The Making of a Million Dollar View - 104 Elm Street
About a half-block up from the intersection with School Street, have a look at the large cliff on the left-hand side. At the top is the spectacular lookout point for the city view I mentioned in the last tour, and that viewing spot was largely made possible by an event that took place here in 2005. It was a snowy Monday evening on the day after Christmas when one of the neighborhood’s residents heard what he thought was the snowplow going by. Except the plow kept getting louder, and closer. Turns out it was a massive rockslide. Full-sized trees and 30-ton boulders as big as cars came hurtling 60 feet down to spread across the street. It took out power lines and everything else in its path. Miraculously, it all came to a rumbling stop at the doorstep of the apartment building across the street, and no one was injured. Another miracle was that the slide did not extend to any of the homes that are rather precariously perched on the edge of Cliff Street above, which you can see if you peer up through the greenery to the left of the lookout point.
A Grid-Shaped Meadow - Corner of Elm and Spring Streets
Walking further up the street, at the intersection of Elm and Spring we’re entering an area once known as Hubbard Meadow after its owners, the Hubbard family. On a map, you can see it’s the only neighborhood in town with a neatly laid out grid pattern, and that’s because it was an early housing development mapped out by the family in the early 1800s. I have more to say about Mr. Hubbard in tour #3 when we talk about the public library.In 1899, John E. Hubbard bequeathed to the city a 125-acre parcel of land in the hills above the Meadow, to create a "preserve wilderness" as he phrased it, for future generations. This became Hubbard Park, and there is an access road to it at the end of Spring Street. The park is another of those destinations that is so easily missed by visitors, but so worth a visit. It’s a forested, 4-season recreation area with 7 miles of hiking and skiing trails, picnic shelters and Hubbard Park Tower, a stone observation tower that looks medieval but was built in 1915. The park is accessible from various points in the city. You can drive up to it via Spring Street, but if you’d like to get there with a fairly easy hike, there is a switchback trail behind the State House that leads directly up to Hubbard Park Tower.
Our Founding Family's Resting Place - 207 Elm Street
The cemetery at this location dates back to 1813 and is the oldest in the city. It was originally leased to the town by the honorable Jeduthun Loomis, an early upstanding citizen and Judge who agreed not to pasture cows and horses on the land but reserved the right to have a few calves and sheep roaming around. He is not buried here, but members of Montpelier’s founding family are. The grave of Colonel Jacob Davis is close to the street and fairly easy to pinpoint because of the American flags and the Revolutionary War medallion next to his tombstone. The engraving on the stone is faint, but he died in 1814 at the age of 72. His wife Rebecca lies next to him. An early historical narrative of Montpelier reports “…she was the never-failing friend of the needy and distressed, the judicious adviser of the young, and the universal object of the love and respect of all classes of the people of the settlement.”A lot of the slate tombstones are too worn to read, but the cemetery is well maintained and if you visit at the right time you’ll see a gorgeous line of blooming hydrangea bushes bordering the street.When you’re finished at the cemetery, continue up Elm Street, and about a block past Winter Street you’ll see a white, colonnaded house on the left-hand side of the street, which is our next stop.
Our Big, Fat, Greek Love Affair - 241 Elm Street
Apart from the State House and Court House, we haven’t seen too many examples of this type of Greek Revival architecture on our tours, but here is one, and you’ll see a few more like it on this tour. They conjure a Southern antebellum state of mind that makes you think Scarlet O’Hara might slip out the door and glide down the portico. Like most of the country, Montpelier had a mid-19th-century love affair with this style, which is characterized by the colonnaded portico and pedimented gable. They are known for having a symmetrical layout, but a particularly New England variation of this style places the front door off to the side as it is here. This house dates back to around 1850 and is thought to have been constructed by Alfred Wainwright, who owned the forerunner to Montpelier’s historic Lane Manufacturing Company, which we’ll hear more about in a few minutes.We’re going to keep going up Elm Street a bit farther and eventually turn right onto Vine Street, but before we do I invite you to pass by that intersection and walk on to Birchgrove Bakery.
