President Chester Arthur Birthplace Fairfield
— — a small parsonage at the end of a dirt road.
Not only on a wall.
“Fairfield, Vermont, is not on the way to anywhere. The road climbs north from St. Albans into hill country that thins out before it reaches the border. At the end of a dirt road sits a small wooden replica of a Baptist parsonage — the reconstructed birthplace of Chester Alan Arthur, twenty-first president of the United States. The original cabin is long gone. The state put the replica up in 1953. The view is mostly pasture, mostly quiet, mostly the same as it was in 1829. from the studio
President Chester Arthur Birthplace Fairfield, 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 Chester A. Arthur State Historic Site sits on a dirt road in the town of Fairfield, Franklin County, in Vermont's far northwest, roughly fifteen miles from the Canadian border. Chester Alan Arthur, the twenty-first president of the United States, was born here on October 5, 1829, the son of William Arthur, an Irish-born Free Will Baptist minister, and Malvina Stone. The original cabin and parsonage are long gone. The current building is a 1953 reconstruction by the State of Vermont, based on contemporary descriptions, alongside the original 1830 Baptist church the family later attended.
The site is one of the least-visited presidential birthplaces in the country, kept that way by the back-road approach and the limited season. The State of Vermont operates the site on weekends from early July through mid-October, with no admission fee. The reconstructed parsonage holds interpretive panels on Arthur's path from Vermont schoolteacher to New York lawyer to Collector of the Port of New York to vice president, then to the presidency on the death of James Garfield in 1881. The 1830 Baptist church next door is sometimes open for view as well.
Fairfield holds about 2,000 residents across one of Vermont's larger towns by area, most of it dairy pasture and second-growth hardwood. The historic site is a mile and a half up a town dirt road that does not appear on most travel itineraries. Cars are rare. The Missisquoi River drains the watershed to the north; the Green Mountains begin their long roll south. The quiet at the site is the quiet of a working hill town that never industrialized — the same condition that shaped a Baptist minister's son into a careful, reserved adult.