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Plymouth first gave women the chance to vote on school issues.
    As the boy soon learned, the political life of Plymouth ran on its own annual cycle. Town officers were chosen at a March meeting, where the town also set the tax rates. There was also bonded debt to manage due to road construction and costs incurred during the Civil War and by the freshet of 1869, one of the many floods that plagued Vermont. Come September there was another meeting, a freemen’s meeting, where the town elected its delegates to the state government, as well as to Congress, and presidential electors. At an annual district meeting at the schoolhouse, villagers chose the school officers, such as Calvin’s father, and set the rate of the school tax. Everything happened on a small scale of pennies and dollars: collection of a snow tax, payment for care of an indigent. But the town felt itself the basis of all that was above it: the county authorities and state authorities in Montpelier.
    The records John Coolidge kept show the painstaking effort of town leaders to budget and manage a small amount of cash. The town paid Coolidge’s father $11.40 for superintending the schools; $1 to someone else, unnamed in a town report, for a day’s labor; 50 cents to someone else for a half day of work on a road in winter; $104 to a woman, May A. Sawyer, for keeping a poor or sick man, “C.J.,” for one year. That year the town also paid $1 for a pair of shoes for a child. In all, Plymouth’s expenses in that year were $3,182. One year the other men of the town wanted to raise a large amount of money with a new tax. John Coolidge abstained from voting, saying that “he did not wish to place so large a burden on those who were less able, and so was leaving them to make their own decision,” Coolidge later remembered.
    At the store too, the boy could observe the clockwork that was commerce. His father paid $40 a year rent for the store and turned over $10,000 a year in goods. That left room for fat profits. But John and Victoria would not charge high prices to their neighbors; that might turn away business. It was better to operate on narrow margins and hope to sustain volume and trust. John paid his blacksmith $1 a day to run the blacksmith shop. In the store he had to set prices and decide whether to haggle. In the end he took only $100 or so a month profit out of the store business. That was enough to pay for a maidservant around the house and some other expenses, but not enough to live richly. Many people who came to the store borrowed small sums to buy items on credit. Remarkably few did not pay the money back.
    The railroad that had come to so many Vermont towns chose yet again not to come to Plymouth in the 1870s and 1880s. John Coolidge rode a wagon to another town to catch the train to Boston for business; he rode the night train to avoid the cost of a hotel. Even the school Calvin attended betrayed the fragility of the Vermont economy. One year all three teachers who taught there wrote “No,” one in capitals, on a questionnaire asking “Is the school house in good condition?” The school year began in May and ended in February; the roads were too muddy and the sugaring was too demanding for pupils to take time to go to school in spring. Coolidge did well enough at his studies; he even pulled pranks, as his grandfather Calvin Galusha had in his time. He not only liked practical jokes but saw that others liked them.
    But more serious thoughts also ran through the boy’s head. His mother read the Romantics, and the style impressed the boy: “From scenes like these, old Scotia’s grandeur springs.” The town of Plymouth Notch was contemptuous of snobbery: when a maidservant needed a ride in the wagon, the children of the employer would give up their places and stay home. One of the things the Coolidges had fled when they had left Boston was the sanctimony of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. One of the Coolidge children, probably Calvin, penned a