A Butcher, Then a Baker - 279 Elm Street
We are honestly unrivaled when it comes to top-shelf bakeries in Montpelier, and this is another that should be on your pastry pilgrimage through the city. The shoebox-shaped building doesn’t look particularly historic but it dates back to at least the 1950s when it operated as Joe’s Market.As Montpelier continued to grow during the 20th century, an assortment of small, family-owned groceries set up shop in its expanding neighborhoods and residents were very loyal to their hyper-local markets and their very own meat butcher. Here in the Meadow, families shopped at the Meadow Mart, which is still in operation across the street, but they got their meat from Joe Canales here in this building, and other provisions as well.An earlier bakery briefly operated here, and on opening day the baker had her sister pitching in to hand out the macaroons. That was kind of exciting for us because her sister is a movie star: Sandra Bullock. The Bullocks moved on quickly, though. The current owners Jennifer and John have decades of professional culinary experience between them, and Birchgrove Baking has it all – breakfast pastries, tarts, cookies and cheesecakes. I will be good and wait here on the sidewalk while you indulge.From this point, if you continue up Elm Street, in about a mile you'll reach our spacious, oval-shaped municipal swimming pool and an adjacent Recreation Field where on evenings in June and July you can grab a seat in the grandstand and cheer on the Vermont Mountaineers, our hometown team in the New England Collegiate Baseball League. The complex was completed by the Works Progress Administration in 1939.
Vine Street Bridge: What IS a Samill, Anyway?!
I think of this part of town as one of Montpelier’s hidden gems. This pedestrian bridge crosses over a picturesque section of the North Branch called Waterman Falls, and it leads to a leafy green and shaded neighborhood that we are going to walk through next. This is the area where that Greek Revival homeowner, Alfred Wainwright, started his iron foundry. Before that, in the earliest days of Montpelier the boundlessly industrious Jacob Davis sited a mill near the waterfall.I don’t know about you, but whenever I thought of the term “sawmill” I always envisioned an old barn board building with a waterwheel next to a river. That’s not exactly wrong, but a sawmill is more accurately described as the actual machinery that’s inside it and used to…well, saw the wood. Tinkering with sawmill machinery was the particular genius of Dennis Lane, and I’ll tell you a bit about why that was so important. Cross over the bridge and turn right to begin strolling through the Lane Shops neighborhood.
The Birth of 2x4 Lumber - 3 Mechanic Street
Dennis Lane started out as a sawmill operator in Barre, but he was also an inventor, and a tinkerer. He kept adjusting and tweaking the machinery until he finally came up with a new technology he patented as the Lever Cut Circular Saw Mill. With that, he got out of the business of operating a sawmill and into the business of manufacturing them.Dennis went into business with Colonel Perley Pitkin, who you might remember from Tour #2 as the fire chief and principal hero in the battle to contain Montpelier’s 1875 fire. These two were later joined by local attorney John Brock, and they formed the Lane Manufacturing Company to build state-of-the-art sawmill machinery. They purchased the long brick building you see arranged to the right along the riverside, which had been the iron forge operated by Alfred Wainwright. Their headquarters office was on the site of this building on the left with the surrounding covered porch. The community building that’s here now was completed in 1980 but was constructed to imitate the features of the 1870 original.The business was a roaring success. The patented Lane technology was the first to provide lumber of a consistent thickness. It featured a mechanical method for propelling the log through the blade, and it quickly became the nationwide, and then global, standard. It might be fair to say that the two-by-fours found in every wood-framed house in the world were first made possible by Dennis Lane.Tragically, Lane died in 1888, just as the company was reaching the height of its success. He never knew that one of his circular sawmills was shipped four thousand miles up the Amazon River in Peru, or that others made their way to every corner of the globe, from Chile to Sweden to Alaska and all points in between. Under the stewardship of his partners, the business continued on and was picked up by a second generation, but with the Great Depression, it fell on hard times and never really recovered. The company closed in 1961 and the building remained deserted and increasingly derelict for many years.A Glorious RenaissanceDuring a brief spell in the 1970s, the second floor of the building across from the community building served as a dance club called Blackie Stone’s Industrial Revolution, and it was about as sketchy as it sounds. Also, in the 1970s, Dennis Lane’s great-grandson reopened part of the plant to manufacture replacement parts for the sawmills, some of which are still in operation to this day. That business succumbed to fire in the late 70s, and shortly after that, the entire complex underwent a glorious renaissance when it was developed into the residential area you see now.The riverside condominiums are in the original main machine shop of Lane Manufacturing. This is such a charming and obviously desirable neighborhood that you might think it’s a spot meant for people with lots of disposable income, but in fact, it is managed by the Montpelier Housing Authority, with apartments rented to senior citizens at subsidized rates.
