Triangle Park The corner cut off from the rest of the Green by the railroad was embellished in 1908 by Joseph Battell and the Century Club with a three-tiered cast iron fountain carried by figures of cranes. Increasingly unpopular because its wind-driven spray would dampen the interiors of open cars parked around it, the fountain was dismantled by the town in 1938 and sold for scrap. Another fountain was placed in the park by the Middlebury Garden Club at the time of the national bicentennial. The fountain urn (from the same foudry and patterns as the larger original fountain) was discovered in the gardens of Battell's niece, Mrs. Jessica Swift and acquired from her estate. National Bank of Middlebury The only building after 1891 north of the bridge to ignore completely the theme set by Battell was the National Bank. Designed by Burlington architect F. L. Austin in 1910, this is a structure in an altogether different tradition. Although Middlebury's bank had been housed in its conservative brick townhouse next to the inn, nationally there had been a long-standing association of banks with classical, temple-like architecture, dating back to the early days of the Republic (when Benjamin Latrobe used the style for the Bank of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1799). Then, by 1910 there way a new force afoot, the City Beautiful movement. This had grown out of the highly theatrical classicism of the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Excited by the fair's display of grand formal architectural and landscape composition, towns across the country began adopting the classical style for their public buildings. The movement was a big topic in the Middlebury Register in 1910. Thus, when the bank determined to build a new home on a prominent site across from the Green, both associations and current fashion suggested a temple. About as monumental as a small one-story structure could be, the bank was set back from the sidewalk to create a landscaped space before it, leading to its column-supported pedimental entrance. It combines stone details with the then very current buff Roman brick (a particular favorite of the Midwestern Prairie School of architecture at that time). In recent years the lateral wings have been added and the original oak and muralled interior somewhat altered. Walking along the west side of Main Street, one passes a number of significant sites from Middlebury's past. 34 — 42 Main Street The site of David Page's cotton mill, built in 1811. Of limestone and marble, this building was three stories high on Main Street and six toward the creek. Here in 1817 Joseph Gordon assembled twenty power looms from plans he had brought with him from Scotland and which he claimed to be the second set of power looms ever built in the country (after six built the previous year in Rhode Island). In 1850 there were one hundred looms in the mill, with a daily capacity to produce 1600 yards of heavy sheeting and up to 800 pounds of yarn. In 1854 the mill burned and was refurbished as a flour mill. After the fire of 1891, Joseph Battell, who built the present structure on the site, bought the mill ruins and used the stone for the foundations of the Battell Block. The lowest level of the old cotton mill was renovated in 1898 as the power house for the Brandon Italian Marble Company's new mills. 44 Main Street Site of Gamaliel Painter's grist mill, sold in 1807 to Lavius Fillmore and David Page, who replaced it with a stone structure in 1808. Here Fillmore designed an ingenious, rock-cut inlet, outlet, and flume system below water level and free from the worries of ice or flood. Portions of the system undoubtedly remain in the ruins on the creek bank behind the present building. The mill, which had five sets of grindstones and a capacity to process 80,000 bushels of grain a year, burned in 1854. 48 – 50 Main Street Site of Jabez Rogers' store, built in 1790. The first store in Addison County. Middlebury Falls From the west side of the Main Street Bridge one can get an impressive view of Middlebury Falls and the eddy down below (across from what is known as Frog Hollow). An even better view of the falls and remnants of the many penstocks which carried water to the mills can be gained by turning down Mill Street (or Frog Hollow Road) and looking out from the lane between the back of the Main Street stores and the Craft Center or by proceeding further downstream to the new Marble Works footbridge. Mill Street (Frog Hollow Road) Turning down Mill Street, one enters the once vital world of Middlebury manufacturing. The area at one time was crowded with industrial buildings of all sorts and range of permanence, from workers' tenements and flimsy drying sheds to solid stone structures; however, it experienced almost as many fires, rebuildings, and remodelings as did Main Street. The few structures that still remain invoke the town's industrial past. This is the area claimed by Daniel Foot in competition with Gamaliel Painter and the site of Foot's saw and grist mills of 1784 (located approximately where the stone mill building now stands). Foot eventually divided his property between his sons Appleton and Stillman. Both brothers operated saw and grist mills, in time selling them and their land to the men who really developed this side of Middlebury Village. Craft Center On the site of Stillman Foot's sawmill, which burned in 1831, this frame building was constructed in 1870 as paper mill. Since then it has burned and been rebuilt six times. In the 1880s and 90s it housed Smith and Allen's woodworking shop, where were produced many of the Victorian architectural details to be found in this region. Subsequently, from about 1900 it was the woodworking mill of Rogers and Wells until its renovation in 1971 as the Frog Hollow Craft Center, a privately sponsored educational and marketing center for a wide range of arts and crafts. In 1975, it was named Vermont State Center for the Crafts, the first state craft center in the country. Old Stone Mill On the approximate site of Daniel Foot's first mill. Here Stillman Foot built a grist mill, which was purchased in 1801 by John Warren and converted about 1813 into a cotton factory with the addition of a large stone structure. A description of 1821 proves the latter to have been virtually identical to the present building. Under Warren it housed 600 spindles and eight looms. Adjacent to the mill on the south was a frame tenement for the workers. Damaged by fire and weak foundations in 1825 and 1836, the stone building was reconstructed about 1840 in its present form by the Middlebury Manufacturing Company for the production of woolens. The conversion from cotton to wool was in reaction to local circumstances. Merino sheep had been imported into Addison County from Spain early in the century and proved to do very well in Vermont's rocky pastures. By 1840 the County had more sheep per acre and was producing more wool than any other in the country. It followed quite logically, then, that this wool should be turned into finished goods in Middlebury. Unfortunately the farmers of Addison County began to concentrate on raising and selling breeding stock, helping to develop the great western herds that eventually put them out of business. By 1890 wool had been displaced as an industry by electricity in the old mill, as the Middlebury Electric Company used the power of the falls to generate the current that enabled converting the village from kerosene to electric street lights. Along with its multiple uses, the mill has suffered from a number of fires since its 1840 rebuilding, but it is still essentially intact. At the time of the national bientennial, it was restored and adapted for commercial use. Star Grist Mill Another adaptive reuse of a building from Middlebury's industrial past can be found across the street from the Old Stone Mill. It was built in 1837 as a woolen mill for Moses Leonard, with great stone foundations set against the steep side of the Hollow and a two-story frame structure above. It was damaged by fire in 1875 and rebuilt as the Star Grist Mill using the original timbers. Water from a branch of the huge penstock serving the Old Stone Mill turned turbines in the basement (still operative in the 1930s) and then was discharged into the Hollow. Frog Hollow Farther into the Hollow were to be found other industries significant to Middlebury's livelihood. Here, beginning in 1794, could be found forges and gun smithies. In 1796 Ebenezer Markham opened the first nail factory in Vermont. In Jonathan Nichols' shop in 1799 – 1800 was discovered a subsequently patented (1802) and widely-used process for welding cast steel. In Benjamin Lawrence's shop between 1821 – 1825, John Deere served his apprenticeship before moving westward to Illinois. An archaeological dig in the spring and summer of 1975 located the foundations of Lawrence's shop and turned up many interesting tools and artifacts from the site (now in the Sheldon Museum). It was in the Hollow, too, that Vermont's marble industry was born. In 1802 Eben Judd (with the apparent collaboration of the then ten-year-old Isaac Markham) developed a machine for the sawing of marble. Judd built a small test operation that year in the Hollow adjacent to a ready supply of marble. In 1806 the mill was expanded to hold sixty of the soft iron saws, and in 1808 it was made still larger. Much of the marble used was quarried in the Hollow and from the bed of the creek above the falls, though other varieties were brought from neighboring towns (especially Shoreham). Between 1808 and 1837, Judd's mill sawed between five and ten thousand feet of marble slab a year, which was then turned into tombstones, carrier's tables, jambs, mantlepieces, hearths, window and door caps and sills, sideboards, tables, sinks, etc. and shipped to markets from Quebec to Georgia. In 1810 Dr. Timothy Dwight of Yale wrote of the marble works: "A quarry of marble has been discovered in the bank of the river just below the bridge, a continuation of the ledge which forms the falls. It is both white and dove-colored, elegantly variegated, and of finer texture