Brandon

We hadn’t planned to stop in Brandon. It was a stretch of Route 7 between two places we actually meant to be, and then the road curved and there was a whole intact Main Street laid out in front of us — brick storefronts from the 1800s in mismatched paint, a church spire, a little falls running through the middle of town on the Neshobe River. I slowed down without really deciding to, and Lia said, “okay, we’re stopping,” before I’d even found somewhere to park.

What got me about Brandon is how unrestored it felt, in the good sense — not a theme-park version of a historic village, just a town that happened to keep most of its 19th-century buildings because nobody ever had the money or the reason to tear them down and put up something newer. There’s a real hardware store, a real diner, galleries that felt run by actual local painters rather than a curated gift-shop version of “Vermont art.” We wandered in and out of a couple of them and ended up talking to an artist about Brandon’s ties to Thomas Davenport, a local blacksmith credited with building an early electric motor here in the 1830s, which is not something I expected to learn on a whim off Route 7.

Lia found a small park by the falls where the Neshobe drops behind the row of Main Street buildings, and we sat there with coffee from a shop that clearly hadn’t changed its counter layout since sometime in the last century. It’s a small scene, nothing dramatic, but it had the particular pleasure of a place that isn’t performing for you. A couple of locals walked past and nodded like we’d been coming there for years, which might be the nicest kind of welcome a small town can give.

I’ve driven through a lot of “picturesque Vermont towns” written up in guidebooks, and plenty of them feel like they’re bracing for a photo. Brandon wasn’t like that. It felt lived-in first, pretty second, which is exactly the order I want things in. We ended up staying almost two hours for what was supposed to be a coffee break, and I still think about that motor plaque more than I probably should.

When to go: Early autumn puts the mountains behind Main Street into full color without the crowds that swarm the more famous foliage towns nearby.