HILL TOWN CENTERS

Throughout the hill country of rural Vermont, there remain small town centers that have changed little since the mid-nineteenth century. Corinth Center is an unspoiled, representative example that features architectural icons of rural community—tavern, town house, church, and cemetery clustered around a triangular green.

One year after Corinth's charter of 1764, fifteen settlers had made their way up the Native American trail along Waits River to the town, and by the end of the Revolution several hundred had arrived. As in most towns, residences were widely scattered and only slowly did villages coalesce. In 1789, the town's residents voted to purchase a “Publick Lot” and fence the “Buring yeard” atop a hill in the center of town near where town meetings were held in Robert Rowe's c. 1785 tavern. Though a modern porch obscures it, the tavern retains a Georgian entablature with a cushion frieze over the entrance. The second-floor ballroom also remains from Rowe's tenure, which lasted until around 1805. In 1800 residents voted to give the Congregationalists a rent-free portion of the lot in front of the cemetery to erect a meetinghouse that served for worship and for town meetings. From the 1820s on, builder Melitiah Willis kept the tavern and probably changed its roof and erected the modest dwelling across the road, north of the meetinghouse. Willis likely built the wood-frame, one-and-a-half-story, five-bay, gable-front cottage for his son Shubaul about 1823. In 1844 the Town deeded the land and meetinghouse to the Congregationalists and for $700 hired Willis to build a forty-foot-square Greek Revival Town House just across the road. Over the next decade the Congregationalists thoroughly reworked the old meetinghouse into its present, strikingly simple Greek Revival appearance with delicate belfry lattice balustrades. They also built a small Greek Revival parsonage just east of the Town House now a private house. In 1849, the Town purchased its first hearse and built a shed next to the Town House to shelter it, which in 1873 was moved adjacent to the cemetery behind the church and improved into the present Hearse House. Since that time, although houses have been remodeled and several small shops, a house, and barns have been demolished, Corinth Center remains largely untouched by the twentieth century.