St Johnsbury Athenaeum facade
— — the brownstone the lamplighters used to know.
Not only on a wall.
“The public library and art gallery Horace Fairbanks gave the town in 1871. Second Empire mansard above red sandstone, the windows tall and serious. Inside, Albert Bierstadt's Domes of the Yosemite still hangs where it was set the year the gallery opened. The clock on Main Street still keeps time over the front steps.
St Johnsbury Athenaeum facade, 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 St. Johnsbury Athenaeum sits at 1171 Main Street in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, at the centre of the Northeast Kingdom. Horace Fairbanks, of the Fairbanks scale-manufacturing family, commissioned the building from architect John Davis Hatch III and opened it as a free public library in 1871. The art gallery wing was added in 1873. The facade is red Longmeadow sandstone in the Second Empire style, with a slate mansard roof and tall arched windows. The Athenaeum was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1996 and remains the town's working public library.
The exterior is Longmeadow sandstone quarried from the Connecticut River valley in Massachusetts, the same brownstone that clad much of 19th-century Boston and New York. The walls carry the heavy bracketing and tall arched windows that mark New England Second Empire, but the colour is what holds the eye, a warm iron-red that turns plum at dusk. The mansard roof is slate. Hatch designed the building to last, and 150 years later the stone still reads clean and sharp under Vermont rain.
The Athenaeum operates today as the town's working public library and a free art gallery. The gallery's centrepiece is Albert Bierstadt's 1867 Domes of the Yosemite, ten feet wide, in the same Victorian hanging arrangement it received when the gallery opened in 1873. Admission is free; donations support preservation. The building is a short walk from the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium and from Dog Mountain. The first half of October, when the foliage peaks across the Northeast Kingdom, is the busiest stretch of the year.