Vermont

In 1772 Peter Olcott of Bolton, Connecticut, settled in Norwich on a south-running ridge between Bloody Brook and the Connecticut River. Olcott played an important role in shaping his town and the Republic of Vermont (1777–1791), holding town meetings in his house between 1774 and 1780 and serving as brigadier general of the Third Vermont Militia and on the governor's council. In 1789 and 1791, when as lieutenant governor he was at the peak of his influence, he hired local framers and carpenters to build a two-story, hipped-roof house, as well as a cow house and a hay barn.

The railroad station is the reason for the existence of South Royalton village. As the Vermont Central Railroad was being built along the White River Valley in 1848, mill owner Daniel Tarbell realized that the ideal location for a station was not in Royalton village farther upstream, but where the road from the mills in Tunbridge and Chelsea (VT 110) met the river. He purchased land, built freight and passenger depots (1849–1850), platted a village, and erected a number of its buildings.

The Block is one of the most striking commercial compositions to be found in a Vermont village. In the aftermath of a disastrous Main Street fire in 1886, South Royalton merchants hired Guernsey to create a building with a unified, continuous facade overlooking the village green. The Block contained twelve individual stores behind a cohesive elevation that is cast iron on the ground floor and Italianate brick on the upper floor (three stores at the Windsor Street end were lost to fire in 1968). Rather than producing a strictly uniform facade, Guernsey designed a theme and variations.

In 1790, Peter Fletcher purchased land on Parker Hill, just north of the Rockingham town line, and together with his son David built this substantial wood-frame, twin-chimney, Georgian-plan house facing Williams River Valley. Father and son shared the house, with Peter, his wife, Ruth, and two daughters occupying the west half while David and his wife lived in the eastern portion. Each had their own kitchen hearth and cellar stairs but shared a common central stair to chambers above.

This one-story, hipped-roof, one-room, wood-frame structure is one of the oldest district school buildings in Vermont, and one of the most stylish. Built for the Eureka district in northeastern Springfield, the 20

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Lewis R. Morris, nephew of General Lewis Morris of New York who signed the Declaration of Independence, served as an aide to generals Schuyler and Clinton during the Revolution. He moved to Springfield by 1785, where he established a farm on the banks of the Connecticut River and superintended extensive lands owned by his father, which he inherited by 1790. Morris was a member of the commission that negotiated Vermont's admission to the Union, a clerk for the Vermont legislature, and judge for the Windsor County Court through 1801.

Set into the side of a steep hill, atop a full brick basement, sits this two-story, wood-frame farmhouse. Unlike most others, it is devoid of ornament and has no formal entrance facing the road, only a utilitarian entrance in the corner of the basement story. It is plain because it was built in 1863 by the taxpayers of the Town of Springfield as the Town Poor Farm.

A bequest for a library from banker Henry Harrison Spafford brought high-style Renaissance Revival design to Springfield's Main Street. The original building had a typical Beaux-Arts scheme, a single principal floor with reading rooms across the front and stacks in a rear wing above an elevated basement. Constructed in brick with terra-cotta trim, slate roof, and iron crestings, it has a finely detailed facade with windows topped by triangular pediments on consoles.

The huge factory complex just north of downtown Springfield testifies to the village's status as one of Vermont's most important industrial centers and to the boom cycles brought to its industry by the twentieth century's major wars. Focused in a narrow valley adjacent to the Black River falls, Springfield village blossomed with the development of the machine-tool industry after 1888, when local entrepreneurs purchased and moved the Jones and Lamson Machine Company from Windsor and hired industrial designer James Hartness as its superintendent and then its president.