Buildings of Vermont (Buildings of the United States)

Most picture Vermont with handsome barns overlooking rolling pastures, white country churches punctuating hillsides of blazing maples, and small villages clustered around gracious greens. While not inaccurate, this image does little justice to the architectural richness of a state that retains so significant a variety of building types, landscapes, and historic environments that it was declared a national historic treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Buildings of Vermont looks beyond the stereotypes to explain the remarkable range, quality, humanity, and persistence of a built landscape that has a compelling appeal to visitors and residents alike. This volume showcases Vermont’s rich stew of styles and types begun with traditions from colonial and early federal New England and New York and enriched over time by the contributions of immigrants from Scotland, English and French Canada, Ireland, Italy, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. It explores their dissemination up transportation routes. It showcases local materials (timber, limestone, marble, granite, early iron, brick, and slate) and technologies that range from log and braced frame through cobblestone and snecked ashlar to metal fabrication. It includes classic examples of vernacular types, functional structures, and pattern-book and mail-order designs, along with high-style statements from the likes of Ammi B. Young, Richard Upjohn, Henry Hobson Richardson, McKim, Mead and White, Jens Larsen, Peter Eisenman, and noteworthy regional and local architects and builders who have previously received little attention. Both conservative and trendsetting, the buildings range from some of America’s finest Federal and Greek Revival meetinghouses, early Gothic Revival churches, Victorian inns, Italianate and panel brick business rows, wood-framed general stores, robber-baron estates, and hippie houses, as well as early water-powered mills, large railroad and factory complexes with nearby workers’ housing, summer camps, roadside cabins, and ski resorts.

A volume in the Buildings of the United States series of the Society of Architectural Historians