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SPRING 2021

Kingdom campus priced at $1 million

Old World Garden Design gets closer to nature

Gardening guru Charlie Nardozzi's no-dig approach

Samantha Ford sleuths out home histories

Vintage furniture gets new life with Graceful Designs

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10 Only die-hard snow enthusiasts could lament the coming of spring; the rest of us are downright giddy. This year, of course, we’re beginning to emerge from a long “winter” of another sort: a pandemic. The arrival of vaccines and greens inspired not one but two hands-in-the-dirt stories in this issue: a conversation with GARDENING GURU CHARLIE NARDOZZI about his new book, and a profile of “OLD WORLD” LANDSCAPER SILVIA JOPE. We also visit with the owner of GRACEFUL DESIGNS, who upcycles vintage furniture with cool paint jobs. Samantha Ford of TURN STONE RESEARCH digs way back into the past and regales homeowners with the story of their houses. And in the Northeast Kingdom, a FORMER BOARDING SCHOOL on 300 acres patiently awaits a visionary buyer. Here’s to new life.

Kingdom Jewel ........................ 6

Sutton’s former King George School offers myriad possibilities to the right buyer

BY K E N P IC AR D

Big Picture Gardening............10

Landscape designer Silvia Jope redefines “pretty” with ecology in mind BY E LI ZAB E TH M. S E Y L E R

Digging No-Dig ........................15

In his new book, Charlie Nardozzi shares how to grow more food with less work

The House Whisperer .............18

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Color Coordinator....................21 Grace Elletson gives vintage furniture a makeover BY M A R G AR E T G R AY S O N

e home design real estat

SPRING 2021

21 ON THE COVER A backyard garden in Burlington 6 Kingdom campus priced at $1 million

10 Old World Garden Design gets closer to nature

15 Gardening guru Charlie Nardozzi's no-dig approach

18 Samantha Ford sleuths out home histories

21 Vintage furniture gets new life with Graceful Designs

PHOTO BY PAMELA POLSTON

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Kingdom Jewel

The Horse Barn at the former King George School in Sutton PHOTOS COURTESY OF CENTURY 21 FARM & FOREST

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Sutton’s former King George School offers myriad possibilities to the right buyer BY K EN P I C A R D • ken@sevendaysvt.com

A decade ago, Eric Hudson and his maintenance staff kept the grounds of the King George School in Sutton immaculate: lawns and gardens manicured, walkways shoveled and swept, fences regularly painted white. After all, the affluent and mostly outof-state parents whose high-school-age kids attended the therapeutic boarding school in the Northeast Kingdom paid hefty tuitions on par with those at many elite private colleges.

R EA L ES TAT E These days, Hudson shows prospective buyers around the place; the 300acre campus with sweeping vistas of the Green and White mountains has been on the market for almost a decade. Hudson is the sole caretaker and doesn’t have much else to do at the shuttered school. One of his jobs is to keep the furnace running in the education building, aka “Eddy.” Otherwise, the radiant floor heating pipes would freeze and buckle the foundation. Hudson also cleans up after occasional vandals. More than once, he’s discovered that someone has sneaked into Eddy and played with the fire extinguishers, or stolen equipment left behind when the school abruptly closed in 2011. Thankfully, no one has damaged Eddy’s stained-glass windows, some of which bear the names Descartes, Galileo and Marie Curie. On the other hand, the front windows have repeatedly been shot out with BB guns. “It’s probably fortunate that I haven’t caught anyone,” Hudson said halfjokingly on a recent tour of the grounds with listing agent Daniel Maclure, owner of Century 21 Farm & Forest in Derby. Given that the property has remained unused for a decade, the mostly unheated buildings are in remarkably good shape, albeit in need of painting and other cosmetic upgrades. Some of the structures date back to the 1920s. Nearly all were ungraded in the 1990s when the Brown Schools of Austin, Texas, bought the former dairy farm and converted it into a private coed boarding school. Today, most of the 13 buildings have metal-seam roofs and modern windows, and all are structurally sound, Hudson said. They range from a small, one-room schoolhouse to a massive two-story horse barn. The latter, which sits on the upper campus a stone’s throw from the Sheffield Wind Farm, was converted into a campus community center and recreation room with billiards, foosball and Ping-Pong tables. On the lower campus, across the road from Eddy and adjacent to the Clark administrative building, there’s a huge, three-story white barn topped with a cupola. Originally built to store hay in the loft and farm equipment below, the barn still holds rows of exercise machines left from its school days. Decades ago, the barn was also used for maple sugaring, when farmers tapped about 5,000 trees on the property and gathered the sap using horses. According to Dianna Simpson, former Sutton town clerk, the barn’s lower section was later converted into a factory for making maple candies, though it was never put into production. Nevertheless,

THE MOSTLY UNHEATED BUILDINGS ARE IN REMARKABLY GOOD SHAPE, ALBEIT IN NEED OF PAINTING AND OTHER COSMETIC UPGRADES.

