About Quizzes

History of Brattleboro, Vermont

Brattleboro is a village in Vermont in Windham County, about seven miles north of the Massachusetts border along the Connecticut River. Within its area is the site of Fort Dummer, built in 1724 as an outpost for Massachusetts. In 1753, the site of the fort, which had been determined to be in New Hampshire, was granted to Colonel William Brattle, who named it after himself. Brattleboro was incorporated in 1763. William Fisk, a Methodist minister and educator, was born in Brattleboro in 1792. He later founded Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The architect William Rutherford Mead was born in Brattleboro in 1846. He later joined C.F. McKim and Stanford White to form the noted architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White. The Brattleboro Retreat, originally the Vermont Asylum for the Insane, is situated on a 1,000-acre campus and contains buildings dating to its founding in 1838. On February 20, 1849, the first train from Boston, Massachusetts reached Brattleboro on the tracks of the newly constructed Vermont & Massachusetts Railroad. Over the years, Brattleboro was served by three train stations, of which the last, Union Station, was built in 1915. On September 1, 1966, the regular passenger service was ended and Union Station was closed. Fortunately, the station was saved from demolition and reopened as the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in 1972. The first hospital in Brattleboro was built with $100,000 made available in 1901 from the Thompson Trust. The original name chosen was The Hemlocks Hospital, but that had connotations of Socrates and suicide, so when it opened in 1904, the name Brattleboro Memorial Hospital was chosen.