The Capital Plaza's Ancestors - 100 State Street
“Montpelier House”Montpelier has some lovely inns and B&Bs, but the Capitol Plaza in its present and earlier design has been the only traditional, full-service hotel in the city for decades. The block it sits on has been the home of hotels for almost 200 years, and the way it’s changed over the years in some ways reflects how transportation itself evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries.There was a sprawling wood-framed place called Montpelier House on this site in the 1820s, and photographs on view in City Hall show an open archway in the middle that was tall and wide enough to drive a stagecoach through it.Which sounds romantic, right? Well it was a pretty miserable trip over bumpy, muddy roads, but it was the only way to get here until the railroad arrived in 1849. In the early 1880s two train depots stood at opposite ends of town. The tracks ran right behind the hotel, and when Montpelier later started a trolley car service, there were tracks running by the front door as well. The trolley line stretched from lower State Street to Main, then took a right and trundled along all the way to Barre, branching out to a few other neighborhoods along the way. The flood of 1927 that was so catastrophic to Montpelier wiped out the trolley, and it never really recovered, but by then Henry Ford was putting cars on the road by the million, so one way or another its fate was sealed.A Hotel for the Motor AgeThe Pavilion Hotel that we talked about in the first tour had flourished during the railroad days, but it floundered during the automobile age. While it was beginning a slow, long decline, over here on this block the new owners were seizing the moment. A no-frills rectangular brick building went up in 1932, the hotel was rechristened the Montpelier Tavern, and postcards from that time pointedly included a car parked right in front of the grand colonnaded entrance. As if that didn’t “drive” the point home, they changed the name again in the 1960s to the Tavern Motor Inn. They also opened a split-level lounge called the “Justin Morgan Room” after the famous Vermonter who established the Morgan horse breed. With its red leatherette furniture and horse-head décor, it was a real “Mad Men” style watering hole for the movers and shakers in town.
The City's First Buildings - 99 State Street
From this spot at 99 State Street, we have a view of some of the oldest buildings that formed the core of early Montpelier. This is where things began taking shape in the 1780s, when town founder Jacob Davis got busy with the lumberjacking. The brick building in front of you was built in 1816, and the wooden clapboard one to your right was built in 1810. To the left, set back from the street, you'll see another structure from the same era. It was built in 1825/6 by Silas French, a boot and shoe merchant. Old-timers sometimes still refer to this building as “The Thrush”, because it operated for many years as the Thrush Tavern, named after the Vermont State Bird. It was a place of low-lit nooks and crannies and another popular spot where many a legislative logjam was eased with the help of a few stiff drinks. In Tour #1 we talked a lot about buildings moving around and this is another one. It originally sat close to the street, in line with those next to it. It got moved back in the 1950s to make way for a Gulf gas station, which was torn down in 2019.
Capitol Theater's Art Deco Grandeur - 93 State Street
Here at 93 State Street is the Capitol Theater. Its fabulous Art Deco marquee is one of the most photographed buildings in town after the State House. It still has its original green-glazed brickwork and the marquee at night is illuminated in neon splendor. Its gala opening in 1939 featured the world premiere of “Rulers of the Sea” starring the young and very handsome Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
Federal Building - It Seemed a Good Idea at the Time - 87 State Street
This building stands on the site of an 1891 Romanesque Chateau-style post office constructed from granite and marble that was demolished in 1963. Many local history buffs consider it to be one of the greatest architectural crimes in the city’s history, and personally, I think they have a point. I challenge anyone to look at a photo of the original, gorgeous building that once stood there without a gasp of dismay.One interesting feature of the present building, though, which was dedicated in 1964, is the attractive stone facing of the building’s ground floor. It is often mistaken for marble, but in fact, it is a dark green stone called serpentine. It is pretty rare, so if you see this particular type of stone anywhere else, there’s a good chance it is Vermont Verde Antique, which comes from a quarry in Rochester, VT that’s been in operation for over 100 years. Another item of interest - this building is also the site of what might be the state’s longest anti-war protest. Sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, more commonly known as Quakers, it has been taking place every Friday at noon in every kind of weather for almost 20 years.