Inside the former Clark Administration Building

A classroom at the former King George School

the massive building along King George Road has been known ever since as the Candy Barn. In all, this unique property, with its sprawling meadows, ponds, woods, dormitories, ball fields, and 58,000 square feet of assorted residences, offices, classrooms and outbuildings has much to offer prospective buyers. “If they find the right purpose for it, it’s a bargain,” said Hudson, referring to the $1 million asking price, reduced from

a high of $2.5 million. What might that purpose be? “That’s the big question,” he said. It’s not as though the KGS campus hasn’t generated interest, said Maclure, who took over as listing agent three years ago. For a time, he said, Circus Smirkus of Greensboro considered moving its nonprofit youth operation there. Other prospective buyers have included companies that run summer camps, nursing homes, residential

treatment centers and schools for kids with special needs. The Vermont State Police used the grounds for training operations. There was even talk of converting both barns into hemp-drying facilities — that is, until hemp prices collapsed two years ago. “There’s so much here and so many buildings spread all over the place,” Maclure added. “People have an idea [for part of it], but they don’t know what they’re going to do with the rest of it.” The property does pose some redevelopment challenges. Though it’s easily accessible from Interstate 91, and only 22 miles from St. Johnsbury, it’s not close to many social services or medical facilities. “It’s kind of out in the middle of nowhere,” Hudson conceded. In other respects, its location is an asset. The campus is just 30 minutes from Burke Mountain ski resort, Kingdom Trails mountain biking, the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail and Lake Willoughby. Other outdoor recreational opportunities include hiking on Sutton’s Mount Hor, fishing in Sheffield’s Holbrook State Park and paddling on the Connecticut River. The campus’ rural character was certainly part of its allure to urban parents, Hudson said — though they might not have imagined how one of the remaining silos would be used. One winter, a KGS KINGDOM JEWEL NEST SPRING 2021

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IF THEY FIND THE RIGHT PURPOSE FOR IT, IT’S A BARGAIN. E R IC H UD S O N

Foyer of the Education Building

“They turned out to be great neighbors,” he said. “They were great kids,” agreed Hudson, who also taught woodworking classes there. “Saying they were ‘troubled

kids’ is just wrong.” Most, he said, just came from bad situations at home or school and “needed a change.” They got that at KGS. In its early years, the school focused heavily on

wilderness learning. Students went camping in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, hiking in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park and rafting on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. On campus, the KGS curricula emphasized writing, history, literature, and the visual and performing arts. Unfortunately, like many private schools, KGS ran into financial trouble. In March 2005, owner Brown Schools, which operated seven other therapeutic schools in Texas, Florida, Idaho and Utah, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. According to a 2003 investigative series in the Austin AmericanStatesman, staff at some of those schools were accused of using improper physical restraints and other questionable techniques, resulting in lawsuits and actions by state regulators. No such allegations ever surfaced at KGS, though comedian and author Zoë Klar wrote a March 2015 piece for VICE about the “six bizarre months” she spent there at age 14. In fact, the Sutton school was the only Brown school that remained open. During the 2005 bankruptcy, Universal Health Services of King of Prussia, Pa., bought KGS and operated it until its closure in June 2011. Currently, Maclure has an offer on the table from someone interested in purchasing part of the upper campus, which includes the horse barn, girls’ dormitories and a large farmhouse. But he’d prefer to sell the entire property as one piece — assuming that someone recognizes it for what it is: a hidden jewel in the Kingdom’s crown. m

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COURTESY OF CENTURY 21 FARM & FOREST

