Ripton, Vermont

Ripton is a town in Addison County, Vermont, United States. The population was 588 at the 2010 census. The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference is held annually in Ripton. Jessica Ravitz of CNN said that the town "is the kind of place where cell service fails more often than it works and the country store is really just that....Tibetan prayer flags wave outside a weather-worn home, and the fog lifts to reveal a white horse grazing in a field".

Geography

Ripton is located in east-central Addison County, in the Green Mountains of Vermont. The highest point in the town is the 3,835-foot (1,169 m) summit of Bread Loaf Mountain. The mountain lends its name to the community of Bread Loaf and to the writers' conference that is held there every summer. Although the approach to Middlebury Gap begins in Ripton, the Gap's height-of-land is in neighboring Hancock.

Ripton is bordered by the town of Middlebury to the west, Bristol and Lincoln to the north, Granville to the east, Hancock to the southeast, Goshen to the south, and Salisbury to the southwest.

Ripton (fictional town)

Ripton is a fictitious town in Massachusetts, United States. A professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst sought to demonstrate and protest the ignorance of the state bureaucracy in Boston of the rural portions of the commonwealth. To do so, he invented the town of Ripton. He then proceeded to apply for various grants and other official assistance, and the town was allotted funds in the state budget. Several checks were issued, and deposited in an escrow account, before the hoax was uncovered. The funds were returned and the matter dropped.

As a protest of the issue today, some signposts in the western portion of Massachusetts still contain "directions" to Ripton. Lawmakers in western Massachusetts continued to humorously reference the incident in proposed state budgets.

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