County Courthouse: A Murder and a Ghost Story - 65 State Street
The best vantage point for viewing the Montpelier County Courthouse is the pocket park of the Christ Episcopal Church across the street from it, which gets very active in the summertime. We’ll talk more about the church in a bit, but first have a look across the street at our courthouse.We talked about the earlier, Jeffersonian version of the State House that was destroyed by fire, and unfortunately, that was not an unusual occurrence in 19th century Montpelier. There aren’t many buildings from that era we can talk about without adding “and then it burned.”One example is this courthouse. The one you see now is the third one on this site. The first, made of brick, was built in 1843 and burned down practically before the paint was dry. It was replaced with another brick building, which also had a major fire in 1880, but that one left enough of the outside walls standing to rebuild it into the Greek Revival structure you see today.About that Ghost Story: Hell Hath No Fury…The courthouse has of course seen a lot of drama over the years, and one of the more sensational cases was an 1898 murder trial that provides the origin for two separate ghost stories. Mildred Brewster was the bored and restless daughter of a wealthy farmer from Huntington. She came to Montpelier looking for excitement when she was 21 and got more than she bargained for. She fell in love with Jack Wheeler, a handsome granite worker living in the same boarding house with her. The problem was that Jack had already fallen in love with a local girl named Anna, and he was entirely devoted to her.Or was he? He is said to have admitted being intimate with Mildred but then became engaged to Anna, and Mildred was having none of it. She bought a $3 revolver in Barre, spent a few hours in the fields above Montpelier practicing her aim, and the following day – a rainy Memorial Day – she invited Anna out for a walk on Seminary Hill, the site of the what until recently was the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Witnesses report seeing them walk out under the same umbrella toward Jack’s house, which was nearby on Sibley Avenue. A few minutes later, Mildred drew her gun, and fired a shot directly into Anna’s head, and another shot into her own. Mildred survived; Anna did not.The murder trial was an internationally reported sensation, and it was standing room only in this county courthouse a year later when Mildred was declared not guilty by reason of insanity. She spent the rest of her life at the Waterbury State Asylum for the Insane but is said to be spending her afterlife in the halls of the county courthouse. Staff over the years have reported sounds of glass shattering, items out of place, and voices in empty rooms.Meanwhile, up the hill in the former seminary building now known as College Hall, there have also been reports over many years of glass breaking, doors closing, and pictures falling off the walls in unison. They are attributed to the murdered Anna, who is said to be haunting the tower. The ghost is regarded with some fondness in Montpelier, such that when the College of Fine Arts was in residence at College Hall, they named their café after her.The street running next to the Courthouse is Elm Street and not too far past the courthouse is the site of Montpelier’s first log cabin settlement – this is where Jacob and Rebecca Davis and their sons lived when they first arrived and got busy clearing the wilderness. For future reference, the corner of Elm and State is the starting point for Tour #3 in this series, when we’ll talk more about that site.
Christ Episcopal Church: A Green Space for Everyone - 64 State Street
The courtyard/pocket park next to Christ Episcopal Church underwent a major renovation in recent years and has become a favorite gathering spot in the city. During August and September, there are noontime concerts here every Thursday, and during the other seasons throughout the year, the church often features noontime music inside in the sanctuary.The Gothic-style church was built from Vermont granite in 1868, and the parish house annex at the end of the courtyard was added later. Originally, the tower had a steeple on top of it, as pictured in this postcard photo, but between a major fire, and then the devastating flood of 1927, it became destabilized and was eventually removed in 1963. The lovely interior has a Gothic vaulted ceiling and rose window and is well worth a look if the church is open.There is a green space on the other side of the church as well. It’s called the Ralph Geer Memorial Garden. Since it’s designed to be a sacred, meditative space the gate is usually locked, but if the parish house office is open you can ask for permission to go inside.
The Bank Building and the Invisible Bridge - 41 State Street
At the intersection of Elm and State Streets on the corner opposite the Court House’s opposite is a late 19th century building. It replaced an earlier wooden structure built in 1861 that served as the city's post office. Where did it go? Down the street and around the corner. You can see for yourself where it shuffled off to because it is still coyly hiding away in Pitkin Court behind the fire station on Main Street. It was built by James G. French, a successful Montpelier clothing merchant. He also served as postmaster and got into construction in a big way in the latter half of the 19th century. You’ll hear his name a few more times on these tours.Another James you’ll be hearing about is James R. Langdon, also a very important figure in the commercial life of Montpelier in the late 19th century. He put up the current building in 1874, and it originally had a flat roof. The decorative mansard roof and round dormers seen now were added about 20 years later. Along with the post office, the main tenant was a bank that remained there under different names for well over a hundred years. The place is still often called the Chittenden Bank Building because nobody gave it a different name. The bank’s vault has been creatively incorporated into the interior atmosphere for several businesses that moved in when the bank finally left.Rialto on the North BranchWalking past it, you’ll come next to the Rialto Bridge. It was built in 1915 and is probably the most unusual of its kind in Vermont because most of it is invisible. It’s made of steel I-beams encased in concrete and has a width of 70 feet, the longest span of its kind in the state. It takes its name from the structure built on top of it. If you turn and look across the street you’ll see the Rialto Block, with its name over the doorway.The best perspective on this unusual bridge is from the truss-style steel bridge you can see upriver on Langdon Street (which, yes, is named after James Langdon, or more accurately, he named the street after himself when he created it). From there, you can watch the waters of the North Branch disappear under the Rialto – both bridge and building - and stream out the other side.On the Rialto bridge, as you are facing the river, you’ll see a sign on the side of the Chittenden Bank building to the left. It is offering to sell the air rights over the river to build a deck connecting one building to the other, and there’s a story behind that.The sign was posted by Jeff Jacobs, a famous and controversial figure in Montpelier’s real estate community for several decades. In 1996 he filed a permit to put a McDonald’s in the bank building, which he owned. The idea did not go over well. The permit was rejected by the City Council, not least for the fact that it would have required installing a 3-story fryer vent on the side of the historic structure. There were lawsuits and appeals, all unsuccessful, and at some point in all the drama this sign appeared. Whether Jacobs actually owns the airspace, or whether it could legally be sold or leased for development, remains an unsettled question, and to most of us it seems best that it remain so.