The Elizabeth Shaler Brouha Theater

KEN PICARD

staffer hosed down one of them to create an ice-climbing wall for students. “It was not a bad idea, if it was away from the building,” Hudson recalled. However, when the sun heated up the silo’s metal exterior, it sent a huge chunk of ice crashing through Eddy’s roof. How King George School got its royal moniker is an unusual story. The same building damaged by the falling ice holds a small performing arts theater named in honor of Elizabeth Shaler Brouha, a Sutton neighbor and patron of the arts. Her son, Paul Brouha, now 75, still lives on the farm immediately northeast of campus. His parents came to Vermont as Belgian refugees during World War II. Brouha’s father was hired as a handyman by Lawrence Henderson, who owned what was then a dairy farm. Henderson later sold it to out-of-staters Grinnell and Myra Martin. “[Grinnell] Martin was a retired New York banker who didn’t get along particularly well with people up here,” Brouha recalled. “His answer to everything was to buy it.” Indeed, the Martins ended up accumulating about 3,300 acres, though they didn’t name the land after themselves. “Around 1952, the mailman showed up and said, ‘The Martins have decided that they’re going to call their farm the King George Farm,’” Brouha recalled. “Being the kind of guy he was, everyone just assumed he was talking about King George III, the king of England during the Revolutionary War.” He wasn’t. Martin was referring to George Chesley, a man who, in the early 20th century, owned a mill along nearby Calendar Brook. As a miller, Brouha explained, Chesley had ready access to cash at a time when much of the area used a barter economy. As a result, he said, Chesley became the “unofficial banker” of Sutton. “So when Grinnell and Myra Martin decided to call their place the King George Farm,” Brouha continued, “my mother decided to have fun and call this place the Queen Elizabeth Farm. She also named our duck house the Queen Mary duck house” after Brouha’s grandmother. Despite KGS’ lack of royal lineage, it became an economic engine for Sutton, employing as many as 50 people, with a payroll of more than $1 million, according to a 2005 Associated Press story. Sutton town records indicate that the current owners pay about $85,000 a year in property taxes. When KGS first opened in September 1998, press accounts often characterized it as serving “troubled youth,” which, according to Brouha, initially worried some Sutton residents.

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Landscape designer Silvia Jope redefines “pretty” with ecology in mind B Y EL I Z A B ET H M . S EY L ER elizabeth@sevendaysvt.com

A particular photo of Silvia Jope’s backyard “always stirs my heartstrings,” she said. Purple coneflowers seem to dance in front of a delicately woven willow gate in a young hornbeam hedge. The landscape designer grew the coneflowers from seed, made the gate from twigs in her yard and patterned the hedge after those she saw during her youth in Germany. “It reminds me of home a little bit,” Jope said, recalling her European roots. “But it also reminds me of these amazing plants, all native to North America, and how wonderful they are: how they support both humans — they’re beautiful — and birds.” Her feathered friends feast on the coneflower seeds, and she hopes they’ll nest in the hedge when it grows thicker. The photo “summarizes my interaction [with] and my experience in my garden: creativity, inspiration and also food for wildlife,” Jope said. Owner of Burlington-based Old World Garden Design since 2004, Jope offers landscape design and planning, installation oversight, and consulting and coaching. She serves residential and commercial clients on everything from small accent gardens to comprehensive landscapes for large properties. Jope won Industry Awards in 2014 and 2015, as well as the 2015 Judge’s Choice Award, from the Vermont Nursery and Landscape Association/Green Works, and she has a long-standing affiliation with Gardener’s Supply. She began working with the company as a freelance landscape designer and nursery associate while finishing her bachelor’s degree at the University of Vermont. Referrals from the company helped Jope build her business, and she still benefits from the connection. “We have only gotten good reviews from whenever she’s worked with people,” said Gardener’s Supply help desk specialist Betsy Combs. Though Jope values her UVM degree in urban forestry and landscape horticulture, an epiphany about eight years ago radically shifted her professional approach. Her studies, consistent with the industry at the time,

