The former Spaulding School Building is a historic structure that has overlooked the city of Barre, Vermont, United States, since 1891. It now houses the Vermont History Center, the home of the Vermont Historical Society.
The former Spaulding School Building is a historic structure that has overlooked the city of Barre, Vermont, United States, since 1891. It now houses the Vermont History Center, the home of the Vermont Historical Society.
The building was designed by Vermont architect and builder Lambert Packard (1832–1906). Trained by his father as a carpenter, Packard found employment as a draftsman and a pattern maker before becoming the carpenter foreman and later the company architect of E. and T. Fairbanks and Company in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.
Packard designed many of St. Johnsbury's notable buildings, including the Fairbanks Museum and the North Church. According to biographer Allen D. Hodgdon, "During his career, Packard was called upon to design practically ever kind of building known to the profession." [1] He designed over 800 buildings during his Vermont career from 1866 to 1906.
The Spaulding School is Packard's interpretation of a popular mid-19th century architectural style known as Richardsonian Romanesque, named for the work of prominent Victorian architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–1881). In red brick and Barre granite, Packard referenced the weighty, polychromatic Romanesque style with large, round-arched entranceways, recessed windows with contrasting sills, carved capitals, and the characteristic towers and turrets.
The school was named for Jacob Shedd Spaulding (1811-188), principal from 1852 to 1880 of the Barre Academy, the private school that occupied the site from 1852 to 1885. Spaulding was a graduate from Dartmouth College and a successful teacher at the Bakersfield Academy in Vermont before coming to Barre. He was a respected Vermont educator of "sound morals and religious principles." [1]
On August 15, 1891, former Academy graduate and Barre businessman Charles A. Smith declared the cornerstone, "a fine specimen of Barre granite," to be "well laid." [1] The new school, dedicated in September 1892, contained nine large classrooms, a chapel, a chemical and physical laboratory, a library and two teachers' rooms; it housed high school and younger students.
As other schools were constructed around the city, the earlier grades moved out, leaving grades nine through twelve in the building that was renamed Spaulding High School in 1895. In order to serve Barre's expanding population, an annex containing six new classrooms, an auditorium and a gymnasium was built in 1914 to complement the original facility. In 1964, a new, larger high school building was constructed on Ayers Street, and the old school began to serve grades six through eight. In 1995, a new K-8 facility was built on Parkside Terrace, consolidating the functions of the neighborhood schools scattered around the city. The Spaulding School building then stood vacant.
In 1996, the Vermont Historical Society, looking for a new building to house its collections and expand its services, approached the City of Barre about the possibility of using the empty school. In September 2000, the Historical Society purchased the old Spaulding building from the city for $1.00. Renovations began in October of that year. Architects for the renovations were Black River Design of Montpelier; the general contractor was H.P. Cummings Construction. The partially completed facility opened to the public on July 20, 2002.
The first phase of the renovation included finishing space for the Society's library on the second floor of the original building; offices, a book store and a meeting room on the first floor of the 1891 building; and library and museum collection storage vaults in the basement of the entire building.
Today, the first and second floor reception foyers feature the school's original wainscoting made of American chestnut, now an endangered species. Original pressed tin ceilings have been cleaned and restored and are visible throughout the 1891 building. In the library "stacks" room on the second floor, stained glass windows, hidden many years by a suspended ceiling, have been exposed and restored. In all, a little over half of the 60,000 foot space (two floors in the 1891 building and the entire basement) has been renovated for use by the Vermont Historical Society.
In December 2022, the Vermont Historical Society announced that it was the recipient of $210,000 as part of the FY23 omnibus spending bill secured by Senator Bernie Sanders, which would be used to renovate part of the building for an open storage facility to house collections items. [2] Construction on the space was completed at the end of November 2023. [3]
St. Johnsbury is the shire town of Caledonia County, Vermont, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 7,364. St. Johnsbury is situated on the Passumpsic River and is located approximately six miles northwest of the Connecticut River and 48 miles (77 km) south of the Canada–U.S. border.
St. Johnsbury Academy (SJA) is an independent, private, coeducational, non-profit boarding and day school located in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, in the United States. The academy enrolls students in grades 9-12. It was founded by Thaddeus Fairbanks, and accepts the majority of its students through one of the nation's oldest voucher systems. It has a sister school, St. Johnsbury Academy Jeju in Jeju Island, South Korea.
