Browse Items (169 total)

Railroad Yards of the Montpelier & Wells River and Central Vermont Railroads, as seen from the top of the E. W. Bailey Grain elevator, 1929. The number of tracks here has been reduced to one and the area is now known as Stone Cutters Way.

A boy looks out of the cabin of this Montpelier and Wells River locomotive on the turntable in the railroad yard, c.1934. The turntable still exists on Stone Cutter Way.

Model of Vermont State House at Toy Motor Court at the western edge of Montpelier on Route 2, c. 1930s.

When Edward Dewey, vice president of National Life Insurance Company, in 1889 decided that he wanted to build a large, ornate Queen Anne-style house across the street from the State House (see “Then & Now,” The Bridge, September 7, 2022), he didn’t…

When the State of Vermont needed to build more office space in the late 1930s, it looked no further than across the street from the State House. That stretch of street was occupied by four residential buildings that would have to be removed to make…

State Street has housed many hotels and guest houses over the years. One of them was the Riverside Inn at 128 State Street. This impressive French Second Empire-style building was constructed in 1869 out of the remains of the smaller episcopal…

The eastern end of what we now call Memorial Drive was a hub of industrial activity in the late nineteenth century. Winooski Avenue, as it was known, was part of Berlin until 1899 when the area was annexed by Montpelier. It was a dirt road lined…

110 years ago, the entrance to Montpelier’s downtown was filled with vertical structures, a stark contrast to today’s spare appearance. Cars traversed a wide 1898 Pratt Truss bridge over the Winooski. The E. W. Bailey grain elevator stood sentinel…

Is this the same house? It is, but this house at 61 College Street now has a different facade. This was the home of Rooney M. Harvey who represented Topsham in the state legislature and Orange County in the state senate before moving to Montpelier…

This is what mud season looked like at the intersection of State and Elm Streets in 1874! The streets had not yet been paved and planks were placed across the mud to keep pedestrians’ feet somewhat dry. This photograph shows that the south side of…

Today, Northfield Street seems a busy place for a summer home, but in 1850 when aspiring artist Thomas Waterman Wood chose the site for his carpenter Gothic cottage “Athenwood” the street was a country lane overlooking the capital city. The house was…

The Central Vermont Railroad bypassed Montpelier, but for portions of the 19th and 20th centuries a busy spur line connected a
station across the street from the Statehouse to the economic lifeline
of its time. In 1880 the original 1850 station was…