An Old Fashioned Day

We have made it our yearly Christmas season tradition to visit the Old Stone House Holiday Open House. (At our house we were not so fortunate as to have our first significant snow - it was all rain. But because of the higher elevation, we were able to enjoy the beauty of the freshly fallen snow.)

The Old Stone House Museum is located in Brownington, Vermont, in a quiet and picturesque Northeast Kingdom village, the museum includes six buildings on fifty five acres. Seemingly untouched by time, this hillside town is centered around a monumental stone dormitory, called Athenian Hall, built in 1834-36 by the Rev. Alexander Twilight, the nation’s first African-American college graduate and state legislator.

"I like the way the Stone House still looms up on that hilltop, where the wind blows all the time. There it sits, unshaken and monolithic, as I write this sentence and as you read it, every bit as astonishing today as the day it was completed. What a tribute to the faith of its creator, the Reverend Alexander Twilight: scholar, husband, teacher, preacher, legislator, father-away-from-home to nearly 3,000 boys and girls, an African American and a Vermonter of great vision, whose remains today lie buried in the church-yard just up the maple-lined dirt road from his granite school, in what surely was, and still is, one of the last best places anywhere."
Howard Frank Mosher ~ Vermont Life Magazine ~ Autumn, 1996

At the Samuel Read House we had cider warmed over the open hearth fire ~

The children decorated cookies and made ornaments to hang on their tree ~

And listened to music ~