Middlebury College’s Old Stone Row Listed on National

Registry

The National Park Service has named Middlebury College’s

Old Stone Row to the National Register of Historic Places. Old

Stone Row is composed of three buildings that formed the original

Middlebury campus, an historic complex still used today. The buildings

date from 1815 to 1861 and were built with Vermont limestone by

the local community.

The National Register is the official federal government

listing of historic, architectural and archeological resources

worthy of preservation, and operates its program in Vermont through

the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation. The state office

reviews proposals before submitting them for nomination to the

National Park Service for consideration for the National Registry.

The first building of the Old Stone Row is Painter

Hall, the oldest extant college building in Vermont. It was built

in 1815 to house students, and is still used for that purpose.

Old Chapel, the centerpiece of the grouping, initially provided

for all the academic needs of the College, housing the library,

mineralogy museum, lecture rooms, faculty offices, the chapel,

and an observatory. Today, the President’s office and other administrative

offices occupy the building. Completing the row is Starr Hall,

a second dormitory built in 1861 out of donated and “borrowed”

materials from the surrounding local community.

The Old Stone Row was built over the early decades

of the College’s history based on Yale’s Old Brick Row prototype.

The Yale grouping also served as inspiration for similar building

complexes on many other liberal arts college campuses. It is believed

that these three buildings on the Middlebury campus offer the

purest form of expression of the Yale prototype that exists today.

The College prepared the proposal nominating Old

Stone Row in honor of the school’s 200-year anniversary coming

up in the year 2000. As part of its bicentennial celebration,

the College will place commemorative plaques on 18 architecturally

significant buildings on campus, including the Old Stone Row buildings.