County. It has one of the best school systems in the state so people will do the commute to live the resort town life with the gold-plated school system for their children. You can get from Rt 100 at Mountain Road to UVM, Fletcher-Allen, and the UVM medical school in 40 minutes. The GlobalFoundries/IBM plant in Essex Junction is about the same drive time. Those people and affluent vacation home owners drive the prices up.

[Targo]

A great many of Stowe residents are very fit and active. I grew up that and the town attracts a very sport/outdoor/healthy mountain culture group of people. I live in Addison now and the main sport for most around here is running, running into the store for pizza/soda/beer and lottery tickets.

Funny how a dairy town with a ski area on the mountain acme what it is today.

[Ted Bear]

As a kid, I always wanted to ski at Stowe. It was known as a skiers ski mountain. No frills, just steep, challenging runs.

Finally I got to travel there....first for a weekend here or there, and then for a week at a time, and ultimately I owned a house there and skied every day. Mount Mansfield was the place to ski on the east coast. No rookies. No fashion show offs. Skiers. In damned good health and fitness. And they knew how to ski. Starr, National, Goat...and even lift line are among the most challenging things the US has to offer. If you could ski them...not "make your way down", but really ski them, you had achieved something.

The beautiful thing about Stowe was that it was too far for most city folks to drive on a weekend. Boston is about four plus hours, and NYC, from where is started, was six hours door to door on a Friday night. Not many of us dedicated enough to have a go at that every weekend, so you really ended up with a die hard "crowd". (Thank you to the bars that waited for me before last call!).

And then...after years of fighting, along came "progress". When they started selling condos at Spruce Peak for $2MM each (that alone is quite a story as to how they achieved that little scam) I sold my house. I couldn't get the realtor to understand what was going on, and get him to put the price high enough, but finally he "got it", and I sold it for an insane amount of money to a guy from NJ.

Last time I skied Stowe.

I hear that with the new monument to money on the Spruce Peak side there is still a dedicated crowd on the Mansfield side. The wannabees stay at Spruce, the skiers still have Mansfield, but the few times I have been back when passing through, it just doesn't seem to have that same "quaint", no frills, hard core ski place "feel" to it any longer. Some locals, apparently are driving around to Smugs. Heresy in the old days.

I get it. Progress. Money. It costs a ton to make snow and groom the place and put in all those high speed detachables. The Forerunner still looks to be intact, and the mountain double --if you can ski that from top to bottom, you know you have accomplished something--slow as it is, still seems to be there.

Lefty is gone. Gracies has moved a bunch of times. The Matterhorn serves sushi (omg!), and the Nail is trying to open again (Bobby has to be chuckling, after what Stan paid for it!). Topnotch went bust; Grill 108, a late comer, is now a pizza joint....and Pie in the Sky--how could they EVER have run that place into the ground? Where is Berkie?

It's different, from what I can see. But i'll bet there are still places on the Mountain that are kept secret, and where the key to entry is kept well stashed. And the traditions...some still seem to be alive. From a newcomers perspective, i'll bet it looks wonderful. But some things....like steep, and deep, are best left as they are.

[harry chickpea]

Stowe is a survivor. While I enjoyed the paean to the Stowe known by Ted Bear, it was probably about the fourth iteration of the town, and I expect changes will continue as the years go by. Consider that it began as yet another nondescript small town, somewhat near some mountains, isolated, and not very good agricultural land - much like numbers of other Vermont and New Hampshire towns.

Not many people know that the people of Stowe built a huge 200 room hotel in the center of town, long before skiing, taking up most of the south side of main street. It plied the summer residential tourist trade, competing with the area around Mt. Washington. There was also a small mountaintop hotel, frequented by folks with respiratory problems.

When big hotel burned, Stowe became a lumber town, complete with diesel lombard ski sledges dragging trains of logs through the streets and an electric railroad to get sawmill products to Waterbury and thence the Boston market.

When that became less viable, it managed to get the first concrete road in Vermont (1932) and begin courting the ski trade.
A slightly disconcerting postcard photo shows a banner across the street during that period, proudly proclaiming a Germanic "SKI HEIL!"
in front of the old Green Mtn Inn.

Sepp Rusch, the Luces, Churchill, the Von Trapps and others managed to guide the town from overalls to formal clothes to lumbering outfits, to music camps to ski haven, to winter playground for the rich and beyond.

For me, the epitome of the brashness is how the town got an electric railroad built over eleven miles to Waterbury, using only promises and $510 dollars in actual invested money.