The obstacles in the way of conducting, business successfully, for want of a circulating medium, were such as to be beyond the comprehension of the present generation. There was a constant money pressure, equal to that of hydraulic power. There was neither money nor property enough in town to pay the taxes and leave a fair support behind. The rates were abated to a large extent every year. The old Continental money had depreciated so as to be almost worthless. At the close of the war it required $20 of this money to buy a dinner, and $1000 or more to buy a suit of clothes, while the condition of the poor discharged soldiers, who were paid off in the miserable shinplasters at their normal value was pitiful indeed.

Oliver Parker Sr., in 1777 "got his name up" for tavern-keeping, on the Isreal Jones (now Harrison) place. Soldiers from the east and southeast passed through the town on their way to take Burgoyne in such numbers that Landlord Parker had almost a captain’s company to dinner every day for a while, and they consumed four or five beeves per week. Every nook and cranny of the house was filled at night, the barrooms and other floors were piled thickly with weary soldiers, and even the barn and sheds were appropriated for their use. Hardship and fatigue made sleep sweet on the roughest couch. A large share of these customers would leave no pay for their entertainment, but the Parkers were too staunch Whigs to act penuriously toward the defenders of American liberty. Hotel keeping under these circumstances could not have been a very lucrative business, and the Continental or "card money" that was paid in had a sort of imaginary fluctuating value that might make a man the poorer the more he possessed of it. While Oliver Parker sustained the bodies of the soldiers with good fare, whether he made or lost by it, his brothers, Didimus and Ezra, with his nephew Giles, marched to Bennington and shared in the glory of winning that memorable victory. Didimus Parker was a Captain at Bennington.

At a town meeting held January 17, 1786, it was "voted" that it be recommended to the General Court to pass a law making both real and personal estate a tender.  "Voted"that it also be recommended to the General Court to strike a paper currency in this state."

The heavy burden of debt in which most of the towns were involved by their aid to the Revolution, the suspension of industrial enterprises and loss of profit therefrom by drawing off so many of the best men for the army, and especially the lack of a uniform circulating medium in which payments of all kinds could be made, maddened men into violent and lawless demonstrations. Shay’s rebellion was mainly kindled by the oppressive load of taxation and the impossibilities of casting of the load through the courts or Legislature. The state tax imposed on this town was felt to be peculiarly onerous. In one instance it was not paid under four years. At a town meeting held January 9, 1792, Israel Jones was chosen an "agent to go to the General Court and obtain an abatement of the tax laid on the inhabitants of the town in 1788."

Oliver Parker, Sr., was ruined pecuniarily, sent to jail and his bondsmen mulcted, because he could not perform impossibilities — collect the taxes in such hard times. Town meetings without number were held on the great question of "how to raise the wind." Farmers’ produce was accepted for taxes at a stipulated price, the town debts were paid in the same way in 1781, and all the highway taxes were worked out by men and oxen for many years. But even with a general system it was "hard sledding." A great many honest, industrious, frugal men were unable to feed their households and satisfy the tax gatherer from the produce of their stony, stumpy and rudely tilled acres.

At a town meeting held August 26, 1786, it was voted "that the present assessors of this town be a committee to settle with the collectors and make abatements of such taxes as they shall suppose necessary." October 30, 1786, the selectmen were appointed a committee for the same purpose; but at the same meeting it was voted "that the collector collect the town taxes and pay them to the town treasurer immediately, and the town will support him in so doing."

The pressure of poverty was so severe that the town’s poor were increasing with undue rapidity, and March 11, 1791, Ezra Parker was instructed by the selectmen "to warn and give notice unto twenty-eight persons," whose names were set down in the warrant, "the same being laborers or transient persons, as the case may be, who have lately come to this town for the purpose of abiding therein, not having obtained the town’s consent thereto, that he or she