Once railroads connected Newport village with the outside world between 1863 and 1873, it rapidly became a bustling port for timber and trade with the Canadian townships surrounding Lake Memphremagog. A successful business class developed along Main Street. In 1875 Jerry E. Dickerman, an attorney and customs assessor, purchased a Main Street lot that overlooked the lake and erected this wood-frame, two-story, mansard-roofed house. With two-story bay windows flanking a central pavilion capped by a bellcast wall dormer, the house followed local Italianate and Second Empire models for the houses of prominent individuals. A century and a quarter of redevelopment has erased most of its domestic and commercial contemporaries, but the Dickerman House indicates the original deep setback for houses on Main Street and represents the economic prosperity that made Newport into the county shire in 1886.