By Christina Tree, Globe Correspondent
INDSOR, Vt. - Today, as communities across the country celebrate independence from Britain, one town is busy preparing to commemorate Vermont's independence from its neighbors.
While they did their part fighting the crown, Green Mountain residents were more worried in the 1770s about being swallowed by New York or New Hampshire,
In 1777 the Green Mountain Boys, et al, declared independence, named themselves ''Vermont'' and on July 8 met in the Connecticut River town of Windsor to draw up a constitution. It was the first in America to outlaw slavery, to extend suffrage beyond property owners, and to establish a system of public schools. The Independent Republic of Vermont lasted 14 years, until statehood was secured in 1791.
This Thursday, Vermont Governor Howard Dean will don a plumed, tri-cornered hat and roll down Main Street in a vintage carriage, from the Old Constitution House to the Old South Church, and next weekend (July 10 and 11) will mark the first annual ''Windsor Heritage Days: Celebrating the Republic of Vermont.''
Windsor's Main Street (Route 5) will be shut to motorized traffic Saturday and Sunday afternoons, filled with carriages and costumed equestrians. Festivities will include historical encampments and reenactments, many musical performances, a contra dance, walking tours, crafts demonstrations, three church suppers, a pig roast, and much more.
Why this year?
''It's the 222d anniversary of the constitution,'' according to Larry Bowser, the festival's organizer, who cheerfully also acknowledges that this just happens to be the year that the town has finally ''gotten it together.'' Bowser, a former Boston area developer, became intrigued with Windsor's early history while he was restoring an 18th-century house on Main Street, now the Inn at Windsor.
While the ''Welcome to Windsor'' signs on Route 5 are subtitled ''Birthplace of Vermont,'' more attention has been paid in recent years to the town's status as the early-19th-century ''cradle of the machine tool industry,'' memorialized in an 1840s mill that's now the American Precision Museum. The town's big annual event, moreover, is Historic Windsor's Hidden Garden Tour (July 10 from 10-4), spotlighting yet another chapter in the area's history: the ''Cornish Art Colony.''
Cornish, N.H., is across the river from Windsor but it's connected by the country's longest covered bridge, probably the single most photographed site in the country that includes two states.
The bridge, as this entire stretch of the Connecticut, belongs to New Hampshire. Mount Ascutney, the magnificent peak rising abruptly more than 3,000 feet from the riverbank (it's always in the photos), is in Vermont.
Most tourists stop to photograph the bridge and mountain and then move on up to the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, summer home of the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, remembered for works like the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common and the ''Standing Lincoln'' in Chicago. Saint-Gaudens came to Cornish in 1885 and rented this old inn, eventually buying and redesigning it, renaming it ''Aspet'' and adding a studio and elaborate landscaping.
A beautiful place to visit any day, ''Saint-Gaudens'' is especially appealing on summer Sundays when free concerts are staged outside at 2 p.m., and patrons are invited to come early to picnic on the lawn, which overlooks Mount Ascutney. This afternoon, ''Art Song Nouveau'' marks the beginning of the current concert season, which runs through Aug. 22 and includes jazz as well as chamber music.
In the 1880s, these riverside hills were far more open, mowed by thousands of sheep, but the wool bubble had already burst and farms in these riverside hills were selling cheaply. Many were bought by artists and writers, friends of Saint-Gaudens, who could get here just about as quickly as they can today (the station in Windsor is still served by Amtrak).
By the turn of the century, 40 families were part of this Cornish colony that became known for, among other things, the ways in which its members expressed their creativity in flowers and greenery. The garden at ''Mastlands,'' Route 10 in Cornish, on the tour this Saturday, was, for instance, originally designed by Rose Nichols, author of gardening books and one of the first women to become nationally know as a landscape designer. The house itself is now a museum displaying works by more than a dozen Cornish Art Colony artists, specializing in the work of Maxfield Parrish.
Alma Gilbert, owner of Mastlands, is a leading authority and dealer in Parrish, an eminent illustrator during those first years in which full color printing was possible. In the '20s through '40s, Parrish's lush pictures could be found in books, on magazine covers, and on calendars in most American homes. Less widely seen, of course, were his huge, deeply colored paintings on panels such as the three created for a Vanderbilt family dining room that are now on view at Mastlands, along with another, even-larger piece from another private collection.
Maxfield Parrish came to Cornish in 1898 to join his father, well-known artist Stephen Parrish, who had built ''Northcote,'' a hillside house with extensive formal gardens, now largely restored and on Saturday's tour. A number of Stephen Parrish paintings will be displayed under a tent in the gardens at Home Hill, a handsome 1820s brick mansion down by the Connecticut River. Now an elegant inn and restaurant specializing in French Provencal cuisine, Home Hill is not only on the tour but the venue for Thursday's Gala Opening Dinner.
The Hidden Garden Tour includes the Plainfied Town Hall (Plainfield is just north of Cornish), which houses a recently restored Maxfield Parrish stageset picturing Mount Ascutney and the river. (The building is also open summer Sundays, 1-5.) The tour also features several more superb private gardens and, on the Vermont side of the river, Cider Hill, a commercial display garden that's the creation of herbalist Sarah Milek and artist Gary Milek. (A new studio here displays the striking Vermont landscapes in egg tempera and botanically correct flora prints for which he is widely known).
It's worth driving the couple miles up State Street to Cider Hill, just to see how quickly and completely Windsor's brief downtown is replaced by high, open hillsides set against Mount Ascutney. It's also worth walking around Windsor Itself, eyeballing its amazing architectural mix.
