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By CHRISTOPHER GRAFF The Associated Press

Romaine Tenney watched through the summer of 1964 as the bulldozers and heavy trucks worked from sunrise to sunset carving out the path of an interstate highway. Mountains were blasted; valleys were bridged. Nothing stopped the army of workers as they marched mile after mile north from the Massachusetts border.

Tenney, 64, who farmed with horses, hayed with a pitchfork and refused to drive a car, had tried first to ignore and then to fight off the bulldozers.

But as they neared the Ascutney farm where Tenney had been born and Tenneys had lived since 1892, a sheriff showed up with a court order to empty the house and sheds. A crew of five worked until dark, pulling old tools and harnesses out of one of the sheds and piling them on a knoll a hundred yards away. Then they quit for the night.

A few hours later Howard Fitch was driving his babysitter home when he noticed a strange glow from Old Man Tenney's place. Fitch raced to the fire station and pulled the alarm, but it was too late.

Romaine Tenney had vowed, "I was born here and I'll die here."

He did.

Change was coming.

Frank Hutchins represented the town of Stannard in the Vermont House. His community, tucked up in the Northeast Kingdom, was small, with a population of just 113, but in this House his vote counted just as much as that of the representative from the city of Burlington with its population of 35,000.

It was the Vermont way. And had been since the state's beginning. One town-one vote, a system that lawmakers clung to year after year, despite repeated calls for a change to a more representative system. It was a system that put the power in the hands of the small towns: Representatives of 12 percent of the population controlled a majority vote in the 246-member House.

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