Lets Talk About Blocks - 24-26 State Street
We’re now moving into the main commercial area of the city and we need to start thinking in terms of blocks. It is the large brick blocks of buildings that were built in the late 19th and early 20th century that give Montpelier its overall air of coherence and character. The blocks are sometimes hard to distinguish when you are browsing among the shops and restaurants along the street, but if you look up to the roof lines you’ll get a better idea of where one stops and another begins. The largest on State street is the Union Block, which has an impressive arched granite doorway topped with a decorative iron railing. It's between 24 and 26 State Street.A Renewed Interest in PreservationOn the opposite side of the street if you look up you’ll see a rooftop pediment identifying the Walton Block. I mentioned earlier that the 60s marked a period when demolition replaced the earlier fashion of moving buildings from one place to another, but the 1967 renovation of the Walton Block was the first to reflect a renewed commitment to historic preservation in the city. All the stamped sheet metal ornamentation on the façade was retained, as well as the 8 columns running along the ground floor, which are made of cast iron.Fires and More Fires!There’s a story to how some of these long city blocks were created, and it’s another one that starts with fire – two of them this time. The first was in March 1875. It took down several buildings on Main and State streets, including the original Rialto block we passed earlier. The second and more catastrophic fire was only two months later. Fanned by strong winds, it raged along both sides of Main Street and burned many buildings at the lower end of Barre Street as well. Miraculously, there were no lives lost in either fire.Our fire chief at the time was a Civil War veteran with the fabulous name of Colonel Perley Pitkin. He had a team of men that he assigned to lead efforts to contain the fire at various points along the street. Many were fellow Civil War veterans and also ministers of the various churches in Montpelier. They are credited with preventing an even wider disaster, using nothing more protective than wet carpets to wrap themselves in while they beat back the flames. By the end of it, such was the destruction that a citizen could stand on the Rialto bridge and have an unobstructed view across town to the area on Barre Street where Sarducci’s restaurant is now.The rebuilding began immediately, and this time the merchants and architects of Montpelier went in for solid, flat-topped brick structures over the more flammable wooden ones with gables and pitched roofs. Most of the large blocks along Main Street were constructed during this period.Montpelier Gets a Water SystemAnother direct result of these fires was the installation of the city’s main water system, including hydrant hook-ups. Berlin Pond, a few miles from the city center was identified as the most suitable source. The engineer for the project was a man named Joel Foster, and his publicly-funded memorial can be seen in Green Mount Cemetery today, which is at the lower end of State Street. It is a full-size granite likeness of the man, with a bowler hat in one hand, and his other resting on top of a fire hydrant.
State and Main: Crossroads of the Capital
We’ve arrived now at the center of town. For this section of the tour, you can stand where the granite-columned TD Bank building wraps itself around the corner, or grab a seat on one of the benches on its State Street side.We Love a ParadeWe are at the spot where State Street intersects with Main, and where all our parades eventually show up. We have a lot of parades in Montpelier. In Tour #1 I described the epic Dewey Day parade in 1898, and our equally epic reenactment of it 100 years later. Our Independence Day parades and fireworks draw people from all over the state, which is why we always have it a day or two earlier, so as to not pull all the Fourth of July cheer out of towns smaller than ours. On the first Sunday in May there’s an All Species Day parade. It’s an event with lots of colorful costumes, animals, puppets, music and pageantry, all meant to celebrate the diversity of life and the (entirely theoretical) arrival of spring.Looking across at East State Street, on the right side you’ll see the 1840s Federal style building that is also featured in the sledding photo included here. In the street next to it there once stood a five-story brick structure called the Arch Building, because of the drive-through arch placed in the middle of it. If you can’t quite imagine a building sitting in the middle of a street, it’s featured in an old photo you can see inside City Hall that shows this part of State Street in the mid-1800s.Then, on the second Saturday in June we are one of about 70 cities that joins in the World Naked Bike Ride, which is exactly what it sounds like. An entirely different sort of ride happens on the second Saturday in August, when the United Motorcyclists of Vermont stage an annual Toy Run for Shriners Hospital. Several hundred motorcycles coast through the city carrying stuffed animals and other toys, and all are dropped off on the State House lawn.There was even once a circus parade in Montpelier. In the late 1800s, PT Barnum’s organization paraded its elaborate wagons and a herd of elephants through town. The much-anticipated star of that show was an enormous, whiskey-drinking elephant named Jumbo, and by all accounts at the time, he lived up to the hype.
