Main Street – Saint Johnsbury, Vermont

St. Johnsbury is home to one of the finest collections of Victorian-era architecture in northern New England.

In the 19th century, a single family emerged to dominate both the industrial and cultural center of the town, the fortunes of the town rose with the family. The Fairbanks family developed the first commercial platform scale, which could weigh the bulky locally produced crops of hemp using a system of levers. At first the scale was just an addition to their product line of farm implements, but the scale business quickly grew to employ a thousand workers in various shops, forges and foundries. When the railroads arrived in the 1850s, the entrepreneurial family manufactured locomotives.

The railroads transformed a meadow below Main Street into a thriving commercial district of banks, shops and hotels on Railroad Street. Dozens of passenger trains passed through each day on their way to Montreal and Boston and points afar. A vibrant French Canadian community of mill workers grew on the slope between the upper and lower part of town. The imprint of all this is reflected in four historic districts in St. Johnsbury that retain the flavor of the times in which they were built.

The Fairbanks family, whose legacy lives on in the museum, library, and school they founded, shaped much of the town’s industrial and social history and the architecture of the vibrant downtown they helped to build.