Hedding Methodist Church

The Hedding Methodist Church is the most flamboyant of the late-nineteenth-century churches built around the Barre common at the height of the city's granite prosperity. The Methodists began in 1802 in a building on the common, then in 1838 built a Greek Revival church on Washington Street that matched those of the Congregationalists and Unitarians. The Unitarians subsequently remodeled in a Gothic Revival mode in 1884 (19 Church Street), and the Congregationalists added a striking brick and granite Romanesque Revival gabled and towered front to their church in 1887 (35 Church Street). Shortly afterward, the Baptists built a Gothic/Romanesque Revival church (1894) and the Episcopalians erected a granite Gothic Revival church (1895) at 24 and 39 Washington Street, respectively.

This Methodist church was the third built by Brooklyn architect Lawrence B. Valk in Vermont, after the Gothic Revival Bennington Baptist Church (1878) at 601 Main Street and Middlebury United Methodist Church (AD20). Using a cross-gabled massing with a corner entrance tower, common to all three, the Barre church exhibits the Queen Anne penchant for diverse materials and textures. This is evident in its granite basement and porch columns, red pressed-brick body, projecting red slate gables with wood-paneled peaks, Stick Style door canopy, and wood-shingled and gray slate tower tied to the transept by a slate-covered bridge. Dominating the tower is a tall belfry zone with twin round-arched openings filled with multi-paned windows, louvers, and wooden sunburst tympana. They are bounded by shingled corner columns that rise as slated pepper-pot pinnacles at the corners of a tall splayed pyramidal steeple. The slate roofs of the church's main body have recently been replaced with metal.