Horace Fairbanks was an American politician and the 36th governor of Vermont from 1876 to 1878.
Spaulding High School and the Central Vermont Career Center has a long history in the city of Barre. Established in 1890, the school is located at 155 Ayers Street with Luke Aither as principal of the high school and Jody Emerson director of the Career Center.
The Barre Opera House is an opera house in Barre, Vermont, USA. It was built to replace the Barre City Hall/Opera House which burned down in 1898.
The St. Johnsbury Athenaeum is a combined library and art gallery, in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. The building in which it is housed is architecturally and historically significant because of its construction. The Athenaeum is also noted for the American landscape paintings and books in its collection and its having been funded by Horace Fairbanks, manufacturer of the world's first platform scale. The art collection contains a number of Hudson River School paintings. This building retains a strong Victorian flavor of the 19th century.
The Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium is a combination natural science museum, history museum, and planetarium located in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. It was founded in 1890 by businessman, politician, naturalist, and collector Franklin Fairbanks. The museum and its buildings are on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.
The Vermont Historical Society (VHS) was founded in 1838 to preserve and record the cultural history of the US state of Vermont. Headquartered in the old Spaulding School Building in Barre, the Vermont History Center is home to the Vermont Historical Society's administrative offices, the Leahy Library and a small book shop. In Montpelier the Society operates the Vermont History Museum in the Pavilion building, just east of the Vermont State House.
Thaddeus Fairbanks was an American businessman, mechanic, and engineer. He invented furnaces, cooking stoves, cast iron steel plows, and other metal items related to farming. He invented and manufactured the first platform scale, the Fairbanks scale, that allowed the accurate weighing of large objects. His scales revolutionized farming and manufacturing and were sold worldwide, and he received numerous honors and awards for his development of the technology. Fairbanks was also a philanthropist, and was a co-founder of the St. Johnsbury Academy.
Howard and Alba Leahy Library is located in the Vermont History Center in Barre, VT. It is housed in the old Spaulding School Building and run by the Vermont Historical Society, which is also located in the same building.
Lambert Packard (1832-1906) was an American architect from St. Johnsbury, Vermont.
Frank Lyman Austin (1874—1942) was an American architect from Burlington, Vermont. He designed several buildings that have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places and others that are contributing buildings to listed historic districts.
St. Thomas Church is a Roman Catholic church in the Town of Underhill, Vermont in the United States, located in the unincorporated village of Underhill Center.
George H. Guernsey was an American architect from Montpelier, Vermont.
Archibald I. Lawrence (1869–1950), usually referred to as A. I. Lawrence, was an American architect who practiced in Berlin, New Hampshire, and Burlington, Vermont.
The Wells River Graded School is a historic school building on United States Route 5 in the Wells River village of Newbury, Vermont. Built in 1874, it is one of the state's finest examples of Second Empire architecture. Now in commercial use, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
The Railroad Street Historic District encompasses a cluster of commercial and railroad-related buildings at the traditional late 19th-century heart of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. It includes five commercial buildings and the town's 1883 union depot, and is reflective of the town's importance as a major railroad junction in northern New England. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. It was subsumed by the larger St. Johnsbury Historic District in 1980.
The St. Johnsbury Federal Fish Culture Station, also known as the St. Johnsbury Federal Fish Hatchery, was a United States government-funded fish hatchery on Emerson Falls Road in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. The hatchery operated from 1895 to 1960, producing fish stock for headwater tributaries of the Connecticut River and St. Lawrence River in northern New England and New York. The surviving facilities of the hatchery, now adaptively reused for other purposes and in private ownership, were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.
The St. Johnsbury Historic District encompasses much of the historic civic and commercial center of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Representing a significant expansion of the Railroad Street Historic District and the St. Johnsbury Main Street Historic District, it captures the historical tension and competition between Main Street and Railroad Street for primacy as the town's most important civic and commercial areas. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
The St. Johnsbury Main Street Historic District encompasses the historic civic and cultural center of the town of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Organized along the town's Main Street, it includes high-quality architecture spanning the 19th and early 20th centuries, and includes the National Historic Landmark St. Johnsbury Athenaeum. Many of the district's buildings were designed by Lambert Packard, a prominent local architect. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, and was enlarged slightly in 1976. It was subsumed into the larger St. Johnsbury Historic District in 1980.
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