Holley Hall

Representative of the town hall boom that hit Vermont communities in the l880s, Bristol's Holley Hall takes its name from the donor of its site overlooking the village green. It was designed by C. W. Damon of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and built by the firm of Smith and Allen, the team responsible for Middlebury's town hall the year before. Its meeting room/ performance space, with a stage and gallery on the upper level and the town offices below, provide a vision of what its larger cousin once was. On the one hand, the timber-frame and brick-veneer construction and many of the details are common to Smith's other work and may represent his adaptations of the imported design. On the other hand, the jerkinhead roof, Romanesque round arches, and elaborate Queen Anne tower are elements from Damon's vocabulary that would influence Smith's later work. The tower marks the village's main intersection at the western end of a strikingly unified business district defined by frame Italianate commercial buildings from the 1870s and 1880s, and, as necessitated by fires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their brick replacements of similar scale and cornice height. They are all set against a backdrop of forested mountains. Both the business district and the town hall are vivid reminders of Bristol's boom days as a lumber, casket, and wood-products manufacturing town.