than any other, which has been wrought hitherto in the United States. It is sawn, ground and polished by water machinery, and is cut and curved with an elegance not surpassed on this side of the Atlantic." The operation essentially halted in 1837 with the deaths of both Judd and his son-in-law and partner Lebbeus Harris. The marble deposit at the falls, riddled with fractures and weak layers, was originally considered economically attractive because it could be easiliiy quarried by primitive hand tools. With the later development of steam-powered quarrying machinery, other sides with sounder deposits became popular and quarrying at the falls was never resumed. In 1851 N.H. Hand opened a wooden pail factory in the Judd building, turning out up to 600 pails, butter tubs, and the like a day. As it rises on the far side of the Hollow, Mill Street passes the Sheldon Tenement House (1868), the last extant example of housing built in the Hollow for the workers in the local mills. Park Street Beginning in front of the Star Mill and running southward to Main Street is Park Street. Here at number 3 is the house that Stillman Foot built for the superintendent of his grist mill in 1799. Originally a story-and-a-half, it was remodeled and enlarged in 1923. It retains its fine old sidelighted doorway, simple but with pretensions to being more than just a door. The small building across the street housed the woolen mill offices. It burned and was rebuilt in 1875 and probably again in 1903. Number 2 was built as a two-story house in 1801 and expanded and remodeled as the Logan House Hotel in 1891. Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History This grand house was built in 1829 by Eben Judd and his son-in-law Lebbeus Harris with the profits and some of the products from their marble works in Frog Hollow (including a porch carried on marble ionic columns and a series of showy black Shoreham marble fireplaces, and the first rectangular, as opposed to trapezoidal, marble lintels in town—indicative of a changing taste for Greek Revival rather than Federal forms). It was purchased in 1875 by Henry Sheldon, who had a penchant for local history and for collecting things. His house became something of a repository for objects of local significance, and in 1882 it was opened to the public as the Sheldon Art Museum, Archaeological and Historical Society, the first incorporated village museum in the United States. By the time of Sheldon's death in 1907 all but two rooms (in which he lived) had been turned over to the museum's collections. In recent decades the house has been organized to present a glimpse of 19th-century life—from formal front parlor and dining room to bedrooms and a spacious kitchen (with its large, utensil-hung hearth and bake oven). Most of the items on display also have connections with the history of the town and community: furniture by local cabinet-makers, Dyar clocks and silver, Lake Dunmore Glass, Wainwright stoves, tools brought from Connecticut to build the first buildings in town, student chairs from the College, portraits of prominent early citizens (including numerous works of Benjamin Franklin Mason). In the research wing are housed the documents of Middlebury's local history: maps, notebooks, letters, newspapers, photographs. The Fletcher Community History Center, housing changing art and local history exhibits, was built in 1990. Scholars and more casual visitors alike can find much of fascination in Henry Sheldon's house. Just south of the museum was a reservoir (a forty-gallon barrel under a canopy) fed with spring water brought through log pipes. It was placed there by the Middlebury Aqueduct Company (chartered 1804) as a public water source for the west side of the village and continued to serve in that capacity until 1893 – 94. Today the site is occupied by the bell from the old Town Hall. An 1888 barn, reputedly built for Henry Sheldon to house his collection overflow, stands near the rear of the property. This carriage-barn-style structure, painted in its original colors of yellow ochre and red oxide (both produced locally from regional iron ore deposits), sporting a stylish gothic window in its gable end, is part of the museum. Cannon Green Between Park and Main Streets is the small triangle known as Cannon Green, a bit of Foot land that in time became public property. In it is set a Civil War cannon with a Vermont marble base, presented to the town in 1910. The cannon, a 10-inch "Rodman," (named after Thomas J. Rodman, U. S. Army Chief of Ordnance), weighs 15,140 pounds, and was manufactured by Cyrus Alger & Co. of Boston in 1866. Cyrus Alger was a long-time gun founder from as early as the 1830s. These big guns, that ranged in size from 10 to 20 inches, were sometimes referred to as "Columbiads," and intended for seacoast fortifications. The one came to Middlebury from Bucksport, Maine. The intials "JGB" that appear on the muzzle refer to James Gilchrist Benton, an inspector between 1842 and 1881. The monument was completely disassembled, cleaned, repaired and reassembled in 1996. Ilsley Library Across the Green and Main Street from the museum is the Ilsley Library, a gift to the town by Col. Silas A. Ilsley in 1923. Here is another and later example of the City Beautiful urge to construct public buildings in the classical style, though as with banks the traditional association of libraries with temples in this country dates back to our early days (e.g. the 18th-century Redwood Library, Newport, R.I., or Jefferson's early 19th-century library at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville). Here the tradition continues with a marble temple set apart, its fine oak interior housing a heavily-used and continuously updated collection. Previous to the 1920s the community had been served since the 1860s by the Ladies' Library Association on the second floor of the old bank building north of the inn and then (from 1912) by the Middlebury Free Library. The library has undergone two expansions since 1923. In 1978 a marble-faced two-story addition was made to the southern side that provided additional access to the building, an elevator equipped to serve the handicapped, a meeting room on the second floor and additional office space and rest rooms. In 1989 a major renovation added about 8,000 square feet on the north side as well. Osborne House (77 Main Street) The frame house south of the library is known as Osborne House. It was built in 1816 by Daniel Henshaw, partner and then successor in Stillman Foot's milling business. From 1820 to 1827 this was the meeting place of the Episcopal Society. It is now the property of Middlebury College. Roads West of the Bridge The complex intersection of Main St., Park St., College St., and South St. was the important hub of the western side of Middlebury. Main Street led to the bridge; Park Street to the mills; College Street (formerly Academy Street) was the original main road to Cornwall; South Street connected the village to farms along the creek and ran to what was known as Three Mile Bridge (burned in 1952) near the junction of the Middlebury River and the creek; and South Main Street was laid out as the new Cornwall Road in 1803, though it was not completed until 1811. Spared the fires that raged up and down most of commercial Main Street, this area presents (if one can think away later intrusions) something of the residential-commercial mix that must have typified the northern end of Main Street as well. 86 Main Street Built as a store for Edwin Vallette in 1863, this mercantile structure drew heavily on the Italian Renaissance for inspiration. The cubic mass, heavy cornice, quoins, and regular window rhythm all invoke the palace tradition that was so popular in the 1850s and 1860s for stores in such centers as New York. The ground floor was equally up-to-date, for it originally had large windows framed by fine cast-iron Corinthian columns. Beginning in 1901 this building housed Joseph Battell's Middlebury Register. 88 Main Street Built by John Warren, clothier and developer of the cotton mill in the Hollow, in about 1804 – 05. This was one of the most pretentious and urbane early houses in Middlebury. It was of brick (its end walls of a particularly elaborate Flemish bond) atop a dressed stone basement and detailed with marble from Eben Judd's mill and fine woodwork (note the brackets supporting the entry hood and the modillions of the cornice). The elegant Palladian window has the star-shaped center which was typical of a number of the finer early 19th-century buildings in town. The detailing seems to suggest that the builder was looking to carpenters' handbooks (and particularly to Asher Benjamin) and playing with motifs of the then-popular Federal Style. The handsome interior is arranged symmetrically about a stairhall with curving staircase and moulded plaster ceilings. Each major room has a different fireplace design. The basement, above grade to the rear, housed the kitchen; and a sub-cellar, constructed below frost level for vegetable storage, is reputed by a tenacious local tradition to have served as a stop on the Underground Railroad during the Civil War. The house's restoration by Townsend Anderson in the early 1980s won a national award from the Naitonal Trust for Historic Preservation. 14 College Street One of Middlebury's earliest gasoline filling stations, built around 1920 in Colonial Revival style of brick with a gable roof. It has been altered for retail use by a number of renovations and additons. 0 College Street Two doors away from the Warren house is another notable early brick structure. It was built in 1815 by Jonathan Hagar for stores and a warehouse. Hagar began as a cobbler, specializing in the manufacture of dyed "Morocco" leather and selling his shoes in New York City, Troy, Boston and Montreal. He expanded into an export- import business with London at one point, building and running the ship "Mentor" in 1806 – 07. The War of 1812 found him becoming more local in his interests, pursuing among other roles those of bookseller, selectman, and Vermont assemblyman. His building presents an excellent example of early 19th-century commercial architecture. Except for its size, it is essentially domestic in scale and character, with plain walls and simple, regularly-spaced windows. It harks back to the Georgian buildings of Boston and Philadelphia, to a style of simplicity and dignity. Old photos show the building with a cupola on top. In the 1960s the structure was renovated for use as apartments by Middlebury College. 