Rooted: Cultivating Community in the Vermont Grange
Directed by Ned Castle & Charlotte Barrett
Vermont | 2018 | Documentary | 57 min
Filmmaker in attendance
Vermont’s agricultural heritage gets a starring role in this film, which goes inside the Grange, the national farmers’ organization, to explore how it has worked to strengthen and preserve rural communities since 1867. Created in partnership with the Middle Branch Grange in East Bethel and Riverside Grange in West Topsham, Rooted uses an ethnographic approach to explore the social, economic, and political impacts of the National Grange on Vermont’s rural communities over the past 150 years. In one-on-one interviews and at social gatherings, Grange members reminisce about growing up in the Grange “family” and share their hopes and concerns for the future of an organization challenged to adapt to a sharply different concept of community in the 21st century. A co-production of Historic New England and the Vermont Folklife Center.