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31 Market Street, Williston, VT them to be perfect, it’s a source of ublocal.com • 802-318-7395 frustration for homeowners, and it’s a very shallow view,” she said. kdeforge@unionbankvt.com Jope helps clients develop “a little bit more forgiveness” for themselves as gardeners and for their plants. “The Auctions Work! 2/4/21 1 plant is doing exactly what it’s supposed8v-unionbankkellyd021021.indd to do. If it’s droughty, the plant will shrivel up. If it is really moist, it’ll grow taller and maybe flop.” She also invites clients to redefine “pretty.” It could be knowing that a garden is supporting wildlife or not polluting, she said. She encourages clients “to be a little lazier in their gardens and not be fussing and fretting about every plant that’s not performing.” And she promotes a holistic view: If leaves are Sell your real estate from start being nibbled, “You’re supporting some to finish in 60 days with no critter, most likely a caterpillar. And if you want young songbirds in your contingencies. garden, they need a ton of caterpillars An auction offers a fast, cost to eat.” effective way to liquidate One of Jope’s favorite mottos is, “Keep your indoor cleanliness inside. your property with little to no Outside is a different environment.” commission paid by the seller. Combs of Gardener’s Supply is sold The professional auctioneers at on this approach. She hired Jope to design two gardens for her home in the Thomas Hirchak Company Essex Junction and is thrilled with have been working to maximize their appearance, as well as how they our clients’ return since 1979. changed the yard and how little effort they require. NAAPro! “She really listened to what I wanted and made it look attractive,” Combs recalled. Grasses and other textured plants surround red and purple flowers in one bed that provides a buffer between the 800-634-7653 house and street, and both new beds are THCAuction.com low maintenance.

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Silvia Jope planting a bare root hornbeam hedge

had focused on selecting plants that were well suited to a landscape in form and function only. When Jope attended a two-day workshop offered by the Ecological Landscape Alliance, which promotes sustainable landscape design, construction and management, she “had so many aha moments, thinking, Oh, my God. I’ve never really thought about my field being actually a pretty big polluter,” she recalled. Pollutants include synthetic fertilizers, the black plastic surrounding nursery plants, and “the routine of stripping old mulch, bringing in fresh mulch and sending off the old in dump trucks.” She also realized that she was using non-native plants, creating “a total eco desert for a lot of our pollinators and the wildlife we want in the garden.

“I felt almost like, I’ve been so blind. I’ve been on one track — beauty, function, people — but have not really looked at the bigger picture.” Emboldened by readings and research, Jope has developed what she calls the “close-to-nature landscape approach.” Guiding principles include water and soil conservation, using native plants and greener resources, championing climate-sensitive design, and supporting birds and pollinators. She believes that gardens can serve many functions in the landscape beyond appearance — and that a better understanding of nature’s processes can even make garden owners happier. “If we’re expecting plants to look amazing and not have any wilted leaves, no nibbling by an insect, [if ] we want

BIG PICTURE GARDENING

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Big Picture Gardening « P.11

“Her approach makes it really easy to stay on top of things, because you’re not fighting Mother Nature” in terms of plant choice and placement, said Combs, a self-professed lazy gardener. “And you’re going to do more cutting and dropping of dead material, so that you’re returning carbon to the earth.” Like Combs, Chris Boffa is pleased with the landscaping Jope designed for his new home in Charlotte. He particularly appreciated her ability to integrate his and his wife’s ideas. “It was really a great combination of her listening, understanding us, and then that feeling of collaboration when you know you bring some interests and experience to the table and she incorporates that into what you’re doing,” he said. Boffa also values Jope’s use of local species that are sustainable, whether it’s crab apples that welcome birds at his rural home or salt-tolerant plants that 490BUY Shelburne Rd • Burlington, VT AMERICAN, BUY LOCAL thrive in an urban setting. As director 802.658.5444 • www.city-lights.com Shelburne Rd.,10-6, Burlington of construction management at Summit New490 Hours: Tues-Fri. Sat 10-5 802.658.5444 • www.city-lights.com Properties, Boffa has hired her for commercial projects, including rental properties Casavant Overlook and Parc Terrace in Winooski. Jope is good at N8v-citylights031721.indd 1 3/4/21 5:35 PM teamwork and serving a broad range of clients, he said, from someone who wants a bit of direction on a home plot to managers of large buildings. Even the pandemic hasn’t slowed business for Jope. Last year, she was busier than ever and attributed demand in part to “people paying more attention to their surroundings” and to “more of an interest in ecologically inspired gardens.” “I will always have customers who will just say from the very beginning, ‘I just want it to look good and not [be] a lot of work,’” Jope said. She can work with that. “But once I hear people saying, ‘I want to attract butterflies, and I heard about the monarchs, and what about milkweed?’ that’s when I get really excited … It can be a real source of inspiration, of beauty, of renewal, of play.” Overall, Jope wants “people to have a little bit more fun out there, to be less attached to a certain outcome, to go with the seasons a little bit more, looking at [gardens] more as a journey than a Get the newsletter featuring finished product.” notable news, arts and food stories A garden is not “a frozen piece of handpicked by our editors. art,” she emphasized, but “a living Sit back, relax and read up on what sculpture that changes with the seasons you may have missed.. over time.” m

