Harmon House

Ezekial Harmon settled in Pawlet in the early 1770s and served as a sergeant in the Pawlet militia during the Hubbardton to Saratoga campaign in 1777. After the war he built a wood-frame house along the banks of the Mettowee River. Like many of the larger houses and public buildings raised during the 1780s, it probably took a decade or more to finish inside and out. The remaining twelve-over-twelve sash windows and stylish exterior ornament appear to date from the last years of the eighteenth century. The hand-carved Scamozzi capitals on the corner pilasters, the entrance surround with similar pilasters that support a broken pediment, the modillions, the dentils, and the repeating circle-and-leaf pattern applied around the door indicate the high level of late Georgian embellishment then popular in the Mettowee Valley. Titus Cook, the master-builder responsible for the Congregational (1798) and Baptist (1800) churches in Pawlet, who lived in a fine house with a similar cornice near the New York state line, is one possible source of the design. Inside, the traditional center-chimney plan provided for a basement baking hearth, two parlor hearths, and a great-kitchen hearth at the rear on the first floor, as well as two hearths that served the two best chambers on the second floor. All of them remain.