The Old Hubbard Home - 14 Franklin Street:
At its apex, the Lane company had over 500 employees. It also comprised about 15 buildings in the Mechanic and Franklin Street area, so the atmosphere of the neighborhood was much more industrial at one time. It’s hard to imagine the belching smokestacks and clanging machinery now as you stroll down Franklin Street.As you continue heading toward Main Street, you’ll come to another rather magnificent-looking Greek Revival, including the full treatment of a Doric columned portico and a filigreed iron railing on two stories. This was the home of Roger Hubbard and his bachelor son John, who we hear more of in Tour #3. They didn’t live on Franklin Street, though. This house once sat on Main Street on a spot that we’ll pass in a few more minutes.
The City's First High School - Corner of Main and Franklin Streets:
Past the Hubbard house, you’ll come to Main Street Middle School as you near the end of Franklin. This started out in 1914 as the city’s first public high school. The current high school, built in 1956, is at the edge of town at the intersection of Memorial Drive and Bailey Avenue.Once you reach Main Street, we’ll be turning right to make our way back to the center of town, but if you just can’t get enough of our architectural treasures, you can make a quick detour about a hundred feet up to the school’s parking lot to look across the street at a building that represents one of our finest examples of the French Second Empire style, built around 1880.If you walk past to look at it from the side, it might remind you just a little bit of the Addams Family house. Moving back down Main Street, you’ll pass the intersection with Liberty Street, which I noted as an Off the Beaten Path recommendation in Tour #1. The Liberty/Loomis Street neighborhood offers more views of handsome and festively painted old homes.
Around We Go! - 156 Main Street Roundabout
So now we’re here at Keck Circle, installed in the year 1995. It is not just Montpelier’s first roundabout, but the first modern roundabout on a state road in the entire country! How about us, huh?! At first the traffic got backed up because we weren’t quite sure how a roundabout worked, so we acted like it was just a really big and circular 4-way intersection, but we eventually got the hang of it.On the north side of the circle is the Montpelier Health Center, which was originally built as a Masonic Temple. Before its construction, the house standing here was that Greek Revival of Roger Hubbard that we just saw on Franklin Street.We are going to cross at the crosswalk in front of the bridge and make our way past the candy-colored house on the other side, another example of the festive Queen Anne-style “Painted Lady” architecture mentioned in our first tour. Across from it is an apartment building operated by the Montpelier Housing Authority. Next to that is the privately operated Gary Residence. It was built in the 1940s with a gift from the estate of Dr. Clara Gary, who was the first woman in Vermont to enter the medical profession. It started as a senior residence for women but now includes male residents.You can continue down Main Street on either side of the street as I’ll be highlighting a few buildings on both sides. Our next stop will be in front of the Inn at Montpelier.
