Island Pond, Vermont is a tiny community of a couple hundred people up near the Canadian border.

Like a lot of small, rural, northern New England towns, things are rough there economically.

Income is around half the average for the rest of the state and

for years wages have been falling and people were moving away. But then, a few years back, people started to hear about something through the grapevine.

Yeah, right, you heard things, right?

Up in that part of the world,

Sweettree was kind of a big deal.

Sweettree, that's the name of the company that got this community buzzing.

There are two people talking here, but we've disguised their voices.

I couldn't get anyone to tell me this story unless the interview was anonymous.

At first this was confusing because no one was saying

anything particularly controversial. I have some theories about this but we'll come

back to them later. They were invited as part of a private tour of Sweet Tree's new facility.

And so you drive into the small Vermont Northeast Kingdom town and then you come upon what was formerly

Ethan Allen Furn manufacturing facility.

So it looks like a warehouse.

It's like gray corrugated metal sighting.

So the facility had a very, gleaming new stuff and it just felt very strange, like we're

walking into some creepy lab where you don't know what they're doing. I don't think that the

region had seen anything like this kind of investment going into such a state of

the art massive facility.

So what are they building?

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