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All the United States Vermont Fair Haven Vermont's Marble Mansions

Vermont's Marble Mansions

Two distinctive homes on a New England village green look like a couple of frosted wedding cakes.

Fair Haven, Vermont

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mreniche
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The Allen House is the larger of the two, built in 1867.   mreniche / Atlas Obscura User
The Adams house came first, in 1861.   Map data
The Allen house has nearly twice the number of rooms of its smaller counter-part.   Map data
The Adams House at the end of the village green has been divided into low income apartments.   Doug Kerr
The Allen house across from the village green, with the Adams House in the background.   Map data
The Marble Mansions (circled) can be seen along the village green in this print from 1886.   Library of Congress / LC-DIG-pga-03584
The Allen House is now the Marble Mansion Inn.   Doug Kerr
Detail of Adams House, Fair Haven, Vermont.   mreniche (Atlas Obscura User)
Allen House   blimpcaptain / Atlas Obscura User
Adams House   blimpcaptain / Atlas Obscura User
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Two white houses on the village green of Fair Haven, Vermont, are tributes to the state's marble and slate industries–that just happen to look like a pair of frosted wedding cakes. 

The homes anchor the west and south sides of Fair Haven Green, an overlay district that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. They were built in the 1860s for a pair of early investors in western Vermont’s stone quarries, Joseph Adams and Ira Allen.

Both are of the highest Italianate style that was popular at the time, and both were built by the architect A.C. Hopson from nearby Whitehall, New York. Their distinctive glow comes from a creamy white marble with just a tinge of green, all from the quarries 15 miles to the east in Rutland.

Adams and Allen had grown wealthy from the stone business, taking advantage of their existing mills in Fair Haven and converting them from lumber to marble and slate. Raw slabs were hauled to town via the Rutland and Whitehall Railroad, hewn into finished blocks, and sent off to market. But both marble moguls made sure to keep some, to create their own personal confections.

Fair Haven has more than its share of distinctive architecture, but these two homes on the green are exceptional. The Adams House, dating to 1861 and the smaller of the two, is now divided into units of low-income housing. The Allen House, built six years later with nearly twice the number of rooms and an elegant porte cochère, is now a small hotel. Its name? The Marble Mansion Inn.

Related Tags

Mansions Quarries History Architecture

Know Before You Go

Fair Haven is on Vermont's border with New York, about 15 miles west of Rutland and 65 miles south of Burlington. The Allen house is directly across from the center of the village green at 12 W. Park Place, and the Adams house is down at the southern end, at the corner of Park Place and Adams Street.

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mreniche

Edited By

blimpcaptain

  • blimpcaptain

Published

June 5, 2017

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Sources
  • http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VT-01-RU58
  • http://www.oldhouses.com/25126
  • http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~vermont/BioJosephADAMS.html
  • "A History of the town of Fair Haven, Vermont. In three parts" By Andrew N. Adams, 1870
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Haven_Green_Historic_District
  • https://npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NRHP/Text/80000339.pdf
Vermont's Marble Mansions
12 W Park Place
1 Adams Street
Fair Haven, Vermont
United States
43.59395, -73.267716
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