An excerpt from Beyond the Classroom by Bill Holiday
In 1969 Windham County appointed a new Sheriff, Putney’s William ‘Bill’ Graham. He found himself ”very often being a referee between Windham College and the locals.” Graham was a one-man sheriff’s department who had some “local fellows who erroneously believed that since the sheriff lived in Putney, they could do what they wanted.” The main source of tension was between what Graham called “the so-called hippies” who made up a strong part of the 1,000 student campus and local “rednecks, for lack of a better term.”
It was not always smooth sailing. Some of the locals set up a bathtub and ‘stocks’ to give haircuts. Graham received threatening phone calls “from locals saying they’d burn my house down if I kept protecting the kids.” He also received letters from “hippies’ telling him to stop protecting his Putney friends. The FBI informed Graham that a leader of the Weather Underground and Students For a Democratic Society, Bernardine Dohrn, was hiding at the Red Clover Farm commune in Putney. “A lot of these people used Vermont as a kind of haven to lay low and hide out. Communes were very difficult to infiltrate” according to Graham. Local and federal authorities found no trace of Dohrn.
Activities that particularly roused locals were the sight of nude student gardeners in full public view at the so-called ‘free farm’ along US Route 5 just north of the campus and the annual pig roasts at Windham College were raucous. Graham remembers becoming aware of Windham College’s 1972 valedictorian as the author of a so-called “bomb cookbook” as Graham describes it. Graham quickly added, “But I never knew him to do any violence.”