Elliot Morse of East Montpelier stands outside the sugarhouse at Morse Farm in East Montpelier, where the former farmer and auto mechanic makes maple candy and maple kettle corn, and entertains visitors with stories of bygone farming days in Vermont. Photo: Photo by Stefan Hard

By Patrick Timothy Mullikin

Gov. James Douglas take note. If you are looking for a spokesman to capture the hearts and souls of our fine state, a genuine article in flannel shirt and Carhartt jacket, whose seventh-generation Vermont accent is the real McCoy and not some faked-for-radio nonsense, then drive up to East Montpelier's Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks and watch Elliot, the Morse family's elder statesman, in action. Oh, yes. A picture of his grandfather, hangs in our Statehouse: Gov. George Aiken.

Six years ago Morse underwent surgery for a blocked artery, but today at 68 he is a dynamo who purrs along like a fine-tuned VW engine. "I want to get things done. I want to move 90 miles an hour when I do something. If I start out in the morning to do it, I want it done now," he says gazing out from a newly installed picture window at his County Road home. In true Yankee fashion, the window is second hand but in perfect shape. Morse installed it himself, with a little help – maybe more than he will admit – from his wife of 43 years, Florence.

In a field across the road, a cross-country skier winds along the groomed trails of the Morse-farm complex, a harmonious Southfork of the North, owned and operated by various Morses and their families. Directly across the street is the garage where Morse made a name for himself for 40 years by repairing Volkswagens. (Son Andy now runs the shop. Their other son, Brian, operates his own shop, Morse Auto in Berlin. Daughter Beth lives in Connecticut.)

Up the road is the Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks, owned by his youngest brother, Burr. There, says Morse proudly, as many as 500 buses, many carrying 50 tourists, stop annually. Elliot helps out there as the official greeter, which means he can have a cumulative audience of 25,000.

"I'm a salesman of Vermont lore. There is nothing I like better than to have a whole load of tourists and to get on the bus. My job is, in five minutes, to get everybody laughing their heads off, and get off that bus, and be happy. Happy people spend money," he says with a hearty laugh.

"Our standard joke that we'll say to tourists is: 'We no longer milk cows on Morse Farm; we milk tourists.'" That line is a good example of Morse's sense of humor. He is droll but hardly taciturn. There's none of that "yup" and "nope" stuff. He bursts with information about farming, East Montpelier, Vermont traditions, his family, the Civil War and, naturally, Volkswagens. Should a lost traveler ask Morse for directions there will be no hesitation, none of those 'well-that-all-depends,' qualifiers for which Vermonters are famous. He's more likely to hop in the car and deliver a sermon on Civil War history (in August, Morse becomes a Knight of the Northeast Kingdom Civil War Roundtable; he will be "Sir" Elliot Morse from then on). He might even diagnose an engine knock. Must be his upbringing.

In 1939 Morse's family moved from Putney to Maple Corner where his mother came to teach in the one-room schoolhouse. His father, like practically everyone else in those days, farmed. "It was a wonderful place to grow up," he says of Calais.

When Elliot was 14, his dad sold the Calais farm and moved the family to another in East Montpelier. Morse says he chose to stay on the farm after graduating from Montpelier High School in 1956, although his parents wanted him to go University of Vermont. "I liked to fix the equipment. … Somebody on a farm has to fix it."

One of his most memorable repair jobs was on a Volkswagen Beetle that was owned by a county forester, who then lived in the house that the Morses now own. In 1961, the only VW dealer in the state was miles away in St. Johnsbury, and the forester asked Elliot if he could repair the air-cooled engine.

"I tinkered on his car, and got it going. I didn't know anything about Volkswagens, but it was an engine, and I know engines. Over and over again people would leave them, and I started fixing them. At that point I said: 'Do I want to milk cows all my life, seven days a week?'" The answer was no.

Morse's reputation as a VW mechanic landed him a job with Twin Town Motors in Berlin (now Walker Imports), where he worked for three years before opening his own shop on County Road.

"I got to know those cars so well that I could listen to them coming up the road, and I knew exactly what was wrong."

One of Morse's' customers was a young Bernie Sanders. "He had a 1963 Volkswagen bug. It was blue, I think. I can remember most of the colors of those cars."

Then came the hippies in their VW microbuses. "I got an awful lot of work from Goddard College. Those people treated me real well. Local people really had to stretch to find money to pay. (But) the Goddard students had tons of money," he says. He also had a steady stream of work from members of the New Hamburger Commune in Plainfield.

"I had people come in here with beards and mustaches and hair down to their shoulders, and in the back of the micro bus would be a couple goats, two or three sheep. I've seen everything."

In 2000, Morse, who has been a member of the East Montpelier Volunteer Fire Department since 1964, decided to give politics a shot. "I'm a conservative old Vermonter, but not that conservative. I can go for some modern things, too," he says of his political bent.

Morse ran for the Vermont Senate. "I lost by 103 votes, and I didn't even ask for a recount. Politics are different today. In my Grandfather (Sidney) Morse's day, and he was a representative to the Golden Dome down here, too, all you had to do, because everyone was a Republican in those days, was to say: 'I'd like to go to the Legislature,' and you were in. You didn't campaign. You didn't do anything. You were just elected by a town meeting.' Yeah. It's different."

Thanks to Elliot Morse, though, some things will always seem the same.



Patrick Timothy Mullikin writes regularly for The Sunday Magazine and is an editor at The Times Argus.