What if the Flatlander has no home to return to?

I was reading this article about the humorous inability of the crazy Minutemen border patrol to even locate the Canadian/Vermont border, much less to patrol it, when I noticed a very curious term in the final sentence.

Even the Minutemen concede that their welcome hasn’t been perfectly warm. During their first patrol weekend, Buck said he found a note with a native Vermonter’s derogatory term for outsiders — indicating that someone thought they were already on the wrong side of a border.

“Flatlander, go home,” Buck said the note read.

Not having ever even been to Vermont, I have never been called a Flatlander (although after showing my vast gulf of ignorance regarding their state, I fully expect to have the epithet hurled at me vehemently should I ever visit. Of course, I turned to Google for an explanation, and here is what I found.

The term flatlander derives from ‘flatland’, which describes a geographical location as land that is predominantly flat. A flatlander would be a person who is from this type of a region.

To a Vermonter, the term flatlander takes on a whole new meaning. In the simplest terms, it means a person from outside the confines of Vermont. Often times, the actual geographical location of an outsider can be mountainous, but this weighs little on Vermont’s opinion. There is a gray area of where the flatlander boundaries exist, but to some die-hards, a flatlander is anyone not born in the state of Vermont. Others only consider the states south of Vermont that are located within New England. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island fall victim to the term by this definition, but it is unlike Vermonters to leave out New Jersey on their definition of flatlander. And for some, a flatlander is anyone with white plates on their car.

Flatlander is used as a negative slander on non-native Vermonters or visitors. In it’s basic concept, the term implies a person who visits the state or lives here that brings negative qualities from their home to our state. It is a person who is unfamiliar with traditional Vermont ways. Nathan Mansfield, a native Vermonter, defines the term as “Thinking they [a flatlander] can meld their beliefs of what Vermont is into our reality.” Unfortunately for the flatlander, even if they assimilate to Vermont culture and reside here for 50 years, they can never rid themselves of this label.