More on the Giant Frog


In the last post, I shared a New York Herald article on a Giant Frog discovered in Forestdale, VT. Mind you, this account was published in a newspaper but hardly fit the category of news.  The Lazarus-like frog was unearthed 55 years before the article appeared in the Herald.  The source of the article was Frank Rogers, then of Forestdale.  Frank informed the Herald reporter that he was 15 years old as he personally watched miners uncover the frog, which soon revived. Why did the story itself hibernate for over five decades from 1865 to 1920 before Mr. Rogers and the New York Herald dug it up and revived it?



It was widely known, then as now, that glaciers once covered all of New England.  Ice covered the land in places to a depth of almost 2 miles.  People speculated; could this frog have gone to sleep in a pre-ice age swamp only to be buried, frozen, and roused from sleep in a post-glacial meadow surrounded by the miners who dug him up?  (I assume “him” is the correct pronoun, since females are the quieter frog gender.)  This wouldn’t be much more surprising than finding a whale skeleton in Vermont, which happened quite conclusively a dozen years earlier in 1849 while building a railroad line in Charlotte.


It is worth noting that in early New England, buried frog stories were not uncommon.  According to Joe Citro’s Weird New England, accounts of live frogs being uncovered far underground were recorded in 1822 in Bridgewater, and in 1786 and 1807 in Burlington.  Was Brandon’s frog just the latest, deepest, and largest of a number of unearthed amphibians? Giant frogs feature in a number of native American stories that predate the early colonist stories by thousands of years.  Was Frank Roger’s story an objective description of an actual event, or a hyperbolical tale rooted in a shared subconscious?  Like many aspects of the natural history of Brandon, we may never know the truth for sure.    


In future installments,we’ll take a look at how that whale got to Charlotte, how the ochre got to Brandon (spoiler alert, it started 1.3 billion years ago), and what is an ochre anyway.

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