Six hundred people live in Grafton and every one of their houses looks like it was restored by someone with unlimited patience and money, because it was. This is Vermont as a kind of preserved dream, and I mean that as a compliment.
I drove into Grafton on a dirt road that turned to pavement and then, disorientingly, back to dirt again a block later, and I remember thinking the town looked staged, like a film crew had just left. It hasn’t been staged, exactly — it’s been rescued. The Windham Foundation, funded by a wealthy local family starting in the 1960s, bought up and meticulously restored dozens of the village’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, and the result is a town of roughly six hundred people where nearly every clapboard facade, picket fence, and barn roof looks tended by hand. It shouldn’t work as well as it does. Somehow it doesn’t feel like a museum piece so much as a place that simply refused to let itself fall apart.
The Old Tavern and a village that hosted presidents
The Old Tavern at Grafton has been receiving guests since 1801, and its guest book reads like a strange cross-section of American and literary history — Ulysses S. Grant stayed here, and so did Rudyard Kipling, who was living across the border in Brattleboro at the time and apparently found Grafton worth the trip. I had a drink at the tavern’s bar on a cold evening, a fire going in the hearth, and it was easy to imagine the same scene playing out with barely different furniture a hundred and fifty years earlier. Down the road, a covered bridge crosses the Saxtons River, its red timber frame reflected in water that runs fast and clear even in late summer.
Cheddar at the source
Grafton Village Cheese Company makes the kind of aged cheddar that ruins supermarket cheese for you afterward — sharp, crumbly at the edges, with a bite that builds the longer you let it sit on your tongue. I watched through a window as workers turned curds in enormous vats, then bought more wheels than I had any reasonable use for and ate a good third of one in the parking lot before I’d even left. The whole operation sits just off Grafton’s main street, close enough that the smell of the aging rooms drifts out toward the sidewalk on a still day.
Getting There
The nearest airport with regular service is Manchester-Boston Regional in New Hampshire, about ninety minutes east, though Bradley International near Hartford, Connecticut is also a reasonable option at just over two hours south. From Boston, plan on roughly two and a half hours west through Windham County’s back roads. A car is non-negotiable here — Grafton’s charm depends partly on its remoteness, and several of the access roads are unpaved, so give yourself extra time and don’t rely on GPS alone once you’re off the main highway.
Keep exploring
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