A Creditor, A Senator, and A Carpenter Walk into a Hotel... - 147-149 Main Street
The Inn at Montpelier is spread between two buildings, one made of yellow-painted brick on the left, and a white-painted wooden one on the right. The Federal-style white house is the older of the two. Built around 1807, it’s another of the few remaining wooden frame houses from the early days of Montpelier.A Finger in Too Many PiesThe first owners were Chester Houghton and his wife, Hetty. Chester was a feverishly active merchant in town. He had a general store, and a tavern, leased a distillery, was in the tin business, and then later invested heavily in a store, mill, and potash operation in Northfield. In short order, he became overextended and lost the house. His creditor briefly took possession before selling it to William Upham, a prominent lawyer who became a US Senator in 1842, one of only two Montpelier residents to hold the title. The other is Patrick Leahy, whose birthplace we saw in Tour #1.By the time Senator Upham died, his widow sold the house to the owner of the yellow brick home next door. This was none other than James R. Langdon, who we’ve encountered a few times on these tours. At the time, the grand covered porch had not yet been added. It had been the home for many years of Dr. Edward Lamb, a revered physician lauded for losing only 3 of the 70 patients he treated during a spotted fever outbreak, most of whom he neglected to bill. In fact, he neglected to bill so many of his patients that his house was mortgaged to James Langdon many times over several years and he ultimately took possession when Dr. Lamb died. The two houses remained in the Langdon family until the death of James’s daughter Lizzie in 1924. The brick house next became the property of Alton and Bertha Baird, and the lane running between the two homes became Baird Street, which is no longer a through street.The City’s Best-Dressed CarpentersBaird was a carpenter who established a thriving construction business that was involved in many large projects throughout the city up until the 1970s, including the development of the town’s first brick apartment building in 1930, which is still in operation today and can be seen in the background behind the inn.Baird’s crew of skilled carpenters assembled at the headquarters on Baird Street each morning, most in dress shirts and ties, over which they pulled coveralls before getting to work. My own grandfather, Nelson Paxman, was one of them. One of their more whimsical projects was the construction of an enormous wooden model of the State House in 1929. It served as a parade float during the dedication of the Crown Point Bridge over Lake Champlain when Vermont Governor John Weeks and New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt met in the middle to shake hands.The model State House went missing for a number of years in the 1980s, which is a story in itself that I won’t get into, but thanks to the tireless detective work of one Paul H. Guare, it was located, restored and once more proudly rides through the streets of Montpelier in every parade. At all other times, you can visit it at the Morse Farm and Sugar House, which is a few miles up Main Street in East Montpelier.
Montpelier's "Arms Dealer" - 146 Main Street
Across the street from the inn you’ll see a brick house in the Greek Revival style. It was once the home of the famed Colonel Perley Pitkin. Along with being the fire chief and key partner in the Lane Manufacturing Company, he also served as the Quartermaster General for the state and had charge of the State Arsenal, which was filled with $600,000 worth of armaments supplied by the federal government. How did Montpelier come to have all that firepower?It was given as compensation to the city in exchange for our agreement to allow the building of 25 hospital buildings in town to house Civil War soldiers suffering from injuries or disease. Both the Sloan Army Hospital and the arsenal were located on what is now College Street, up in the College Hall neighborhood. A few of the original hospital buildings still exist in the neighborhood, and one small building that made up the Arsenal complex is still there and goes by that name, although it is now privately owned. It is pictured here as the thumbnail image.Because the impressive inventory of gunpowder, grenades and general military weaponry was rather more than the little town of Montpelier required, Colonel Pitkin was tasked with making a few sales to foreign governments, which an early history reports “materially aided the State treasury.”This plot of land, along with those of the next several buildings down, made up the property that was once owned by the Watrous family back in the very early 1800s. One of its family members – Sarah Watrous – is credited with a woodcut drawing of the town which is considered the first rendered image of Montpelier. It was at the beginning of this book but included again here.
The Boy Physician - 144 State Street
Next to the Pitkin home is a lovely house built in what’s known as the Gothic Revival Classic Cottage style, and after that is another Greek Revival beauty. This was built sometime around the 1820s by James Spaulding, who was Montpelier’s chief surgeon. His son William followed in his father's footsteps, beginning his studies at the age of...7. He came along so quickly that he was known as the “boy physician”.We are nearing the intersection of Main and School Streets now, and as you walk further in that direction you’ll get a look at a few more examples of the variety and beauty of the city’s architecture, in particular two more gorgeous examples of the French Second Empire style. The one right next to the Unitarian Church belonged to James G. French, a wealthy merchant who built our first post office that is now located in Pitkin Court behind the fire station. He also built the largest city block on Main Street, which we’ll see in Tour #5.
Welcome Back to Tour 3! - Corner of Main and School Streets
Welcome Back to Tour #3It may seem like I’m skipping over the Trinity Methodist Church and the public library, but those two are covered in Tour #3. As you reach the intersection of School Street, we will also reach the end of this extended tour. You can peek around the corner and across the bridge to Elm Street where we started and see that our big looping walk is complete.If you stopped Tour #3 to follow this tour's extended loop, you can pick up where you left off, which is at Stop #3 where I tell you about the Unitarian Church we are in front of now. When you are finished with Elm Street loops big and small, I hope to see you again for Tour #5!
