What's With the Name?
No, it's not a country music act or road directions
I have lived in Burlington, Vermont since leaving the Foreign Service. Burlington sits 41 miles, or 66 kilometers, south of the Canadian border, and it is a good perch for studying Canada, especially the French-speaking province of Quebec on which Vermont borders. Vermont and Canada have a long historic relationship. Vermont received its name from the first European to explore it, the French Samuel de Champlain, who extolled the “vert mont,” or green mountains. During the days of Vermont’s existence as an independent but unrecognized republic, from 1776 to 1791, it flirted with joining British North America before becoming the 14th state. And today (maybe a little less after the pandemic, as Jeffrey Ayres of Colchester’s St. Michael’s College has documented) Vermont has close economic relations with Canada, and especially Quebec. When the United States reopened its border to vaccinated Canadians earlier this month, French began to reappear on the streets of Burlington, as Montrealers returned to visit vacation properties and rekindle the tradition of cross-border shopping. The U.S. Trade Representative reports that Vermont was exporting $1.3 billion in goods to Canada, 43 percent of the state’s exports, before the pandemic began.
What does this have to do with “South of 45?” Isn’t it a country music act, or a highway reference? (In the United States, odd-numbered highways generally run north-south, so one couldn’t be south of a Route 45!) From the Lake of the Woods to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the 49th parallel North marks the Canada-United States border. But between Rooseveltown, New York and Stewartstown, New Hampshire, including the entirety of Vermont, the border sits on the 45th parallel, established by the Treaty of Paris of 1783 that ended the American Revolution. But Vermont history nerds call it the Collins-Valentine Line after the surveyors of the 1770s who first marked the border.
“South of the Collins-Valentine” doesn’t have much of a ring to it. So “South of 45” it is.
References:
https://cedar.wwu.edu/bpri_publications/127/
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/34556/18th-century-land-surveyors-valentine-and-collins