Brainerd House

Unlike most of Vermont's Gothic Revival houses, which tended to fall into the Carpenter Gothic cottage category, lawyer Lawrence Brainerd Jr.'s house was a more substantial Gothic villa, reflecting the family's success in mercantile, banking, steamboat, and railroad enterprises. The house was built on a spacious property at what was then the edge of town, beyond the head of Bank Street. It is large, two-and-a-half stories, and solid, with brick walls on granite foundations. The house is picturesque with an asymmetrical plan topped by an array of gables, cross gables, and clustered corbeled octagonal chimneys. A veranda with a round corner pavilion wraps the west and south faces of the building in Tudor arches with quatrefoil spandrels. The gables are decorated with some of the finest barge-boards in Vermont, cusp-arched with drops. These bargeboards were replicated when the house was expanded to the east later in the nineteenth century. They were duplicated at the Rugg House (c. 1890 or earlier) on the north side of VT 36, 1.7 miles east of town.