40 College Street This house was built by William Goodrich on the site of a store opened in 1798 by Anthony Rhodes. Goodrich arrived in Middlebury in 1787 and for a while tended Painter's sawmill and lived in the mill house. He served as town clerk from 1797 to his death in 1812. In the early years of the century and before 1812, he built this brick house in which his wife taught one of the early elementary schools in town. With its fine basement, Flemish bond brickwork, and marble string course, it is akin to (if also simpler than) the contemporary Warren House. It was renovated and remodeled by Middlebury College in 1965, at which time the doorway was considerably altered. 54 College Street This may well be the oldest store still standing in Middlebury. Originally at 86 Main Street, it served as Jonathan Hagar's place of business from 1812 – 1815. In 1863 it was moved to make way for the grander Vallette Block. Aspects of the building have obviously been changed, but the basic structure remains evident. Here again can be seen the domestic character of Middlebury's early commercial buildings. There was no radical contrast in building types, and thus the shops could mix easily and naturally with homes such as those to be found on the easterly side of the Main Street hub, a series of particularly fine residences. 89 Main Street This is one of the most noteworthy houses in Middlebury. It was begun in 1813 for Thomas Hagar and subsequently owned by judge Samuel S. Phelps and his family. Born in Litchfield, Connecticut in 1793 and graduating from Yale in 1811, Phelps came to Middlebury and entered the Seymour law office in 1814. He served with the state legislature, as a justice in the Vermont Supreme Court (1831 – 38), and as U.S. Senator (1838 – 51). His son and for a time his law partner, Edward J. Phelps, was to serve as U.S. Minister to the Court of St. James in 1885. The house was as distinguished as its tenants. A document of 1814 – 15 permits its attribution to Lavius Fillmore (architect of the Congregational Church) and serves as a key for associating Fillmore with many of the finer early homes in town. The great frame block is enlivened by the arched doorway, the Palladian window, and the fine frieze which runs all the way around the building. Later owners have replaced the small panes of glass in the windows (and much altered the character of the doorway), and vinyl siding over the original clapboards has diminished the relief of the detailing, but the remaining woodwork details (rope mouldings, dentils, elliptical sunbursts, etc.) bespeak the original quality of this home. Within the front door a great pilastered arch with sunbursts opened onto a graceful curved staircase (removed in the 1880). The kitchen was in the basement, and the symmetrically arranged upper floors given over to a series of large parlors and chambers, each with its own elaborate (and very inventive) carved fireplace. Paneled window embrasures with rope mouldings, carved chair rails, and fine keystone arches between rooms mark this as one of the town's most lavishly and lovingly detailed buildings. 93 Main Street (Storrs-Turner House) Here is a worthy neighbor for the Phelps House. This fine brick structure was built in 1832 by Seth Storrs and his son-in-law, Prof. Edward Turner. From Mansfield, Connecticut, Storrs was a Yale graduate, had been associated for a while with Timothy Dwight at the public seminary in Northampton, Mass., and then had begun a law practice in Vermont, moving to Addison in 1787, where he was appointed first State's Attorney in Addison County. With the establishment of the county seat in Middlebury, Storrs moved to town, buying a large farm adjacent to the Foot land on the west side of Otter Creek in 1794. He lived there in a gambrel-roofed house built by John Foot until 1801 – 02, when he erected a large frame house on the site. Here he led the life of a leading citizen and philanthropist, selling houselots for what is now much of the western part of the village, participating in the founding of both the grammar school and the college, and donating large tracts of land to both these and the town. In 1831 Storrs' frame house burned, and the next year he and his son-in-law replaced it with the present brick structure. The plan follows that of previous grand Federal Style houses in Middlebury (basement kitchen, symmetrical parlors, apsidal stairhall) and so do some of the details (delicate, curving staircase, eave balustrade). In little more than a decade, however, master builder James Lam was documented to be at work remodeling the house in a more Greek Revival style. He lengthened the first floor windows, framing them inside with Greek woodwork. He also may have provided the handsome detailing for the front door. This last has subsequently been twice remodeled, but it retains its original Ionic columns, palmette pilasters, meander-decorated encasement, and leaded sidelights. Its use of Greek details associated the house with the trend then sweeping the country for an architecture with connotations of democracy and culture, and association carried even to the elegant cast iron and wooden fence around the front yard (now removed). 1 South Street The classicism is more pervasive next door to Storrs' house in that built for George W. Cutter about 1837. Here the broadside plan has been avoided in favor of the Federal townhouse type (e.g., Simmons House, 31 North Pleasant Street). In the latter the gable oriented toward the street permits something more akin to a temple-like mass for the house. Middlebury's Greek Revival never went all the way with columnar temple porticoes but it can be seen embodied here in the elaborately designed doorway with its wooden pilasters and palmettes and its cast iron tracery. Later in the 19th century a large porch extended across the entire front of the house and around the south side as far as the bay windows. It was removed in the 1950s. 3 South Street ("The President's House") This house was built in 1854 by Jason Davenport, successor to the Wainwright foundry business. In order to locate his home as closely to the center of things as possible, Davenport moved the previous house on the site (that built in 1797 by Dr. Darius Matthews) to its present location at 13 South Street. The 1854 house is one of Middlebury's few examples of Carpenter's Gothic, a popularization of the Gothic Revival stressing pointed gables and inventively intricate wooden cut-out decoration for eaves and (as on the Davenport house) porches. Here the bargeboards under the eaves have disappeared over time, but there are still the drip mouldings on the windows, and the porch is treated as a series of flattened pointed arches, reminiscent of Gothic arcades. Since 1918 this house has served as the home of the Middlebury College Presidents. 5 South Street The parade of 19th-century styles continues down South Street with number 5, built in 1870 and for a long time the Episcopal parsonage. Here one finds a classically-derived doorway, Gothic-derived sharply pitched roof and asymmetrical massing, Italianate eave brackets and a large Victorian piazza and bay window. 7 South Street Similarly eclectic, if also perhaps more high fashion, were the house and barn built just to the south by Governor Fairbanks, originally of St. Johnsbury, in 1867. A mix of French concave mansard roof and quoins with Italianate brackets and arcaded porch, its was one of the most elegant and dignified Victorian homes in Middlebury. It is now owned by Middlebury College. 95 South Main Street A few steps back to the intersection of South and South Main Street brings one back to the early 19th century, with the Blinn House. A small house built around 1800 existed on the site when Blinn moved here in 1810. The new owner shifted the original house back to the southwest corner of the lot, where it is now 97 South Main Street. He then built a far grander two-story house to replace the original. The rear ell was probably added by a later owner. The Blinn House is now owned by Middlebury College. Municipal Building (Town Hall) Across South Main Street from the Blinn House on a site referred to in earlier times as Storrs Park is the Municipal Building (formerly High School). The Municpal Building is located the site of an old brick school house. The earlier building was sold in 1869 to Eli B. Parker for $335, and Parker took it down, reserving the brick, stones, and bell for the School District, and probably using some of the timbers in the construction of his own house at 57 Seymour Street. In 1911 the site was filled with Middlebury's new high school (the gymnasium and auditorium behind being added with Federal funds in 1938 – 39). Constructed somewhat in the style of the great 19th-century architect H.H. Richardson, the brick building originally had two floors with great brick arches over the entrance and the second floor windows and a powerful dormered roof pinned down by four massive chimneys. For forty-three years it served as a counterpart to the church at the other end of Main Street. The upper portions of the structure were destroyed by fire in 1954; and after the construction of a new union high school off Court Street, the refurbished basement and first floor of the old school became home for Middlebury's municipal offices. Academy To the west of the present day Municipal Building was a structure as important to the life of Middlebury as was the church at the other end of the street—the Academy. Middlebury's children were given a rough and rudimentary education in "common schools" meeting around town, usually in people's homes; but Painter and others wanted more, a school that would carry on beyond the fundamentals. With Storrs, who