incident, keeping traffic moving, and managing the swelling crowd of on-lookers. A parade of cars parked alongside Route 15 and people of all ages stood around George Houghton’ s property watching the unfolding scene. The 1960 Census placed Wolcott’ s population at 633. There were almost certainly that many people gawking at the elephants that afternoon.
The truck was a complete loss and soon hauled away by a wrecker. The elephants, named Happy, Sally, and Queen, had a longer stay in Lamoille County.
The safety of the animals was the priority of their trio of handlers: an animal trainer from Orlando, Florida named Bert Petteus; a driver, also from Orlando, named Jim Dowell; and Bill Jenkins, an animal trainer from Bean Station, Tennessee. The trainers looked over the elephants for injuries. They said the elephants suffered minor bruising but were largely unhurt. At the behest of the elephants’ trainers, onlookers handed over loose tobacco and cigarettes for the animals to eat, which apparently calmed their nerves.
“ There was some concern that they had been hurt but they didn’ t seem to be,” said Hill, who was 20 at the time. He drove over to see the elephants once word got to Hardwick, which didn’ t take long.
Hill was a friend of Keith’ s and did police ride alongs with the Hardwick-based officer from time to time. He describes Keith as a big and powerful man who could take charge of a scene like the one he faced that afternoon.
“ They let the elephants out of the truck, and they wandered around in the field. We weren’ t able to get too close to them. Not that I really wanted to. We didn’ t see many elephants around in those days,” Hill said with a laugh.
To minimize the traffic hazard, Keith and the handlers moved the animals to a field further from the roadway. A parade of onlookers, many of them children, followed behind.
While they moved to a more remote field, the elephants basked in an afternoon rain shower, flapping their ears and trumpeting for the crowd.
“ I was in fifth grade and I escaped from school. I went over and saw the elephants and went back to school and got disciplined,” Bruce Wheeler, a lifelong Wolcott resident and present-day town historian, recalls.
Once settled in for the night, local farmers brought in mounds of hay for the elephants to eat as well as some more tobacco.
“ The life of the weekly newspaper publisher is never dull,” intoned an unnamed editor for the Hardwick Gazette, who described the blow-by-blow of the afternoon in the Thursday, May 18, 1961, edition of the Caledonia County-based newspaper.
“ That evening the field resembled the circus grounds. Cars were parked bumper to bumper from the turn off back to Wolcott village. Children and adults were waiting in line to see and feed the animals,” wrote the editor of the Hardwick Gazette.
“ It was big excitement for a little town,” Hill said.
The animals’ handlers were concerned that cold temperatures could harm the animals. Fortunately, it turned out to be a mild spring evening in Wolcott.
As these events transpired in Lamoille County, a slightly shorter trailer truck operated by Strates Shows raced from Binghamton, New York to pick up Happy, Sally, and Queen. After a pleasant night in Wolcott, the elephants were loaded onto the truck the next morning and carried on to Lewiston.
News of the elephants’ detour in Lamoille County spread far beyond Wolcott and Hardwick. Both the Associated Press( AP) and United Press International( UPI) reported on the story. More than 500 newspapers across the United States carried either the AP or UPI accounts of the incident.
The events in Wolcott inspired Raymond A. Cleveland of Morrisville to write a letter to the editor of the Burlington Free Press. Cleveland called on the state legislature to heighten the state’ s low-hanging underpasses, such as the one in Wolcott.“ Being a Republican state, it seems we should have underpasses big enough for elephants to pass through,” Cleveland
quipped. Eventually, the underpass would be replaced with a new bridge that went over the Lamoille River during the early 1980s. The St. Johnsbury and Lake Champlain Railroad would evolve into the Lamoille Valley Railroad and survive until the 1990s.
That memorable May afternoon wasn’ t the last time that year that elephants appeared in that neck of the woods. In August, the Hardwick Kiwanis sponsored an appearance by the King Brothers Circus which featured a trio of elephants who were presumably unaware that their fellow proboscideans had spent some time in Wolcott. n
From top to bottom: the Strates truck stuck under the Wolcott overpass; the Wolcott elephants on George Houghton’ s property; and the damaged Strates Shows truck
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