By Mary Alexander Peet Photography courtesy Mary Alexander Peet
The distance from Jericho to Glover isn ’ t much more than 60 miles , but with a carload of kids crammed tight inside our Travel All , it sure felt like we ’ d never get there . Our grandfather ’ s farm and Shadow Lake , both in Glover , were our destinations . We did our share of quarrelling along the way , but we also sang songs and played car games to pass the time . All that bickering , singing , and chattering must have made a terrible racket , so it was no wonder that Dad always made a few stops along the way to break up the trip .
My favorite stop was in Johnson where there was a bake stand on the side of the road in the center of town . It was a small wooden structure , painted green and white to match the house that stood behind it . There was a buzzer on the outside which was used to summon an older man from the house who , as I remember , had snowy white hair and wore a white apron and a white paper baker ’ s cap . He would slide open a glass window and serve us freshly baked bread , rolls , cake donuts , and my favorite : raised , glazed donuts . It has been over fifty years , yet my mouth still waters when I picture those simply irresistible , plump , soft , sugary donuts !
For the past forty years I have driven up to the Northeast Kingdom hundreds of times , and when I pass through Johnson , I often think of the donut man and wonder who he was . Some of my siblings recalled our stops at the donut stand , but with only a few additional details than I remembered , unable to totally satisfy my curiosity . In the fall of 2021 , I finally decided it was time to do something with my interest . I sent an email to the Johnson Historical Society
( JHS ) to see what they might know about the donut man . I was delighted to receive an email back from JHS ’ s historian , Linda Jones who informed me that the man who operated the donut stand was Bill Lower . However , what really should not have surprised me , was when Linda enlightened me that it was actually Bill ’ s wife , Ila Lower , who did all the baking ! Linda had one photo to share – a street view of the Lowers ’ stand , which Bill had built . It looked exactly as I remembered it in the 60s and 70s . Apparently , before they bought the big house in back of the donut stand , the Lowers lived in an upstairs apartment next to that house . Ila started making donuts in that apartment in the late 1940 ’ s . Linda graciously put me in touch with a friend of hers , Mr . Dean West , also on the board of the JHS . He had grown up next door to the Lowers .
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