Old Constitution House Windsor
— — the small tavern where a republic began.
Not only on a wall.
“A plain two-story tavern at the north end of Windsor's Main Street. On July 8, 1777, delegates meeting upstairs adopted the Vermont Constitution, the first in the new American republics to ban adult slavery and to grant the vote to men without a property requirement. The building was moved twice and now sits a few blocks from where the work was done. — from the studio
Old Constitution House Windsor, 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 Old Constitution House stands at 16 North Main Street in Windsor, Vermont, a town of about 3,500 on the west bank of the Connecticut River. The building began as Elijah West's tavern, where delegates from across the Vermont Republic met from July 2 to July 8, 1777, and adopted a constitution drafted in part by Thomas Young of Philadelphia. The tavern was moved to its current site in 1914 and is operated as a State Historic Site by the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation.
The Vermont Constitution adopted at the tavern on July 8, 1777, was the first written constitution in what became the United States to prohibit adult slavery, to grant suffrage to all men regardless of property, and to require publicly funded schools in every town. Vermont then existed as an independent republic; it would not join the Union until March 4, 1791, as the fourteenth state. The constitution's text remained largely in force through 1786 and shaped the revisions that followed.
The site is open Friday through Sunday from late May through mid-October. Admission for adults runs around six dollars; children under 14 enter free. The ground floor recreates the tavern room; the upstairs holds exhibits on the 1777 convention and Vermont's fourteen years as an independent republic. The American Precision Museum sits two blocks south on Main Street; the covered bridge across to Cornish, New Hampshire is a half-mile further on, the longest two-span covered bridge in the United States at 449 feet.