Town Bites
by Edd Merritt

Planning Commission discusses a couple of important subdivision requests

After hearing one round of requests for modifications to the Bid Spear proposal for commercial development of the property at the Route 7 and Church Hill Road interchange and submitting their recommendations to the Selectboard, the Charlotte Planning Commission will review its earlier decision. According to Zoning Administrator Tom Mansfield, the commission is doing so in light of changes the Selectboard made to the commission’s recommendations. The planners can revise their prior decision or leave it as it stands.

In a second item, the commission began a sketch-plan review of Andrew Thurber’s proposal for a non-contiguous Planned Residential Development (PRD) utilizing land on Greenbush Road and Converse Bay Road. The proposal asks for a subdivision providing five attached elderly dwellings, three new single-family dwellings and one existing single-family dwelling. The proposal drew substantial neighborhood interest and will be continued.

Current Charlotters were among “hippie” migrants.
The August 20-27 issue of Seven Days newspaper carried an article entitled “Hippie Havens.” It included a section on the Red Clover Collective near Putney, which current Charlotte resident and filmmaker John Douglas bought in 1965 and helped settle in 1969. According to the article, activists flocked to the farm, including Carl Oglesby, a president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the more active and well-known (or notorious depending upon one’s political proclivities) anti-war groups of the 60s. According to Douglas, the FBI “raided” Red Clover in the fall of 1970 looking for Bernadine Dohrn, a Weather Underground fugitive at the time. He said, the agents “lined us all up, searched the house and left empty-handed.”