A fine old home designed by Asher Benjamin had been razed to make way for the Price Chopper store, and neighboring Windsor House was slated to fall next when local residents formed Historic Windsor Inc., in 1971. An 1830s columned, double-porched brick hotel, once known as the ''best public house between Boston and Montreal,'' the building now houses a State Craft Center and the Preservation Institute, offering training programs in preservation skills.
Pick up HWI's slim walking guide because it points out the not-so-obvious, like the Italainate post office that was designed by Ammi Young (architect of Vermont's state house), now the ''oldest federal post office in continuous use in the US.'' The guide also notes that the Olde Windsor Village Apartments (54 State St.) occupy what was the country's ''oldest prison in continuous operation'' when it closed in 1975.
Windsor is refreshingly unselfconscious and lacks the antiques shops, galleries, and boutiques found in more touristed Vermont towns. Poverty as well as preservation have obviously produced its eclectic timeline of architectural styles. Across from Windsor House, for instance, Coastal Gas has replaced an old mansion, and the neighboring 1840s Unitarian Church now houses Sally's Consignments. On Lower Main Street, the red and chrome Worcester diner (number 835) sits across from Old South Congregational Church, designed in 1798 by Asher Benjamin, complete with an elegant four-tiered steeple.
Old Constitution House represents the town's first preservation effort: Elijah West's tavern, originally at the corner of Depot and Main, was a wreck when residents rallied to restore and move it to North Main in 1914. Now owned by the state (and open Wednesday through Sunday, 11-5), it is a fascinating little museum, with displays both on the history of the Republic of Vermont and the town. This summer's special exhibit features letters home from Civil War soldiers.
Interestingly enough, not even the walking guide mentions the original Maxfield Parrish hanging unceremoniously in the Vermont National Bank branch next to the Price Chopper. ''Templed Hills'' depicts a mountain resembling Mount Ascutney above water, suggesting Windsor's Runemede Pond. The painting is here because Parrish left it in perpetuity to the bank's tellers, in thanks for ''keeping my account balanced.''
The Cornish colony, in fairness, would never have happened had not a prosperous New York lawyer, Charles C. Beaman, married the daughter of Windsor's leading resident. It was Beaman who enticed Saint-Gaudens to Cornish, renting, then selling him ''Aspet.'' He rendered similar services to many of the subsequent artists, on occasion bartering an old farm for a painting.
''What's really interesting is the way the arts and crafts movement - for which Cornish is remembered - continues to flourish in Windsor in a totally unplanned kind of way,'' observes Roberto Rodrigues, former curator of the town's American Precision Museum.
It's true. While an occasional writer (J. D. Salinger, for instance) or artist is still squirreled away on the rural Cornish side of the bridge, Windsor is now the happening place for artists with a mechanical bent.
''I realized that manufacturing was an art and I resolved to devote myself to the art of manufacture,'' reads a quote by Henry Leland in the current special exhibit in the American Precision Museum. Leland was a local farm boy who went on to found Cadillac and Lincoln motor companies.
The museum occupies an attractive cupola-topped, 3 1/2-story building by Mill Brook on lower Main Street, built in 1846 as the Robbins and Lawrence Armory and Machine Shop. It was here that the concept of producing interchangeable parts was pioneered through the manufacture of rifles. The museum displays the largest collection of historically significant machine tools in the country, as well as an extensive collection of guns, typewriters, and sewing machines.
Windsor is part of Vermont's languishing ''Precision Valley.'' The second most important employer in town, after the Mount Ascutney Hospital, remains Cone Blanchard Corp., hidden between Main Street and the river, manufacturing the largest grinders in the world. The former Goodyear plant now houses a number of distinguished woodworkers whose work is displayed in the defunct J. J. Newberry's.
Increasingly, too, Windsor is associated with glass-blowing and pottery. Simon Pierce, the internationally known glass designer who moved from Ireland to Woodstock (Vt.) in the '80s, now operates a large, shingled riverside plant with catwalks from which visitors can observe glassblowers at work. A similar pottery facility was recently added and a showroom features furniture as well as glass and pottery. Catamount, Vermont's oldest and largest brewing company, has recently opened next door, and a sculpture garden, a corn maze, and more crafts-related enterprises are planned for this ''See It Made Park.''
Windsor Heritage Days, which will feature a variety of traditional and contemporary crafts, promises to be a blow-out-all-the-stops happening with more ''Diversions for Olde and Young'' than have been seen for a long time in Precision Valley.
Any day, however, Windsor rewards visitors who take an exploratory walk around its corners. Runemede Pond and Paradise Park (both created by Beaman's father-in-law, William M. Evarts) are right downtown, and just up Mill Brook is mill pond , created in 1834 by the Ascutney Mill Dam (called the first masonry, gravity-arch dam built in the United Statea). Note the vast shingled 1860s building (it housed precision drop-forges), with a new roof next to the dam. Edwin Battison, the Windsor native and longtime Smithsonian Institution curator who was responsible for creating the American Precision Museum in the '60s, is turning it into the Franklin Museum of Nature and The Human Spirit.
Windsor is well-positioned for exploring much of both central Vermont and New Hampshire, as well as the Connecticut River itself (canoe rentals are offered just downriver at North Star) and by bicycle. Juniper Hill Inn, an Evarts family mansion perched just above town and, of course, overlooking Mount Ascutney, is one of Vermont's most romantic and relaxing inns. Mount Ascutney itself is, of course, a state park with a 3.8-mile road to its summit as well as many miles of hiking trails. Wilgus State Park also offers campsites near its base on the river, and Ascutney Mountain Resort includes a 240-room hotel and sports center.
Christina Tree of Cambridge is coauthor of ''Vermont: An Explorer's Guide'' and ''New Hampshire: An Explorer's Guide'' and is a frequent contributor to the Travel section.
This story ran on page M1 of the Boston Globe on Sunday, July 4, 1999.
