John Anderson immigrated from Scotland in 1831 and joined his brother William, who had immigrated in 1828, on the latter's farm. In 1841 John married Janiet Shields of Glover and about that time built the Greek Revival Classic Cottage farmhouse where they raised thirteen children. After the Civil War, John followed the lead of other Orleans County farmers and started a ten-cow dairy. To keep his milkers and stock, he built a manure-basement bank barn connected to the farmhouse by a working ell. The forty-foot covered bridge into the haymow at its gable end, built over the town road by John's son Armour about 1895, makes this barn distinctive, because of the unusual length of the bridge and because it is a rare survivor of the many barn bridges that once crossed town highways in northern Vermont. Of the more than a dozen that were extant in 1964, only one other example remains, on Tebbetts Road in Woodbury, Washington County. The Anderson bridge is accessed from the uphill “cut-off” road between two town roads that go uphill from the farmhouse. This meant that when Armour paid his annual town taxes by repairing roads, he was also maintaining all-weather access to the haymow and stable-floor levels of his father's bank barn. In the 1990s the town road across the front of the house and beneath the bridge was closed to through traffic, making the original roadway relationships less obvious.