had experience in secondary education, Dr. Matthews, and lawyers Daniel Chipman (founder of the first law school in Vermont) and Samuel Miller, Painter formed the Addison County Grammar School Corporation, chartered by the legislature in November of 1797. Storrs and his neighbors assembled and donated a sizeable school lot and common (the west side counterpart to Painter's Green) and $4000 were raised by public subscription for the 1798 construction of the Academy building. The wooden building was forty by eighty feet and three stories high, the largest structure yet built in town. Similar to (if simpler than) Dartmouth Hall in Hanover, N.H., in character, it had an impressive number of windows (glass was very expensive), equally important front and rear entrances, and a crowning cupola. The first floor held classrooms, library, and laboratory; the second, dormitories (accommodating two to three students per room); and the third dormitories about a central chapel. Upon the founding of the College in 1800 the building housed both College and Grammar School until 1805, when the latter was moved into the then vacant building of the Female Seminary on Seymour Street. The Grammar School moved back in 1844 and in the 1850s merged with Middlebury School District no. 4. In 1867 the Academy Building was superseded by a new building located just slightly to the west, a fashionable Italianate structure designed by J.J.R. Randall of Rutland. Of brick with brownstone details, the building had heavy, bracket-supported cornices, a gable centered on each facade, and an elaborate mansarded cupola. A fire on Easter in 1904 gutted the school, but it was rebuilt with only slight changes to the roofline (and the elimination of the cupola), and it long served the town as the College Street Graded School. In 1984 it was acquired and renovated by Middlebury College, at which time it was renamed Twilight Hall in honor of Alexander Lucius Twilight of the Middlebury Class of 1823, the first African-American citizen to graduate from an American college, who went on to become a distinguished clergyman, educator and legislator in Brownington, Vt. In a way, the location of Twilight Hall adjacent to the Municipal Building is quite suitable, for it was here traditionally that the two faces of Middlebury, town and gown, met. Here the bustle of commercial Middlebury leaves off and the academic world that for so long as been Middlebury's other half takes up.
The College The separation of this tour into sections on town and gown, which seems advisable on the basis of shoeleather, is really a rather artificial one. Since 1800 Middlebury and its college have led closely intermeshed lives. One has only to skim back over the descriptions of the buildings in the core of the village for confirmation of this fact. There is Sam Miller's (Charter) House, where on September 30, 1798, Timothy Dwight of Yale and the trustees of the Addison County Grammar School discussed the founding of a college. There is Court Square, where stood the 1796 courthouse. When petitions to the legislatures of 1798 (Vergennes) and 1799 (Windsor) for a charter were tabled because of the opposition of the supporters of the chartered but still inoperative University of Vermont in Burlington, the legislature was invited to meet in Middlebury's courthouse in 1800 and, once there, soon bowed to the town's will. A charter was granted November first, and on the fifth the first class was admitted and the College was under way. For a president the new institution took the master of the grammar school, twenty-seven-year-old Jeremiah Atwater, a protégé of Timothy Dwight. For a home it shared with the Grammar School the Academy Building at the southwest end of Main Street. Other buildings about town as well were tied to the early years of the college: the church and the courthouse, as locations for orations and ceremonies; the homes of presidents, corporation officers, and professors; and the homes of numerous citizens where the students of the growing institution boarded. Beginning with seven students (and a first graduating class of one—Aaron Petty, 1802), by 1811 the College had 110 students, a president, three professors, a tutor, a library approaching one thousand volumes, and scientific equipment including an air pump, an electric machine, two artificial globes, large and small telescopes, a quadrant, a theodolite, a camera lucides, two thermometers, a galvanic pile, a hydrostatic apparatus, a prism, mirrors, etc. It needed more space. It needed buildings of its own in addition to the Academy. The trustees turned to the State for assistance and, receiving none, turned back to the town that had given the college birth. The town came through. Thus at the westerly edge of the village one enters a world that was begun by the town specifically for the college. Although the college was already housed in the Academy Building, it did not follow that the town would agree to an expanded campus built on the west side of the creek. When the corporation of the college decided in 1810 to build an additional structure, they found themselves replaying an old Middlebury story—the site tug-of-war. Seth Storrs had deeded additional land, but some in town preferred to see the new campus placed on Chipman Hill east of the creek. The canny Gamaliel Painter not only solved but played upon the problem to the college's advantage. He pitted one side of the town against the other in fund raising, declaring that the group who raised the most in lumber, nails, labor, glass, stone, etc. should have the college. The drive ran for four years. In the end the west side won, and Painter the diplomat then convinced most of the east side benefactors to be good sports and maintain their pledges anyhow. As a result the college campus was built on the Storrs donated hill west of Academy Park. Academy Park This land was donated by Seth Storrs and his neighbors as a site for the Academy and a west-side counterpart to Painter's village green. This is the gateway from town to campus. It was not at first a focus for elegant building as was the village green. Rather, with a few notable exceptions, it was surrounded by the more modest homes of tradesmen and workers in the mills. Many of these, especially along College Street, were built by John Atwater and still exist—here with added Greek Revival details, there with a Victorian bay window. An early exception to the scale of the area is 2 Franklin Street, built as a tavern in 1800 by Amasa Stowell and boasting a full two stories, end chimneys, a square-headed Palladian window like that originally used on the Painter House, and the same hipped roof and Doric frieze that can be found on its elegant contemporary at 15 South Pleasant Street. Other exceptions to the rule, though from later in the century, can be found on the north side of the park at the foot of the residentially prominent Weybridge Street. Here in 1867 College President Kitchel built a grand house (15 College Street) in the Italianate style of the graded school rising across the street. It is a great frame block enlivened by a pedimented entry pavilion, bracket-borne eyebrows and cornice, and a capping belvedere with round-arched windows. In 1891 the college utilized the house as Battell Hall, its first women's dormitory. Across from the Kitchel House, Weybridge House is French rather than Italian in taste. It was built in 1873 for A.P. Tupper in the then-fashionable Second Empire style with bay windows and brackets carrying a dormered mansard roof. It is presently a college living unit. St. Mary's Church (Roman Catholic) The marble edifice at College and Shannon Streets was begun in 1895 according to the 1892 designs of George Gurnsey, when a handsome blue marble cornerstone, donated by Smith & Brainard Marble Company of nearby Beldens Falls, was laid. But work on the project soon ceased for lack of funds. In 1902, due to the active fund-raising efforts of a popular new priest, J. D. Shannon, construction resumed, with new plans drawn by Hopkins and Casey of Troy, New York, and was completed by 1907. It is a handsome structure of rusticated Brandon marble with round-arched windows, beautifully patterned masonry, and, within, a sanctuary for 700 roofed by a grand suspended barrel vault. Its design is rather Italian in flavor, mixing motifs from the Gothic and Early Renaissance periods. Much of the work on the finely detailed building, and particularly the carving of the altar rail and the original multi-stage altar of Rutland white statuary marble, was reputedly by local marble masons and largely donated. In 1972 the sanctuary was redecorated and, in keeping with new interpretations of the liturgy, the high altar dismantled and remodeled. The elements of that rather remarkable creation can be seen reused in the baptistery and in the base of the present altar table.
