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Remembering Lydia Clemmons, who helped create space and belonging for Black Vermonters

Melody Bodette
/
Vermont Public File
The elder Lydia Clemmons, pictured here in 2017, died at 101 years old on Aug. 16, 2024. She was one of the original owners of Clemmons Family Farm, an icon of African American cultural heritage in Charlotte, Vermont.

When she was a kid, Leslie McCrorey Wells would sometimes ride the bus from school to the Clemmons’ farm. Then Lydia Clemmons would drive her and her friends to drama class in Burlington.

After class, McCrorey Wells would stay over at the Clemmons’ house, and eat supper made by Lydia.

“One of my favorite dishes that she would cook was chili and these delicious little cornbread fingers," McCrorey Wells says. "You know you just dipped them in the chili, and I loved it.”

McCrorey Wells, who is now a co-owner of several Burlington restaurants and on the board of directors for Clemmons Family Farm, says the Clemmons household was a kind of refuge while she was growing up in one of the few Black families in Charlotte.

"It felt like home when I was there, because I felt like I could just be myself," she says.

And after McCrorey Wells’ mom experienced a life-altering brain injury, she says Lydia Clemmons stepped in to counsel and coach her.

"I always felt like I had someone — just another, you know, mother, and specifically a Black mother — in my court," McCrorey Wells says.

A photo of a Black woman sitting, draped in colorful striped and batik fabrics, long beaded necklaces and a metal bracelet. She's looking off into the distance with a serene expression. Her grey and black hair is pulled up in an elegant updo. In the background is more fabric with large green round patterns and yellow accents.
Clemmons Family Farm
/
Courtesy
Lydia Clemmons, photographed in textiles from her shop Authentica African Imports. She started the business in the 1980s after traveling to Tanzania for humanitarian work and meeting a Kenyan basketmaker who wanted help selling sisal shoulder bags. Lydia expanded the business to include art made by people across the African continent. She closed the shop in 2012.

Providing welcome, guidance and connection to African American culture is something Lydia Clemmons did over and over throughout her life.

Lydia was born in 1923 in Louisiana. She grew up in Arkansas, and excelled as a student in a one-room, segregated schoolhouse.

Right before Lydia entered high school, her family moved to Illinois. They joined the Great Migration of Black Americans escaping racial violence and discriminatory Jim Crow laws in the South for economic and educational opportunities to the north and west. During this period, Black Americans, including Lydia’s parents, lost millions of acres of farmland to racist policies, banks and government officials, as well as white people who lynched their neighbors.

In the Midwest, Lydia earned a nursing degree from Loyola University in Chicago and then married her husband, Jack Clemmons, in 1952. A decade later, the couple bought their nearly-150-acre farm in Charlotte when Jack, a doctor, was offered a position at the University of Vermont.

A photo of a newspaper clipping headlined "Bird's Surgery" with a photo of two nurses in surgical gear bending over a person in a hospital gown wearing a mask of a large bird.  The caption reads: "Nurses Steve Chamberlain and Lydia Clemmons prepare to move Big Bird (nurse Deborah Bouvier of Bristol) from operating room to recovery room after an operation to remove a hump from his beak. The mock operation was staged in the DeGoesbriand Unit Saturday by the Northern Vermont Chapter of the Association of Operating Room Nurses as a public awareness project. Children ages 4 to 14 and their parents were invited to watch."
Burlington Free Press
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Newspapers.com
In this 1989 Burlington Free Press clipping, Lydia Clemmons demonstrates a mock operation on "Big Bird" for children. In addition to working as a nurse anesthetist, she had a knack for teaching.

While maintaining the farm’s large garden and raising five children, newspaper articles show Lydia becoming involved in her new community. She helped establish the local 4-H chapter and the Charlotte chapter of the Vermont League of Women Voters.

"She was just a joy to have as a neighbor," says Joan Braun, who lived next door to Lydia for 45 years. Braun remembers Lydia as a spiritual, fun, kind person who loved to laugh, who knew all the jazz greats from her time in Chicago, and who was good at pretty much everything.

"She taught me how to make a slipcover ... she taught me how to do that, which takes a lot of patience!" Braun says.

Lydia had a knack for teaching. Whether that was demonstrating a mock operation on Big Bird during her time as a nurse anesthetist at the University of Vermont Medical Center, or sharing stories about the people, travel and culture attached to the art she sold through her shop, Authentica African Imports.

"She was just very anxious to share her, her history," Braun says.

Celebrating African American heritage with the wider community is what the Clemmonses ultimately decided to do with their property. A nonprofit — led by their daughter — purchased it last year, preserving one of the few African American-owned farms in Vermont and across the country. 

Lydia Clemmons explained why they wanted this to be their legacy in a video made by the Vermont Historical Society and MyChamplainValley in 2018.

“It’s very important that all people of all races are recognized and respected," she said. "And the only way you’re going to get some recognition and respect, is to have done something positive. From that standpoint, it’s very important that we have this in Vermont and in the United States.”

Margaret Bass, who joined the board at Clemmons Family Farm after she moved to Vermont in 2016, says she has incredible admiration and respect for what the Clemmonses have accomplished.

"For those of us who, who grew under Jim Crow, I mean, you can't have done that and go to Clemmons Family Farm and not be awestruck," she says.

A photo shows sun shining inside a room with eight people sitting in chairs in a circle, with half of them playing instruments.
Elodie Reed
/
Vermont Public
A jam session at the end of the "Bliss Eclipse" event at Clemmons Family Farm on Monday, April 8, 2024.

Like Lydia Clemmons, Bass spent part of her childhood in a racially segregated South. Then she went on to work in predominantly white-led institutions — and even then, she says the lack of belonging she felt in Vermont came as a shock.

Bass says that’s why the place that Lydia helped create feels so significant.

"It's one of the few spaces in Vermont — maybe only — where there's never a moment that I feel like an outsider," Bass says. "There's never that feeling, I still get it: you know, eyes closed, 'Oh my God, am I gonna be the only Black person there.' Right? That 'Oh, my God,' feeling, 'Oh Jesus.' And then anticipating the questions and blah, blah — I never, none of that. When I go to the farm, I go to the farm and walk around like, 'Yeah, this is my place.' 'Cause it is my place. I mean, it is my place! Because that was their intention."

Bass says she only met Lydia a couple times, but is grieving the loss of the rare Black elder in Vermont.

"The most striking thing about her — with that long braid hanging over her shoulder, was she just the epitome of grace and dignity," Bass says. "This is a face I don't know, but this is a face and a way of being that I know very well. And so it also felt like belonging in ways that nothing else has felt here."

Lydia Clemmons died on Aug. 16. She was 101 years old.

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Corrected: August 30, 2024 at 3:57 PM EDT
This story has been updated to clarify that the elder Lydia Clemmons — who has a daughter by the same name — has died, and it has also been corrected to reflect that the elder Lydia Clemmons helped establish the local 4-H club in Charlotte, but was not president.
Elodie is a reporter and producer for Vermont Public. She previously worked as a multimedia journalist at the Concord Monitor, the St. Albans Messenger and the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, and she's freelanced for The Atlantic, the Christian Science Monitor, the Berkshire Eagle and the Bennington Banner. In 2019, she earned her MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Southern New Hampshire University.