About two miles upstream from downtown Montpelier, there’s an island sandwiched between Route 2, the railroad and the Winooski River. Most of the land is undeveloped. Fields and trees.
By the road, though, is a 19th-century Greek Revival house, a barn and the ell that connects the two. Or, at least, that’s what was there. The day I visit in early August, all that’s left of the ell is an open platform. There’s no roof on the second floor of the house.
"Today we're taking the nogging out," explains Dave Giese, with the company Deconstruction Works. "So in the old houses, they used brick as kind of the insulation."
The company is taking apart the buildings board by board — and brick by brick — so the materials can be bought and reused.
Giese says they've sold all the bricks.
"As much brick as we can take off of it," he adds.
Showing me around the site is Ben Doyle. He’s a Montpelier city councilor and president of the Preservation Trust of Vermont. It’s a plot twist, but — it’s the preservation group that’s leading the effort to take down these historic buildings.
Even though they sit on the property that once belonged to Jacob Davis, the founding settler of Montpelier. (He’s also the person who named the city.)
Doyle says removing the buildings solves several problems. First, the property’s been vacant for more than a decade.
"No one wanted to say, 'Hey, we own this property and we'll take care of it,'" he says.
And then there’s the catastrophic flooding that hit Montpelier especially hard in 2023, and that has returned to Vermont every summer since.
"I came down here and like, went through this doorway and there's like water in the basement," Doyle says. "It's like 8 feet of water down on the floodplain. And I'm just like, this isn't happening."
A coalition led by the Preservation Trust of Vermont received $395,510 from the state’s Flood Resilient Communities Fund to pay off the property’s mortgage and deconstruct the buildings. FEMA is also reviewing an application that would help fully restore the floodplain on the property.
"And when that happens, we're going to get dump trucks on site and take out about 24,000 cubic yards of material," Doyle says.
He says this will reduce future localized flooding.
"When you start to aggregate dozens of projects like this across the entire watershed, then you're really starting to make a difference," he adds.
Rebecca Diehl studies river systems as a research faculty member at the University of Vermont, and she agrees that this project, located on a nice-sized floodplain, can contribute to downstream flood resilience.
"The stretch around Montpelier doesn't have substantial access to floodplains, right?" she says. "It's fairly well confined in the valley. And then you add on top of that, kind of the roads and the infrastructure. ... And so this project in particular does represent a really amazing opportunity."
Before this property became a floodplain restoration project, it was a home for at least seven families. These families lived there across two centuries, as Montpelier developed all around them. Railroads, a cement plant, car traffic.
A historical review of the property gives a glimpse of what its occupants got up to. They:
- Drove dairy cows through early morning river fog in the mid-20th century;
- threw a maple sugar party in 1914;
- and won top prize for their chickens at the 1877 county fair.
Go back far enough, and you'll find the founding settler of Montpelier, Jacob Davis. The house, barn and ell now being deconstructed weren’t his. Historians think they were built right after his family sold the property in the 1830s.
And prior to Euro-Americans displacing W8banaki peoples from their ancestral homelands, floodplains like this along the Winooski River supported horticulture. Corn, beans, squash.
Now, it’s to a preagricultural state that the property will return.
"The highest and best use of a floodplain is to serve as a floodplain," Ben Doyle says. "And that's what this will do."
I ask Doyle whether he thinks about giving up history for the future. And he says yes, he does.
"All the time," he says. "But at the end of the day, it’s the reality of climate change. I personally believe preservation isn't about locking everything in amber, right? It's about how do we take this and make it work for us now and for the future?"
A future which will inevitably bring more flooding.
