Town Meeting Day — a stop on Vermont Route 100.
You have passed a dozen white town halls today, and on one day a year each of them does something that has very nearly died out everywhere else in the democratic world.
On the first Tuesday in March — Town Meeting Day, an actual state holiday — the town meets. Not elects representatives to meet. MEETS. Everybody who wants to comes to the hall, sits on folding chairs, and the town works through its business item by item: the school budget, the road grader, whether to buy a new pump for the fire truck, whether the town clerk's hours should change. People stand up and argue. Then they vote, often by raising a hand, in front of their neighbours.
It is direct democracy, unbroken, in continuous operation for two and a half centuries, and it is not a re-enactment. Real money and real decisions.
It is also, by all accounts, frequently tedious and occasionally vicious, because you are arguing about a hundred thousand dollars with a man you will see at the transfer station on Saturday. There is a strong tradition of a potluck lunch in the middle, which helps.
Vermont towns have used Town Meeting to vote on things far outside their remit too — nuclear disarmament, wars, constitutional amendments — largely because it is one of the few places where an ordinary person's vote is cast in a room rather than into a machine.
So those plain white buildings are not museums. Once a year, that is where Vermont actually happens.