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was the grave of Barton Billings, son of another family daughter, Calvin Galusha’s sister Sally. Billings had died in Kansas, and his epitaph read: “Carry me back to old Vermont, where the rills trickle down the hills, there is where I want to lie when I die.”
    Still, John and Victoria could not help seeing, the majority of the Vermonters who left did not want to come back. Over the years Calvin Galusha, Sarah, and John found themselves lonelier than they imagined. Nor were the Plymouth citizens alone in leaving. In the 1850s alone, 50,000 more had departed Vermont, mostly heading west, than had come in. A factor they had never imagined, the Erie Canal, had made that western migration possible. Talents like the Rutland-born blacksmith John Deere had abandoned Vermont and founded great companies out west.
    Indeed, one could argue that it was their own line, John, Calvin Galusha, and Calvin before him, that was breaking tradition by not leaving. A move was not necessarily cowardice; sometimes one moved on to build a better life. Their Coolidge ancestors had left Cottenham, England, and come over in the time of John Winthrop, perhaps even in the same fleet with the Arbella . On that voyage, Winthrop had delivered a sermon about living as a model: “Wee shall be as a citty upon a hill, the eies of all people are upon us.” Winthrop’s first City on a Hill had been named Plymouth, after Plymouth in England, to signify that the settlers must improve upon what others had built at home. The Coolidges had made their own city across the river from Boston, in Watertown, where they had fast established a reputation for ingenuity and thrift. Trade with Boston was important, but the Charles River was in the way.
    The Coolidge ancestors had worked out a solution: one had built the first bridge across the Charles River by stringing eight-foot baskets across the span, then fortifying it with wood and stone. The settlers of Watertown were not content with an ocean to separate them from old England; they sought political separation. In 1631, the inhabitants of Watertown objected to a levy for public defense imposed from above by their English governors. They, still Englishmen, were being taxed without consent. The result was that free men in the colony were permitted to have representation, elect a governor, and choose a deputy to a general court. Coolidges created and attended some of the first town meetings, helping to establish what would become a familiar form of government in New England.
    A Coolidge forefather had signed the Dedham Covenant, which explicitly posited as its goal to keep out those who did not fit: “That we shall by all means labor to keep off from us all such as are contrary minded, and receive only such unto us as may be probably of one heart with us.” The reasoning was simple: create virtue and lead by example. Testing virtue—inviting too many different thinkers into your midst—was, in their view, too dangerous. There were still numerous Coolidges all around Boston, many wealthy and distinguished. A few were also descended from Thomas Jefferson.
    That first John Coolidge in Plymouth, Vermont, a Revolutionary War soldier, had taken a farm in the town, then known as Saltash, and shortly acquired plots of land for his children. By renaming the town Plymouth the Coolidges and the other settlers signaled to the world now that they were endeavoring to make a yet another “citty upon a hill.” The old name under the New Hampshire charter, Saltash, was set aside.
    Their new “citty” was really a chain of hamlets: Plymouth Notch, Plymouth Union, Plymouth Kingdom, and others with settlements that had been given less obvious names—Frog City, for example. The Coolidges had become local, married locals, and fallen into the history of those contentious people, invariably taking sides in local conflicts, bloody or pecuniary—the battle of Vermonters versus New Yorkers or debtors versus creditors.
    Every July,