The College Campus Library At the west end of Franklin Street and the park begins Middlebury's campus proper, marked by the impressive mass of the college's new main library (Gwathmey Siegel Associates, 2000 – 04). Prior to 1968 Storrs Avenue cut straight across to Main Street, with faculty housing to the village side and a green grove leading up to Old Stone Row on the other. However, in that year the College decided to place the sciences at its front door. The construction of the Science Center to the designs of The Architects Collaborative (Cambridge, Massachusetts) closed Storrs Avenue with what was programmed to be the first of a line of three interconnected, five-plus-story buildings of Brutalist concrete and limestone construction, cutting off the front campus from the village. A brilliant success at encouraging and invigorating the sciences at Middlebury, the building was also an urbanistic disaster. When, in the 1990s, the time came for its enlargement, the college determined to correct rather than compound its earlier mistake, move the sciences to the northwest corner of the campus (McCardell Bicentennial Hall), deconstruct and recycle the Science Center, and build a new library in its place. The architects of the new library faced a difficult set of challenges—providing an interior that could accommodate the rapidly changing needs of library and information technology services, inserting a large building into a delicate historical front-campus location, and creating an exterior that is of its times and yet of its place. They addressed the first with a great hall that gives onto three floors of loft-like stack and technology space wrapped by a mezzanined perimeter of offices and study carrels, the contemporary interiors warmed by the use of certified woods harvested from local forests as part of the College's program of environmentally conscious building. They addressed the second by setting the building into the hillside and making it a compact object floating below Old Stone Row rather than a fourth side to a quadrangle. The semi-circular form of the uphill side reinforces the arc-like flow of space between the Row and the village while it also invokes the imagery of rotunda-libraries initiated by Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia. It is tied to the structure of the campus above by placement as the anchoring terminus of the important Storrs (Chapel) Walk. To adjust the facades to the scale and materials of the historic campus, the architects have manipulated their characteristic modernist geometries to create individually readable units (picked out in marble against a more textured stone body) that repeat the colors and proportions of the nearby Painter and Warner Halls. The library is not only home to a collection of approximately one million items, but also to high-tech classrooms, multi-media facilities, group studies and viewing rooms, a resource and writing center, a café, the college archives, and a full range of information services. Its reading rooms celebrate vistas to the Green Mountains on the east and the historic campus core to the west. Its Abernethy collection of American literature contains over 19,000 volumes (mostly first editions) and manuscripts of some 1000 authors, including Thoreau, Emerson, Henry Adams, and Robert Frost. Middlebury's collection of "Frostiana" ranges from books and manuscripts to photos, documents, and realia—including the poet's armchair. Other special collections comprise materials on Vermont and local history, rare books and manuscripts, and the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection and Vermont Traditional Music Archives with their extensive holdings relating particularly to the musical heritage of New England. In the new building's vestibule a history wall traces the evolution of the college's libraries. Its atrium is dominated by a huge mural commissioned and funded in 2004 – 5 from Matt Mullican with the assistance of the Edwin Austin Abbey Fund Committee of the American Academy of Design. On the south flank of the building can be found "The Garden of the Seasons" by Vermont-based environmental artist Michael Singer, commissioned as part of the college's initiative for Art in Public Places. This reading garden incorporates sculptural elements in granite and concrete, indigenous plantings of all seasons, and a water/ice wall to create a changing year-round celebration of the natural world. Front Campus Walking past the Library, one follows an ascending path across the front campus toward the College's oldest buildings. At one time this portion of campus was given a more formal aspect by a fine fence and gates along Storrs Avenue and tree-lined lanes leading to the Old Stone Row at the top of the hill. Today it is an area of more picturesque informality, with groves of fine old trees and glimpses of limestone and marble buildings. Warner Hall Begun at the time of the College Centennial and completed in 1901 according to the designs of York and Sawyer of New York City, this predecessor to the Science Center was the gift of alumnus Ezra J. Warner '61 of Chicago. It now houses the department of Mathematics. Faced with blue and white marble from the Columbian Marble Company of Rutland, it was an up-to-date structure—up-to-date for its high ceilings, large windows, and lecture hemicycle, and for its use of classical architectural details on an educational building (under the inspiration of the Beaux-Arts and City Beautiful movements at the turn of the century. Painter Hall This, the oldest extant college building in Vermont, was the result of the "contest" of 1810, its actual construction dating from 1814 – 16. Originally called "West College" (as opposed to the Academy Building, or "East College"), this building is as practical and straightforward as the town and the men who furnished the $8000 for its construction. The college needed space, space for any of a variety of purposes; and since the largest, most multi-purpose structures with which the townspeople had experience were mill buildings, it is essentially a mill building that they constructed for the college. Not that this was felt to be a shortcoming in any way. The new hall was a focus for local pride. Under the supervision of trustee Rufus Wainwright, the structure was built with local (Weybridge) stone by local masons. It had multiple entries (originally without porches) and staircases giving access to thirty-six rooms with fireplaces. The regular rows of windows and multiple great chimneys give it much the appearance of structures built to house mill-workers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The flexibility of the building has paid off over the years. In time a library with reading room and multi-level stacks occupied part of the north end, a two-story gymnasium filled the upper floors of the south end. In 1898 Painter contained a reading room, the only lavatories on campus, a classroom, a library, and six student rooms. Today it is wholly a dormitory. Shortly after its completion, the new building was responsible for the loss of a popular faculty member. In the fall of 1817 twenty-eight-year-old professor of Greek and Latin, Solomon M. Allen, climbed up on the roof to fix a defective chimney. Before the eyes of horrified onlookers, the scaffolding gave way. Allen slid down the roof and died when he fell to the ground. In 1905 Kappa Delta Rho, national social fraternity, was founded in Painter Hall, a fact that is commemorated by the plaque at the south end of the building. Old Chapel The second structure built in Old Stone Row was Old Chapel. By the 1830s the student body had grown to 160, and classroom space demands were that most of the students had to find rooms in town. Accordingly, President Bates proposed constructing a chapel and classroom building to permit the return of space in Painter Hall to dormitory use. Funds were solicited between 1832 and 1835, and President Bates sent his own ideas to Cambridge architect Laomi Baldwin, a Harvard classmate of his, for suggestions. In 1835 – 36 the structure was built at a cost of $15,000, aligned with Painter as the central unit of an envisioned threebuilding row. It was still in the mill tradition, but the mill (much like that in Frog Hollow) was turned endwise with a tower and cupola adorning its principal facade. The ground floor housed the library and mineralogy museum; the second floor, class and lecture rooms; and the third floor, a two-story-high chapel, surrounded on the fourth by faculty offices. Not an inch of space was wasted. Yet it is obvious that a refined image was also desired fox this principal structure of the institution. Greek Revival details, so suited to the nature of the college, are to be seen in the fine cast-iron railing of the outside stairs, the Doric pilasters of the tower and octagonal cupola, and the palmette of the weather vane. Besides its more general invocations of culture, Old Chapel, by virtue of its placement with relation to Painter Hall, seems an allusion to the similarly composed Connecticut Hall and Old Chapel at Middlebury's mother institution, Yale University. As with Painter, so here, too, is a structure much altered in the course of time In 1869 the library took over the second floor, the chapel was diminished in favor of the physics department and remodelled in the Gothic Revival style. Its gallery became a reading room, assigned in 1883 to Middleburv's first coeds as the one place on campus where they could study and gather. In 1940 the entire interior was adapted for use as an administration building, and in 1996 it was totally renovated for this purpose according to designs by Moser Pilon Nelson Architects. Starr Hall This third element of the Old Stone Row had been conceived of as early as the design and construction of Painter Hail; and in the late 1830s surplus funds from the Old Chapel project gave serious impetus to planning for yet another structure to the south. However, as a joint result of harsh disciplinary action, student revolt, and a Hell-fire-and-brimstone religious revival, the college temporarily lost students and popularity. Only by 1860 had the enrollment regained sufficient size to encourage constructing further facilities. The Old Chapel surplus was substantially supplemented by Charles and Egbert Starr, and the cornerstone laid for the new dormitory, a building very similar to Painter Hall but lent a slightly Victorian flavor by the sharply-pitched gables over the entries. In 1864 Starr Hall burned on Christmas night and was rebuilt within the old shell with further donations by the Starr brothers. However, it was to be a long time before the new structure would be utilized to its fullest. First the Civil War and then disciplinary problems reduced the student body to a low of thirty-eight by 1880. Such were the circumstances of the college when in 1885 Prof. Ezra Brainerd '64 accepted the challenge of the presidency and began to build for the institution new popularity, a liberalized curriculum, an expanded endowment, and new facilities.Starr Library Extended three times (by York and Sawyer, 1927; Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott, 1959 – 62; and Tully Associates, 1978 – 79), by the 1990s the library was in need of major reworking and expansion yet again. From many viewpoints—coherence of organization, accessibility, technological adaptability—the building