Skip ahead a few years. Its the post war era.

The stone industry contracted and VT heavily resisted infrastructure upgrades to allow other industry to fill the vacuum (Interstate 92 anyone?). Skip ahead a few decades and we have a brain-drain problem since anyone with a skillset leaves to regions that offer jobs in the skillset. You can't open a business without importing your own employees since none of the locals have the skillsets to be employed and you're stuck in a death spiral of strip malls and dollar stores that looks more like the midwest than new england. Burlington only survives because it has the captive-college thing the Boston has going on but like Boston, the cost of living is going to drive grads out but with a smaller population, it will be less fault-tolerant. The church street derelicts are just the beginning.