Grafton
is a pristine town in Windham County, Vermont. Nestled in the Green
Mountains, the terrain still bears a resemblance to what settlers would
have found in the 1780s when they first came to the area.
Subsistence farming sustained the community until Merino sheep came to
the US in the early 1800s and started a major wool boom in Vermont. As
the price of wool eventually dropped off by the mid-1800s, the
community adapted from sheep raising and milling forest products to
dairy production. The town was producing so much milk that in 1892 the
first cheese co-op was formed. Unfortunately, this early co-op
did not survive long, but cheese making was resumed in the 1960s when
the Windham Foundation helped to form the Grafton Cheese Factory. This
foundation also helped to restore and rebuild many of the structures
within the Town of Grafton and the surrounding area to what one might
have seen over a hundred years ago.
Hundreds
of barns still dot the landscape surrounding Grafton. Some of
these barns are easily recognizable forms, however over time some have
been changed and adapted to their present uses. For this project
we conducted a windshield survey of Grafton. This is by no means a
complete or conclusive listing of all barns within the limits of the
town, rather this is intended be a starting place to help with local
efforts to document the features of the town's barns and their
histories. This is also part of a much bigger effort to document the
barns and elsewhere in Vermont and to help to track the rate at which
we are losing these important structures. The following is a link
to a page that maps where the barns photographed for this project are
located
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