did not lend itself to the needs of a contemporary multi-media library facility. It was determined to replace Starr as the college's library and to adapt the historic building for other academic uses. The Boston architectural firm of Childs Bertman Tseckares was commissioned in 2004 to remove the 1970s stack addition (Meredith Wing), restore the historic shell and original reading and Abernethy rooms, and expand the building with a south-facing winter garden, office wings, classroom, screening, and video production facilities to accommodate the Axinn Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, named for donor Donald Everett Axinn '51. Emma Willard House The house across South Main Street at the end of the library walk was built for Dr. John and Emma (Hart) Willard in 1811 and was the site of her female seminary from 1814 – 1819. Of brick with marble lintels over doors and windows, it originally had nine rooms. The wing to the southwest and the Greek Revival details of the interior are the additions by later private owners. In 1959 the College acquired the house and adapted it for use as an admissions office, ultimately adding the single-story wing to the north. In 1966 it was declared a national historic site. The Central Quadrangle With the construction of Starr Library and Warner Hall the composition of the front campus was essentially complete, the College kept growing in endowment and in students. Under Ezra Brainerd's successor, President Thomas, new directions were charted for campus growth to the west and to the north. Thus between 1912 and 1916 work went forward on a new quadrangle behind Old Stone Row. McCullough Student Center Built in 1912 with funds largely provided by ex-governor John G. McCullough, this building by W. Nicholas Albertson of New York City marks another change in style for the campus. Not Vermont mill building or classical Beaux-Arts, this is vaguely colonial. Its symmetrical massing, round-arched windows, entry pavilion, hipped roof, and cupola evoke the Georgian style of our eighteenth century. However, the execution is not in Georgian wood and brick, but rather in Vermont marble. The allusion, too, to a colonial past (which might seem particularly suitable for a New England college) ironically enough, has little to do with Middlebury's origins. The town was barely chartered—let alone the college under way—when such construction was in vogue in Boston and the Middle Atlantic colonies. The gymnasium served first men, then (after 1949) women. In 1963 the competition-sized Arthur M. Brown Swimming Pool was appended to the rear of the structure (the pool has since been replaced with a larger one behind the field house complex in 1996). With the consolidation of the College athletic facilities in the fieldhouse complex, McCullough was converted first for use by the College's dance program and then (1988 – 1990) totally remodeled and expanded by the architectural firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer for use as a student center with the addition of twin polygonal pavilions to the east and west. In 2000 the transformation was completed with the conversion of the old swimming pool space into the Grille (by Freeman, French, and Freeman of Burlington). This colorful multi-level, multi-function space incorporates a juice bar, a short order counter, game and TV rooms, and galleries of tables and booths focusing on a stage and dance floor on the lower level and a free-standing timber-framed billiards pavilion reached by bridges on the upper level. Voter Hall Built in 1912 – 13 as a chemistry building, Voter Hall (also designed by Albertson) matches Warner Hall in massing and McCullough Student Center in placement and character. It was completely renovated in 1970 to accommodate administrative offices on the ground floor and residential suites above. In 1988 the lower floors were renovated yet again to house the College's computer center. At the top of the hill overlooking the "quadrangle" and balancing out Old Stone Row are Middlebury's strongest statements in the Colonial Revival style. Hepburn Hall The earliest of this group to be constructed was Middlebury's first fireproof dormitory, Hepburn Hall (1914 – 16), the gift of A. Barton Hepburn '71. The design of Rossiter and Muller of New York City, this dominating structure is finely proportioned and academically more correct than the more vigorous McCullough and Voter below. True to its times, it is much larger in scale than such Georgian prototypes as those at William and Mary and Harvard Yard. The flavor is much more that of the Harvard houses of the 1920s. In material, however, Hepburn departed from the style. The donor had specified his favorite yellow brick! After his death the building was painted gray in an attempt to relate it more closely with the general vocabulary of the campus. The former dining room of the hall has come to be known popularly as the "Hepburn Zoo"—not because of the eating habits of the students, but because it was adorned with Hepburn's collection of hunting trophies. The "Zoo" is often used as a workshop theatre for student productions. To the south of Hepburn Hall is Stewart Hall, a residential unit built in 1956. Mead Chapel The new chapel (1916) was the gift of ex-governor John A. Mead. The work of Allen and Collens of Boston, it draws freely upon the vocabularies of the American classical styles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in its translation of the traditional New England meeting house into marble. Thus one finds a Greek Revival temple front, Georgian doors and windows and Federal tower. Above the colonnade is inscribed a quotation from Psalm XCV: "The strength of the hills is His also." The tower houses a carillon of eleven bells. Within the building is a beautiful, Georgian-inspired panelled sanctuary with galleries on three sides and in the chancel the college's magnificent Gress-Miles organ, installed in 1971. Here on Sundays throughout the school year one can hear the outstanding college choir. Here, too, are given recitals and certain events from the college concert series. Gifford Hall The final building in the group was not built until 1940. The gift of Mrs. James M. Gifford, it was designed by John Muller of New York City and matches the general design of the Rossiter-Muller Hepburn Hall to the south. However, it is executed in the more usual campus limestone, with very fine NeoGeorgian woodwork detailing inside and out. Proctor Hall This building behind the crest of the hill, named in honor of the late governor Redfield Proctor, was built in 1960 as a student center. It still houses dining facilities, College store, lounges, and the College radio station WRMC-FM. Munroe Hall The gift of Charles Munroe '96 of New York City, this classroom and office building was erected in 1941 and serves as the home of many of the departments in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Another of John Muller's Neo-Georgian designs, it is executed in the same Weybridge limestone used in Old Stone Row. There is a bronze sculpture of a dog catching a Frisbee in front of the building. By Patrick Farrow of Rutland, Vt., it commemorates the tradition that the Frisbee was "invented" by a group of Middlebury students using metal pie plates in the 1950s. The North Campus Crossing College Street one enters the North Campus (originally the women's campus). Middlebury first admitted women in 1883 under President Hamlin. At first the only oncampus provision for the coeds was a reading room on the top floor of Old Chapel. Then, in 1891 the former president's house erected by President Kitchell at College and Weybridge Streets was adapted for use as a women's dormitory and came to be called "Battell Hall." In 1902, a separate women's college was chartered, and soon after taking office in 1907, President Thomas began work on accommodations for this institution. He had solicited a matching grant from D.K. Pearsons of Chicago and begun a fund drive when approached by Joseph Battell with the offer of a twelve-acre site north of College Street. President Thomas walked the site, found it wet and scrubby but with a spectacular view of the village, and then proposed to Battell one even better—the adjoining farm on the ridge to the west with views in both directions. Battell bought and donated the latter site (thirty-six acres) as well. Forest Hall Originally designed by Dwight J. Baum as the corner structure of an unrealized grandiose Neo-Georgian women's quadrangle, Forest Hall was built in 1936. Its name is derived from the fact that it was financed by a sale of a large portion of the mountain acreage left the college in 1915 by Joseph Battell to the Federal Government for the Green Mountain National Forest. Adirondack House West of Forest Hall is the Victorian farmhouse of Merino sheep breeder and wool dealer U.D. Twitchell that went with the farm purchased by Joseph Battell for the women's campus. In 1909 it was remodeled with designs of Frank Lyman Austin of Burlington and extended with a long ell for use as a dormitory and women's dining hall. The hall, which presently known as Coltrane Lounge, boasts a massive Richardsonian fireplace. The building now houses a variety of College offices. Pearsons Hall Behind Adirondack House and beautifully placed on the ridge that Joseph Battell bought for its views, is Pearsons Hall, the first Middlebury structure built for women. It is named for D.K. Pearsons of Chicago, who encouraged and helped fund the project. Built in 1911, it is by the same architect (W. Nicholas Albertson) and in the same marble and the same Georgian-inspired vocabulary as its contemporaries Voter and McCullough. Inside it originally boasted accommodations for sixty-two women, with reception rooms, a suite for the Dean of Women, and basement laundry and gymnasium. The Dean, the laundry, and the gym are gone, but it still serves as a dormitory. Ross Commons Ross Commons, named for Dean of Women, Eleanor Ross '95, is the first to be completed of the College's program to develop residential commons. Modeled on the concept of the Houses at Harvard and the Colleges at