You can drive right up to the Halpin Covered Bridge and still not know what it is standing over. The road runs through ordinary Addison County farmland, the brush grows thick on both sides, and the bridge looks like any other old wooden span on a dead-end lane. It is only when you are a […]
Stand on the Newfane green after dark and the Windham County Courthouse seems to glow on its own. Four white Doric columns hold up a wide pediment, a belfry rises above the roof, and the words WINDHAM COUNTY COURT HOUSE run across the front in plain capital letters. It looks as if it has always […]
On Howe Lane in Tunbridge, the Cilley Covered Bridge goes about its business the way it has since 1883. It is a modest thing, a single span of about 66 feet held up by a multiple kingpost truss, carrying a farm lane over the First Branch of the White River. In early autumn the hillside […]
Stand inside the Kingsley Covered Bridge in East Clarendon on a clear late afternoon and the walls come alive. The sun comes in low and directly from the side, and a crisscross web of heavy planks throws a pattern of light and shadow across the deck. It looks like decoration. It isn’t. Those crossed planks […]
At the rear of Maple Grove Cemetery in Bakersfield, right where Route 108 meets East Bakersfield Road, sits a small building with a job so specific it doesn’t exist anymore: storing the town’s horse-drawn hearse. It’s easy to drive past without a second look. It’s also one of the few buildings left in Vermont built […]
Every spring, my mother, my grandmother, my great-aunt, and I made the same trip to a small, unmarked cemetery tucked behind an old family home in Braintree, Vermont. There’s no gate and no sign, just a scattering of stones under the trees, and one very large rock at an elevated spot set apart from all […]
The Coolidge Homestead in Plymouth Notch has no electricity switch to flip and, in August of 1923, no working telephone either. That’s precisely why what happened here at 2:47 in the morning on August 3rd still gets told in Vermont classrooms a century later: a father, acting in his lawful capacity as a notary public, […]
I didn’t know, the first time I stood on the bank of the Browns River with a camera, that I was standing at the site of at least three different mills. Before the building I was photographing ever existed, Anson Field Sr. ran a cabinet shop and starch mill on this same spot, sometime before […]