There are some stories that need to be told no matter where they originate from.

Wilson Bentley was born and raised about four hours from Troy, in 1865, on a diary farm outside of Jericho, Vermont. He lived the life of a self educated New England farmer. He didn't attend school until he was 14, instead taught by his mother, a former school teacher.

Living in the rugged winter hills of Vermont, he developed a passion for studying snow flakes. With the use of a small microscope, loaned by his mother, it opened a new world of discovery.

Johannes Kepler published On the Six-Cornered Snowflake, in 1611, asking why snow crystals always exhibit a six-fold symmetry. It was Robert Hooke, using his microscope in 1665, that showed their complexity in the first drawings. Yet, it took a Vermont farmer to reveal their real beauty by taking their photographs.

At the age of 19, unimpressed with the difficulty in trying to draw snow flakes, Bentley developed the technique of photographing snow. He fitted his microscope with a bellows camera and became the first person to photograph a single snow flake on January 15, 1885.

He discovered that a single hexagonal shape can have many variations, after looking at some 5000 individual photographs. He wrote "What magic is there in the rule of six that compels the snowflake to conform so rigidly to its laws?" It was Bentley who coined the phrase that no two snowflakes are identical in a 1922 Popular Mechanics Magazine: "Every snowflake has an infinite beauty which is enhanced by knowledge that the investigator will, in all probability, never find another exactly like it."

His research showed that different types of storms produced different kinds of snowflakes and was pioneering in scope.

Then he turned his attention to the study of rain during the summer months. Meteorologists had been focusing on the study of rainfall to measure quantity and rates, but not their actual morphology.

From 1898 to 1904, Bentley made several hundred measurements of the size of raindrops from different storms, using a shallow pan of wheat flour to catch them, and published the results. He also succeeded in photographing their impressions on October 30, 1898. He demonstrated that the largest raindrops were about 1/4 inch and discussed different sizes found in different types of storms, promoting the idea that rain could be formed by melting snow, no snow, or a combination of both. This duality of origin has only been proven correct in 1976. Bentley was ahead of his time. His neighbors thought he was strange.

He wrote several articles in Monthly Weather Review, but also contributed popular articles in Country Life, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, and The New York Times Magazine. He wrote more than 60 publications between 1898 and 1931. He even gave lectures as far away as the Buffalo Museum of Science and the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

In 1924, he was awarded the first research grant given by the American Meteorological Society for his work.

However, many in the scientific community did not appear to contact him or even comment on his work, although most had slides of his snow flakes. After all, Bentley didn't have a college degree. He was just a farmer. One exception was Professor George H. Perkins of the University of Vermont, who bought some of his photographs and helped Bentley to write his first essay (A study of snow crystals. Appleton's Popular Science Monthly. 53-1 (May 1898), 75-82.)

Dr. William J. Humphreys, the chief physicist for the United States Weather Bureau, started a project to collect and preserve the best Bentley photomicrographs. In November 1931, McGraw Hill published Bentley's book "Snow Crystals." Humprheys wrote the introduction. The book contained over 2,000 of Bentley's best photomicrographs.

He was given the nickname "Snowflake" Bentley as a result of his beautiful photographs. Duncan Blanchard, who wrote a biography on Bentley, gives him the title "America's First Cloud Physicist." He is also called "The Raindrop Man."

Bentley died at home from pneumonia, two days before Christmas in 1931. A children's book based on his life, Snowflake Bentley, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, was the winner of the 1999 Caldecott Award. Bentley's original camera can be seen at the Snowflake Bentley Exhibit at the Old Red Mill in Jericho.

It still snows in Vermont.