Yale, each commons combines a broad range of residential types (from first-year doubles through senior apartments) with dining, social, study, and dean's facilities around an open green. Unlike their historic prototypes, however, these complexes cannot be tightly interconnected and introverted but must be achieved utilizing the more open texture of the campus with its sense of individual building blocks in a landscape. Ross was generated by supplementing what had long been known as the "New Dorms," a series of residence halls built in 1969 – 70 and totally rebuilt as a single connected complex in 1994 – 5—its various wings named for long-time Dean of Women, Elizabeth Baker Kelly, and trustees Egbert Hadley '10 (a descendant of the Starrs), Fred P. Lang '17, and Gertrude Cornish Milliken '01 (Middlebury's first woman trustee). To this nucleus in 2000 – 02 architect Tai Soo Kim added senior housing and dining facilities to play off of the existing buildings to create a commons green that preserves and emphasizes the historic view corridor from Pearsons Hall to the Adirondacks, to define a western edge to campus construction, and to terminate the rhythm of dignified stone masses along College Street. The dormitory (LaForce Hall) utilizes a massing similar to that of Old Chapel but based on a mill-with-monitor type that is even closer to Middlebury alumnus Alexander Twilight's Old Stone House in Brownington, Vt. It is softened, though, with a curving rather than angular roof profile, echoed in the descending curved roofs of the lower dining hall that mimic the falling contours of the hillside as it falls to the rural valley below. The dining hall and paneled lounge are dominated by the warmth of certified local woods and by stunning westward views. McCardell Bicentennial Hall Janus-like, Middlebury's new home for the sciences appropriately addressed the old Middlebury and the new at the time of the College's Bicentennial. Looking ahead, it was located at the northwest corner of the campus in order to find space adequate for combining all of the sciences in a single structure, to serve as the northern anchor of what master planning activities had proposed as an "Academic Arc" (the clustering of major academic activities along a pedestrian corridor extending the length of the campus), and to utilize topography to minimize the evident scale of the necessarily large structure from the its campus approach. Built to the designs of Payette Associates of Boston (1996 – 9), it was conceived to bring together state-of-the-art quarters for the departments of Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Computer Science, Geography, Geology, Physics, and Psychology and for programs in Environmental Studies, Neuroscience, and molecular Biology and Biochemistry in a fashion that would foster maximized interaction and sharing of facilities. Thus its wings of offices and laboratories meet around a vast great hall surrounded by informal interactive study areas and giving onto major lecture rooms, the science library, and a pioneering wing of generic laboratories that can be converted to serve a variety of disciplines, including summer language study. Its systems (e.g. room occupancy sensors that control lights and a heat-recovery system for discharged air) and finishes (local, natural and recycled materials including 125,000 board feet of certified, sustainably-harvested wood from local forests, varied by species from floor to floor and corridor to corridor) were determined to serve a major college initiative for environmental responsibility. At the same time, the building has not lost touch with the venerable traditions of the campus and of the sciences at Middlebury. Its display cases are filled with pieces from a noteworthy collection of historic scientific apparatus, dating back to the early days of the institution and still in the college's possession (though several pieces, on extended loan to the Smithsonian Institution, can only be seen by a visit to Washington, D.C.). Among the apparatus in situ are telescopes dating back to the late 19th century, including that from the "America," the yacht for which the America's Cup Race is named. Its descendants can be found in the rooftop observatory, a regular venue for public star-gazing and itself part of a lineage dating back to the college's first observatory in the cupola of Old Chapel. Analogous to the latter, the new observatory caps the roof of its building with a formal cupola-like presence. Other references to the campus are the stone sheathing, the rhythm of individual windows, the wings proportioned and parapeted in the manner of Painter Hall, and the ventilation stacks treated to recall the chimney-studded silhouette of that oldest college building. To the southeast of the massive structure is an appropriately monumental work of sculpture, acquired as part of the college's program of Art in Public Places. This is "Smog," conceived by Tony Smith in 1969 and fabricated for the college in painted aluminum in 1999 – 2000. Its repetitious crystalline expansion of angular forms, fascinatingly mobile when viewed from changing angles and in changing light, seems particularly suitable to a place given to the study of things like molecular and cellular structure. Freeman International Center At the extreme northwest of campus is a complex built in 1970 as "Social Dining Units." Intended to provide more intimate alternatives to the larger campus dining halls, it combined faculty offices, seminar rooms, lounges and dining rooms in three units clustered around a central kitchen. This award-winning design by Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott of Boston, combined contemporary forms and materials (such as the brutal, exposed concrete of the terrace) with a vocabulary that is at home in Middlebury and rural Vermont—limestone, wood, pitched slate roofs, silos and small-scale, picturesque massing. The individual sections are named for President Cyrus Hamlin (1880 – 85) during whose presidency women were admitted to Middlebury; Professor-Emeritus Reginald C. ("Doc") Cook '24, forty years a faculty member, long-time director of the Bread Loaf School of English, and biographer of Robert Frost; and Professor-Emeritus Stephen A. Freeman, forty-five-year faculty member and long-time director of the Summer Language Schools. In 1993 Dr. Freeman became the namesake for the entire complex as reworked, with an additional floor designed by Moser Pilon Nelson Architects, for use as Middlebury's center for international studies. Freeman International Center At the extreme northwest of campus is a complex built in 1970 as "Social Dining Units." Intended to provide more intimate alternatives to the larger campus dining halls, it combined faculty offices, seminar rooms, lounges and dining rooms in three units clustered around a central kitchen. This award-winning design by Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott of Boston, combined contemporary forms and materials (such as the brutal, exposed concrete of the terrace) with a vocabulary that is at home in Middlebury and rural Vermont—limestone, wood, pitched slate roofs, silos and small-scale, picturesque massing. The individual sections are named for President Cyrus Hamlin (1880 – 85) during whose presidency women were admitted to Middlebury; Professor-Emeritus Reginald C. ("Doc") Cook '24, forty years a faculty member, long-time director of the Bread Loaf School of English, and biographer of Robert Frost; and Professor-Emeritus Stephen A. Freeman, forty-five-year faculty member and long-time director of the Summer Language Schools. In 1993 Dr. Freeman became the namesake for the entire complex as reworked, with an additional floor designed by Moser Pilon Nelson Architects, for use as Middlebury's center for international studies. Atwater Commons The second of the residential commons to be completed, Atwater (named for first college president Jeremiah Atwater) is notable for its inclusion of significant existing buildings, a complex topographical site, and environmental design into an interactive commons community. Coffrin Hall This dormitory, constructed in 1986 according to the designs of Edward Larrabee Barnes, is a good example of the attitudes of the post modern era, adapting and updating motifs derived from other campus buildings (e.g. Forest Hall and Le Chateau). It was built as a series of interconnected segments that can operate as autonomous units for different languages during the Middlebury Summer Language Schools. Its staggered massing let it appear smaller than its actual size, but also permitted it to follow the forms of a ledge against which it was built. Concepts present in Coffrin Hall were important to the three new buildings constructed by Kieran Timberlake Associates of Philadelphia in 2002 – 4 to as upperclass housing and dining facilities for Atwater Commons. The dormitories were set to follow the lines of north-south ridges, framing a green that preserves the outward vista from the Château. Their massing and rooflines take cues from Painter Hall, as does their organization into a sequence of entries. This configuration permits the creation of apartment-like suites that extend through the depth of the building to assure natural cross ventilation, assisted by ceiling fans and by ventilation shafts in the form of rooftop chimneys. The oval dining pavilion also responds to its landscape and its views. Terminating a diagonal vista into and through the commons from the direction of Pearsons Hall and straddling the walk linking the commons with the residence of its faculty heads (Nichols House on Weybridge Street), the dining hall settles into a wooded landscape and emphasizes views outward to the Green Mountains. Its green roof is planted to help it to merge into the landscape, but also for its abilities as an insulator and a controller of run-off. Such innovations are representative of the college’s ongoing initiatives in environmentally responsible design. Le Château The landmark building for Atwater, establishing its “address” on the main campus, is Le Château. For long this reigned as the oldest and one of the largest "maisons françaises" (French language residence halls) in the country. Built in 1925 as a gift of Frederica Holden Proctor and according to the designs of James Lange Mills of New York, it was inspired by the 17th century Pavilion Henri IV at the Palace of Fontainebleau in France. It was the first of Middlebury’s language dormitories, containing a library, a resident’s suite, classrooms, offices, salon, and dining room as well as student residences. In its self-containment its program suggested the mix that would ultimately be created on a larger and non-Francophone scale by the commons of which it has become a component. Recast for its new role in 2004, Le Chateau still houses the Department of French, while its classrooms, salon, and residential floors serve a broader constituency as well, and its dining hall has been converted into a performance space. Allen Hall Completed in 1963, Allen Hall was an extension of the Château idea—divisible into four sections, each with its own study lounge and resident’s suite, with the ability to serve groups of students wishing to speak a particular language. It is named for Cecil Child Allen '01 and constructed of slate from her home town of Fair Haven, Vt. In 2004 it was adapted for use as a first year residence hall and commons offices for Atwater Commons. Wright Memorial Theatre (1958) This 400-seat theatre is named for Charles Baker Wright. Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature from 1885 to 1920. Designed by the firm of McKim, Mead and White, it serves as the College's proscenium stage for a broad range of undergraduate, summer school, and visiting professional productions. Johnson Building Designed by the firm of Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott and built in 1968, this handsome structure was the gift of the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation. It demonstrated that a building need not have a cupola to fit in with the Middlebury campus. The architecture is brutalist in style, with raw concrete, cement block walls, and natural wood throughout, but the scale and the limestone exterior permit it to co-exist quietly and naturally with other campus structures. Originally built to house the programs in art and music, it is now home to departments of Studio Art and History of Art and Architecture. The studios, extending across the east side of the building on two levels, afford their occupants the striking vista of Middlebury and the surrounding mountains that first led Joseph Battell to purchase the North Campus for the College. The skylit central court and adjacent gallery are filled during the academic year with changing exhibitions of student work. Out front is a mobile ("Eccentric Variation VI") commissioned from sculptor George Rickey in 1975. Battell Halls Across Chateau quadrangle from the Johnson Building and named for the College's great local benefactor, Joseph Battell, are the Battell Halls, dormitories built in 1950 (north and south ends) and 1955 (center). Sunderland Language Center At the corner of College Street and the mall are are the Sunderland Language Center and the adjoining Charles A. Dana Auditorium (1965). The 270-seat auditorium is a favorite location for large lectures (College and public) and the many domestic and foreign films presented during the year. Sunderland's primary role on campus is as the year-round nerve center for the most famous of Middlebury’s educational programs—the study of modern languages. The special association of Middlebury with languages dates back to 1915, when the College instituted an intensive summer program in German, followed by French (1916), Spanish (1917), Italian (1932), Russian (1945), Chinese (196), Japanese (1970), Arabic (1982), and Portuguese (2003). The pioneering philosophy of the programs was and remains a total immersion in language, literature, and culture—all communication to be in the language studied and relapses into English forbidden under penalty of expulsion. To this end each language group is assigned its own living and dining facilities, and close out-of-class contact is maintained between students and faculty. Before the completion of the Chateau, the French School held forth for some years at the old Logan House Hotel on Park Street. The Germans were established for a time in the village of Bristol. Today the entire campus in summer is devoted to language study, with as many of more students than during the regular year. For Middlebury juniors and for students in the graduate summer programs, the study of language extends broad, where through C.V. Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad maintain schools in sixteen cities in France, Germany, Italy, Latin America, Russia, and Spain. Other College facilities of likely interest to the visitor are the Center for the Arts, the athletic complex and the mountain campus, the first two accessible by foot, the latter definitely requiring a car to reach. Center for the Arts This building was constructed in 1988 – 92 to the designs of Hardy, Holzman, Pfeiffer Associates. It is conceived as a collage of materials and forms—a sloping-roofed shed intersected by a great circular courtyard and penetrated by performance and museum halls, each maintaining its own identity of shape and materials within and without. Here, about a complex, multi-level lobby can be found the College's black box theatre, a surround concert hall, a dance performance hall, the College art museum, the box office, and a caf´. The complex also includes classrooms, rehearsal space, and technical support for the programs in theater, dance, and music, along with an extensive library housing some 10,000 volumes, 20,000 recordings, and 15,000 musical scores. Also housed at the Center for the Arts is the Middlebury College Museum of Art. The Museum was inaugurated in the Center for the Arts in 1992. Originally established in the Johnson Building in 1968 as the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Gallery, the museum now houses the permanent art collection of the College as well as the new Christian A. Johnson Memorial Gallery, a space given by the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation for the accommodation of traveling exhibitions. The collection of several thousand objects ranges from ancient through contemporary art and includes distinguished collections of antique pottery, 19th century European and American sculpture, Asian art, photography, and contemporary prints. Particularly noteworthy are a 5th-century B.C.E. Greek amphora by the Berlin Painter; a wax over plaster sculpture, "Bimbo Malato," by the 19th-century Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso; and "The Moon, August 6, 1851," a daguerreotype by John Adams Whipple. The museum is also home to the earliest work of art acquired by the College: a monumental relief of a winged guardian spirit, or genius, from the 9th-century B.C.E. palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, now northern Iraq. The museum is open to the public free of charge throughout the year. The Fieldhouses The athletic fields and fieldhouses are on South Main Street (Route 30), southwest of the Center for the Arts. Here in 1949 was built the Memorial Field House with the gifts of 5,000 alumni in memory of classmates lost in the war. Originally an air base in Rome, New York, it was dismantled, moved by truck, and reassembled on the Middlebury site. It houses the Pepin Gymnasium and Nelson Recreation Center (the former Nelson Hockey Arena, refitted with a multi-use activities floor and climbing wall). Adjacent are a Fitness Center (1985) with panoramic windows overlooking the Green Mountains, an Olympic-sized Natatorium (1996), and the Chip Kenyon '85 hockey arena (1999), all by Moser Pilon Nelson of Wethersfield, Conn. Beyond the fieldhouse complex are the Youngman Stadium (Moser Pilon Nelson, 1991), the 18-hole Ralph Myre Golf Course, and the lighted 3.5 km Kelly cross-country ski and jogging trail (1976). On a knoll south of the stadium entrance a bronze rendition of the Middlebury Panther (Lorenzo Ghiglieri, 1997) crouches atop a great glacial boulder. Transported to the site by the Committee on Art in Public Places to serve as an appropriate base this is purportedly the largest single piece of stone to have been moved in Vermont since the Ice Age.
The Mountain Campus Bread Loaf On Route 125 fifteen miles east of the campus, in Ripton, are additional college facilities developed on part of the land left to the institution in 1915 by Joseph Battell. The Bread Loaf campus is set in a beautiful mountain meadow and includes Battell's 1861 Victorian inn and its adjacent barn, "cottages," library, and "Little Theatre." Formerly a summer hotel, since 1920 Bread Loaf has been the home of the summer school of English and, since 1926, of the summer Writers' Conference (first of its kind in the country). Just to the west is the college-owned Homer Noble Farm, former summer home of Robert Frost, who was for years an important participant in the Writers' Conference. Here in the winter can be enjoyed the Rikert Ski Touring Center, with fifty kilometers of groomed trails connecting the Bread Loaf campus to the Snow Bowl. The Snow Bowl Further east on Route 125 (and open only during the skiing season) is the Middlebury College Snow Bowl, with its three chair lists, and fourteen trails and slopes. The area is served by the Neil Starr Shelter, which—with its food services, huge fireplace, glazed balcony, and sunny terrace—is an ideal location from which to observe the Snow Bowl's activities.
Middlebury Village Continued Elsewhere in Town Each street in town and virtually every house on it has played a role in the composite history of Middlebury. However, to note every house, date, builder and subsequent owner would be beyond the intended scope of this booklet, though such information can readily be gleaned from the materials in the research wing of the Sheldon Museum. Rather, it is our purpose here to note other buildings and sites of particular interest that would not conveniently fit into the framework of the walking tour.