A Bourbon in the Rubble - State and Main Southeast Corner
The complex on the opposite side of East State Street is called City Center and it’s easy to tell it’s the newest of all the downtown buildings. The previous, late-19th century building on that corner had businesses ranging from dry goods to furniture and upholstery, undertaking services and a beloved clothing shop called The Children’s Store that old-timers still mourn the loss of. In the winter of 1980 that building, which now also housed an outlet of the state liquor store, was entirely gutted by fire in the middle of the night. I still remember that night myself.I also remember my history-loving father venturing into the rubble to retrieve a cultural artifact for posterity. That bottle of Ten High bourbon is still lurking somewhere inside my family home. And still unopened!
The Sledding Hill - State and Main Southeast Corner
At this intersection, State Street takes a little jog to the left and continues as East State Street all the way uphill to the College Hall area I talked about earlier. The East State Street hill was popular for sledding in the winter.On the south side of East State Street is an 1840s Federal-style building that you can also see in the sledding photo. The space has served as various types of eatery under various owners and names since 1937, and its big front window is said to provide the best view in town. In the street next to it there once stood a five-story brick structure called the Arch Building, because of the drive-through arch placed in the middle of it. If you can’t quite imagine a building sitting in the middle of a street, it’s featured in an old photo you can see inside City Hall that shows this part of State Street in the mid-1800s.
Blanchard Block: The Secret in the Middle
Along the south side of Main Street is one more historical block to talk about - the Blanchard Block. As the name on its top pediment suggests, it was the ambitious project of a man named Asa Blanchard. He owned a tannery in Vergennes before moving to Montpelier to become a real estate magnate. To make room for his building, he tore down the oldest place in Montpelier, the Cadwell House. Built around 1790, it had badly deteriorated, but in its heyday had been a fashionable rooming house and center of city life. There’s a plaque on the corner of the Blanchard building noting that the Cadwell House once accommodated U.S. President James Monroe, as well as the Marquis de Lafayette, America’s greatest French ally in the Revolutionary War.The Blanchard building is similar to many such blocks that can still be found in historic districts of small cities around the country, but this one had a secret that most others did not. You get some hint of it from the stately arched main entrance with the wide windows above it. While much of the building was dedicated to merchant and office space, in the rear of the top floors of his building, Asa Blanchard created an opera house, and not a small one. It was an opera house big enough to seat 800 people. For 25 years it attracted some of the country’s top performers because it was conveniently located on the route between Boston and Montreal for traveling theater troupes. Audience members arrived from all over the state by train, and specially scheduled trolley cars were engaged at the end of each performance to carry Barre residents home again. The novel attraction of moving pictures eventually wore down the demand for live theater. The opera house staged its last performance in 1910. Unfortunately there is practically no remaining evidence of it inside now.For a while in the early 20th century, an elite local organization called the Apollo Club made its home in the Blanchard Block, with several well-appointed rooms housing a library and pool room.The slightly different style of building you see at the end of the block was added later to serve as a hall for the Grand Army of the Republic, which was a fraternal organization for Union veterans of the American Civil War.
It Was Right There All Along - State and Main Northwest Corner
On the Northwest corner of the intersection is a red-painted Federal-style building which happens to be the oldest merchant building still standing in Montpelier. It escaped the great fire of 1875 largely because it was one of the only things made of brick on Main Street at that time. If we could return to the 1970s – not that we’d want to – we would not be looking at this gorgeously preserved example of early Federal-style architecture. Instead, we’d see an unremarkable structure covered in aluminum siding, with walls of plate glass windows wrapped around the ground floor and surrounded by sheets of some type of dark Formica material. It was the site of another popular clothing store called the Vogue Shop. Those of us who didn’t know any better thought nothing of its appearance at the time, but in the 1980s it was gloriously restored to its original 1826 appearance. Looking now at the beautiful brick façade and ground-floor bay windows, it’s hard to believe anyone ever had the nerve to cover it up.That brings us to the end of Tour #2 in this series. I know I’m leaving you in the middle of the street, so if you are intending to keep walking along Main Street toward the Winooski River, you might want to skip on to Tour #5, which starts at Charlie-O’s World Famous a steps past this point on Main street. It’s a tour that starts at a bar and ends at another one. What’s better than that, right?! Hope to see you there!
