North Chester

Known locally as the Stone Village, eleven adjacent buildings display similar distinctive masonry. The earliest house (second east of the church) was built c. 1834 for Dr. Ptolemy Edson. Seven more houses, the church, a school, and a cooper’s shop followed by 1855. The architectural designs show features from the transitional period of the Federal and Greek Revival styles. Natives of Chester, the brothers Addison, Orrison, and Wiley Clark were the primary masons along with Arvin Earle and other skilled tradesmen. The double-wall structural technique comprises exterior vertical thin slabs of local gneiss and sparkling mica schist tied with intermittent horizontal slender pieces of stone through an interior rubble wall.

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North Chester emerged with a cluster of wood-framed buildings in the late 1700s. By the early 1800s, it was the primary Chester stop on the Green Mountain Turnpike stagecoach route between Boston and Montreal. With water power from the Williams River for grist and saw mills, the village flourished to include twenty houses, a church, a school, four stores, two taverns, a tannery, and a post office by 1824. A decade later, development of the Stone Village began to transform the architectural character of North Chester. The village ceased to expand after the newly completed Rutland and Burlington Railroad located its station a half-mile away at Chester Depot in 1849, quickly diverting travel and commerce.