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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.

One of my favorite things is an old highway in Kansas that emerges from a reservoir that was created in the 1960s and then drops back into the water a short distance away. It's in an out-of-the-way location and we used to go sit on the pavement and drink beer when I was in high school.
Related article in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/where-the-roads-have-...
The linked 1841 Belgian atlas is surprisingly detailed http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=fd9c2c3...
I don't know how unusual Vermont is in this regard. Many of the states on the East Coast have old roadways on their maps. Southern New Jersey's Pine Barrens are a case in point, as is the Delaware Water Gap area in the state's Northwest.
My in-laws live in western Massachusetts and I always wondered why the name of their small residential street suddenly changes halfway down the road. The story is that there was an old county road that used to intersect that street years ago, and the law said that each segment of road intersected by a county road had to have a unique name. The road is long gone, but the impact remains.
I think the difference is this covers road not even actually built. Many states have abandoned roads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unused_highways_in_the...
Disclaimer: "ancient" = "surveyed in the 1790s"

Edit: For some reason, I was hoping for a catalog of American Indian trails. Otherwise, pretty interesting article.

If the term "ancient roads" actually appears in the historical documents related to this (not sure if it does or not), it could say more about Vermont's Francophone past than anything else. In French it would be appropriate to call these "ancient roads" (anciennes rues) in the sense that they're "old" or "former" roads, like how ancién regime just means "former regime."
Same! Reminds me of the old adage: "Americans need to learn a hundred years is not a long time just like Europeans need to learn a hundred miles is not a long distance."
I have family in Switzerland who, IIRC, are living in a ~700 year old farm house that doesn't qualify as historic because it's not old enough (too many other similarly old farm houses for it to be considered rare enough to protect).

Meanwhile, my parents considered an "historic" house in Ohio from around 1900.

Probably lucky it's not considered historic.

One man's quest to install a toilet leads to a bizarre world of archeology: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/world/europe/centuries-of-...

Does this farm house have electricity? Running water? A foundation?

How old is the oldest component? Is it like the Ship of Theseus?

Yeah, they're all a bit Ship of Theseus - giant wood beams, thick stone walls, but many generations worth of interior upgrades.
I once heard that while in the United States, 100 years is a long time, in Europe, 100 miles is a long distance.
Maybe you heard it in the comment I was replying to?
And in HN comments, a hundred milliseconds is a long time.
Ok, we'll s/ancient/old/.