The Windham County Courthouse: Two Centuries on the Newfane Green
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 stood right here. It hasn’t. The building, and the village around it, came down off a hill to get here.
Windham County’s courts came to Newfane in 1787. In those years the town’s center sat up on Newfane Hill, and that is where the county’s court business was done.
By 1824, complaints about reaching the hilltop courthouse in winter had grown too loud to ignore. In 1825 the people of Newfane did something that sounds remarkable today: they moved their village down to the flat land below. Some buildings were taken apart and carried down the hill, others were moved and remodeled, and others were built new.
The flats offered better waterpower and more room for commerce.
The county built a new courthouse and a jail in the new village that same year, at a cost of $10,000 for the pair. It stood on land donated by Ephraim and Jonathan Park, and when it opened, the village was still called Fayetteville; the name Newfane came later. The 1825 courthouse looked very little like the building on the green today. It was a plain, box-like building in the Federal style.
Federal fan motifs over the windows and door gave it a little decoration.
In the early 1850s, Brattleboro challenged Newfane’s standing as Windham County’s shire town.
Newfane answered with a remodel in 1853. A porch with four tall Doric columns and a broad pediment went up on the east front, turning a plain Federal box into a Greek Revival temple.
The building was also extended two bays to the west, and the ceiling of the upper floor was raised.
In 1907 the courthouse was extended again at its west end with matching detail, giving it the shape you see today. More than two centuries after the move off the hill, it is still a working courthouse, and Newfane is still the shire town of Windham County.
I was driving home from photographing a sunset south of Newfane when I came through the village late at night and saw the green all lit up. A lone car passed maybe once every fifteen minutes. I wanted to frame the courthouse with the huge maples that line the green, so I set the camera on a tripod for a long exposure and, while the shutter was open, fired a flash up into the leaves. The flash is what pulled the canopy out of the dark in that bright green, while the long exposure let the lit facade and the deep blue sky come through.
The green will be far from empty this weekend. The Newfane Heritage Festival fills the common on Saturday and Sunday, October 10 and 11, from 10 AM to 4 PM, with more than 65 juried artists and craftspeople, food, and plenty of apple pie, all to benefit the Newfane Congregational Church. Volunteers have been putting it on since 1970, so be sure to check it out.
This late-night photograph of the Windham County Courthouse is on the Newfane Travel Design photo shirt, a piece of the Newfane green you can take home.
