Unless I'm misunderstanding, the old gentleman is looking for roads that no one uses and are unusable to add to an official Vermont map?

What is the practical aspect to this if the entire point of the Act was to clean up the legal landscape from unused roads?

The New Yorker article has more information about the Act that was passed.

>The act gave the towns until February of 2010 to identify and map any potential ancient roads within their borders; these would then be reviewed by the state and added to Vermont’s official highway map over the next five years. Any ancient road not added to the state map by July 1, 2015, would be considered discontinued.

(Re?)Discovered roads aren't automatically recognized but are reviewed after they're rediscovered from that quote. Who know how particular the process is and how many are being added to the book, but it's not automatically so it's more reasonable. Hope fully the process weeds out really bad roads like the one cited as starting the whole affair.

As for the people out there doing it. It seems like a pretty fun thing digging through old documents and discovering things about your community.

The subtext is somewhat, well, infuriating. Reading between the lines, it's almost impossible to build anything new in Vermont if your property is crossed by a road that hasn't been used as a road for a hundred years and can no longer even be seen without advanced imaging technology.

Maybe I spent too much time as a kid watching Star Trek and not enough time watching Little House on the Prairie, but this kind of misplaced reverence for the past seems downright silly, not to mention obstructive.

Some people in Vermont find that to be Working As Intended. Luckily if you want to build, there's a state next door that it's easier to do so in.

Yep, which is great if you knew about this policy when you were choosing where to live.

My suspicion is that most homeowners had/have no idea.

Reminds me of some other quotes from the past.

"There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States."—T.A.M. Craven, Federal Communications Commission commissioner (1961)

"Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, 'Probably never.'"—David Pogue, The New York Times, 2006

You have the right to use coarse language, but if you take advantage of that right in some businesses, they reserve the right to ask you to leave.

Same thing here, you have the right to pick your sexual orientation, but this law codifies the right of the business to say "we reserve the right to not serve you because it deeply offends us".

You might not agree with them but understand that for some folks and the deeply religious, this goes against their conscience and against their beliefs. This law is meant to allow them to say "NO".