Overview
Ricker Basin climbs the hills above the Little River in Waterbury, Vermont — a nineteenth-century farm community of several dozen families who walled, cleared and worked thin mountain soil until the land itself refused: exhaustion, better prospects west and the catastrophic 1927 flood that ravaged the valley drove the last families out by the 1940s, and the CCC-built dam era passed the basin to what is now Little River State Park, whose History Hike threads the cellar holes, stone walls, orchard remnants, the Almeron Goodell farmhouse and the small Ricker cemetery where the community's generations lie. Trail telling is Vermont-quiet: lantern-like lights among the maples at dusk, woodsmoke with no source, footsteps on the old town road, and a figure near the cemetery — undocumented, gentle, the hill farms' long memory. The families were real and their graves are tended ground. Present Ricker Basin as hill-farm history walked — persistence, flood and leaving — its lantern lights the basin's soft remembering. Park and trail details from Vermont state park pages.