FARM FAMILY NEIGHBORHOODS

Surrounding Ryegate Corner is the “Nelson Family Farm Neighborhood” developed by Scottish immigrants who settled the area during the eighteenth century. John Gray arrived in May 1774, built a log cabin on the hill now north of what the locals call the Corners, and spent the next year working in Newbury to buy his land. Five months later William Nelson, a primary investor in the Scots American Company of Farmers which organized Scottish immigrants to purchase land in North America, arrived and constructed his log cabin southeast of Gray's. Hugh Gardner arrived in 1784 after purchasing land through the company and he settled southwest of Nelson and Gray. He married Nelson's daughter in 1791, and their daughter married another Scottish immigrant, Alexander Gibson, in 1814. Over the next two centuries, these families inter-married and each generation remade their farmsteads. Adapting to changing markets, they produced unique arrangements of the typical architectural types that make up a neighborhood of working farms in Vermont.

The town center which became Ryegate Corner developed between the farms, and subsequent generations replaced the early dwellings with finished wood-frame, one-and-a-half-story houses, ranging from a plank-wall Cape on the Gray farm to a transitional hearth-and-stove cottage on the Gibson to Classic Cottages built by two of Nelson's sons on land east and south of the Corners. After the Civil War, succeeding generations remodeled their farmhouses and built large dairy bank barns, creating the core of the farmsteads as they surround the Corners today. In 1875 Pringle Gibson built a 112-foot-long bank barn. South of the Corners, John F. Nelson, who married Pringle's sister, remodeled his farmhouse with Gothic-styled dormers and a porch and built a bank barn in 1880 that is notable for its simple corner pilasters and decorative trim. John F.'s son John A. H. Nelson purchased his uncle Gibson's farm in 1884, while his brother Samuel F. took over the farm east of the Corners. Samuel added a porch to the farmhouse and built a three-story bank barn. James Nelson a grandson of William Nelson married into the Gray farm and remodeled the Cape by adding a mansard roof, Italianate ornament, and an attached similarly styled carriage house. Around 1890 he also built a large bank barn comparable in scale and quality to that of his cousin Samuel F.

In the twentieth century the evolution continued. Harry Nelson, another of John F.'s sons, acquired the farm just south of his father's and built a gambrel-roofed farmhouse and large bank barn in 1909. The area then became known as the “Four Brothers Farms.” After midcentury, as had happened with bank barns in the late nineteenth century, all these farms made free-stall conversions or added new pole barns to remain current in dairying. The farmsteads are now defined by an early-nineteenth-century wood-frame house remodeled after the Civil War, a late-nineteenth-century dairy bank barn, and some accommodations for modern free-stalling of cattle, a configuration of buildings found throughout the state. Today three grandsons of Samuel F. Nelson farm east, south, and southwest of the Corners.

A tight-knit community of related families that creates a landscape of shared farm and village was typical of most of Vermont from the early nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century. As upland and other farm areas in Vermont opened for resettlement after 1830, Irish, French Canadian, and later immigrant groups replicated the intermarrying community pattern, especially in Addison, Franklin, and Orleans counties. The working landscapes and architecture they created and maintain are central to the state's identity and are among its most significant cultural treasures.