WORKERS' HOUSING

The village of Springfield contains significant neighborhoods of workers' housing. The phenomenon is typical of Vermont communities where local industries experienced sudden growth, including Bennington, Burlington, and Winooski textiles; Arlington shoes; Gilman and Ryegate paper; Proctor marble; and Lyndonville and Northfield railroads. Some of the most striking complexes are those that were built for workers who arrived with the cyclical booms of the machine-tool industry in Vermont's “Precision Valley” Windsor and Springfield in the first half of the twentieth century.

In Springfield, the Fellows Gear Shaper Company was the driving force. Business surged during World War I with major orders from overseas, and by 1916, there was a severe housing shortage in the village. On the west side of town, the Fellows company built a tract of fifty workers' houses near the plant on a terrace above the river along Coolidge, Harlow, and Clement roads. Unlike multi-unit company housing or identical units of workers' housing found elsewhere in the state, this complex offered a coherent neighborhood with the architectural variety and amenity of a typical interwar middle-class suburb. The Colonial Revival/Shingle Style vocabulary echoes in simpler form the substantial similarly designed houses that company executives built for themselves across town in the hilly Summer Street neighborhood. Here, the modest one-and-a-half-story houses are typical of ready-cut building designs offered by local lumber yards and national companies such as Sears, Roebuck and Company. The Springfield examples are frame houses of standard plans, either single or duplex, but they achieve individuality by virtue of their placement on picturesquely winding roads and by their variations in detailing, roof style, siding materials, and appendages. Gables with shed dormers mix with gambrels and vary in orientation from front to side in single houses. Duplexes have gambrel roofs or twin extended gables. Arched entrances on trellises mix with Tuscan-columned porches.

This neighborhood pattern continued with the onset of World War II when the Wiggins Building Supply Company built, primarily in 1940–1941, a sixty-three-lot subdivision off Elm Street, in the north part of Springfield. This neighborhood along Litchfield, Mark, and Randall streets utilized the grades of the site to give variety to its simple Colonial Revival houses. As the wartime need for housing accelerated, complexes became more rudimentary, with wood-framed, flat-roofed, International Style–influenced apartment blocks like those at Westview and Southview at the northwest and south edges of the village. These were subsequently altered with better-insulated pitched roofs.