Grafton village historic inn
— — a clapboard porch the years keep returning to.
Not only on a wall.
“The inn at the centre of Grafton has kept rooms since 1801. White clapboard, dark green shutters, a porch that reads the same in old photographs as it does today. Daniel Webster and Ulysses Grant signed the register. The Windham Foundation took the building on in the 1960s and held the village steady through a long century when most of Grafton's industry was already gone.
Grafton village historic inn, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Grafton Inn sits at the intersection of Main Street and Townshend Road at the centre of Grafton village in Windham County, Vermont. The building opened as Phelps Hotel in 1801, became known as the Old Tavern at Grafton, and has been operating, with some pauses, ever since. The Windham Foundation, established in 1963 by Dean Mathey to preserve the village, restored the inn and surrounding properties through the late 1960s. The Connecticut River runs about fifteen miles east at Bellows Falls; Brattleboro lies roughly thirty miles to the south.
The guest register reads as a tour of the nineteenth-century American imagination. Daniel Webster, Ulysses S. Grant, Rudyard Kipling, Henry David Thoreau and Theodore Roosevelt are all recorded as having stayed at the inn during travels through Vermont. Webster is said to have addressed a crowd from the porch in 1840. The building survived the long decline that came when the railroads bypassed Grafton in the 1880s, when the soapstone mill closed, and when the village shrank from a population of over 1,400 in 1860 to a few hundred residents by the middle of the twentieth century.
The inn keeps roughly forty-five guest rooms across the main building and several restored village houses. Dining sits on the ground floor; the Phelps Barn Pub hosts a tavern menu in a separate barn a short walk away. Rates run higher through foliage week and the Christmas season and lower in mud season and early summer. Grafton Village Cheese is a few minutes' walk down the road; the Grafton Forge and the Nature Museum stand within the same village block. Most guests arrive by car from Boston or up the Connecticut River corridor.