Known locally as the Stone Village, North Chester includes eleven adjacent buildings with similar distinctive masonry. The earliest house, second east of the church, was built about 1834 for Dr. Ptolemy Edson. By 1855, seven more houses, the church, a school, and a cooper’s shop had followed. Their designs reflect the transitional period between Federal and Greek Revival styles. The primary masons were Chester natives Addison, Orrison, and Wiley Clark, joined by Arvin Earle and other skilled tradesmen. Their double-wall structural technique used exterior vertical thin slabs of local gneiss and sparkling mica schist, tied with intermittent horizontal slender pieces of stone through an interior rubble wall. North Chester had emerged earlier as a cluster of wood-framed buildings in the late 1700s. By the early 1800s, it was Chester’s primary stop on the Green Mountain Turnpike stagecoach route between Boston and Montreal. Powered by the Williams River for grist and saw mills, the village flourished, and by 1824 it contained twenty houses, a church, a school, four stores, two taverns, a tannery, and a post office. A decade later, development of the Stone Village began to transform North Chester’s architectural character. After the Rutland and Burlington Railroad completed a station a half-mile away at Chester Depot in 1849, travel and commerce were quickly diverted, and the village ceased to expand.

Photo: Dennis Gilkenson

Photo: Dennis Gilkenson

Photo: Dennis Gilkenson

Chester, Vermont · USA