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G A R DENI NG

Digging

No-Dig In his new book, Charlie Nardozzi shares how to grow more food with less work

COURTESY TESS ARENA

BY ME L IS S A PAS A N EN • pasanen@sevendaysvt.com

Charlie Nardozzi

In his new book, The Complete Guide to No-Dig Gardening, Charlie Nardozzi recalls his uncle tilling the home garden every spring. During horticulture school, he continues, “tilling and digging were touted as necessary to grow plants well.” In recent years, the North Ferrisburgh-based garden educator, writer and host of “All Things Gardening” on Vermont Public Radio has come to a very different conclusion. “I’m always experimenting in our garden, trying new ways of growing things,” Nardozzi, 62, told Seven Days. “What I’ve been noticing is that, as I do a lot more raised-bed gardening where I’m not really tilling anymore and not digging that much, those gardens are more and more productive.” His book offers all the details you need to get going. Nardozzi spoke with Seven Days about how no-dig techniques contribute to mitigating climate change, cut down on weeding

and might even help deter the notorious tomato hornworm. SEVEN DAYS: At least a few times every year, I pull my shovel out of the soil to see that I’ve unfortunately severed an earthworm in half. With no-dig gardening, that would never happen, right? CHARLIE NARDOZZI: Yes, and in fact there’s a lot more damage that you’re doing, and you don’t even know because you can’t really see it. This will make your mind explode. In a teaspoon of soil there are over 4 billion microbes: fungi, bacteria and protozoa. It’s because of those microbes that the soil has all that fertility and health. Any time you insert a shovel, you’re killing many microbes. DIGGING NO -DIG

ANY TIME YOU INSERT A SHOVEL, YOU’RE KILLING MANY MICROBES. CHARLIE NARDOZZI

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Digging No-Dig « P.15

The chop-and-drop method of harvesting

SD: In your book, you talk about the “lasagna method.” What is that? CN: [Laughs] You can call it a multilayered method or sheet composting, but the idea is that you’re layering organic materials on top of the existing soil. They will break down and eventually create that nice fertile soil for our no-dig bed. Determine where you’re going to be building the bed. If it’s on lawn grass, then mow it really low, leave the grass clippings and then start doing the layers on top with newspapers that have been moistened so they don’t blow around. If the spot has a lot of weeds like brambles or quackgrass with a strong root system, then put something a little more heavy-duty. Grab your Amazon boxes, take the staples and tape off, and lay them down. Then, on top, you build lots of different layers, just like with a lasagna: alternating grass clippings from an untreated lawn with straw, for example. You cap the whole thing with a layer of compost. If you do this in the fall, you can put a two- to threeinch layer of compost on top. By spring, you can plant right into it. If you start in the late winter or spring, you’ll have to wait a little longer or add a thicker layer of compost. SD: Is there a shortcut way to start? CN: The simplest way is to make a raised bed with a 50-50 mix of compost and topsoil. A lot of local garden centers will already have it premixed for you. SD: Now that we have our bed, how does no-dig gardening look different through the seasons? CN: I hardly even use hand tools when I’m planting, because the rich, fertile soil is so easy to push aside with my hand. And you won’t get as many weeds,

COURTESY OF CHARLIE NARDOZZI

SD: How can no-dig gardening help with climate change? CN: Every time you turn the soil, you’re releasing carbon into the atmosphere. In a small way as a backyard gardener, you can help mitigate some of the effects of global warming by not digging. A 3-by-6-foot bed is not going to save the world, but millions of gardens like that could help.

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because when you turn the soil, that’s just bringing weed seeds up. The philosophy is to keep the soil covered with something 12 months a year. During the growing season, we’re covering it with plants like leafy greens growing between our tomato plants. The benefit is, you’re leaving less room for weeds, and soil organisms are kept active working with those plants. In fact, if you want to do a little companion planting, there’s new scientific research out that shows which partners work best. One of them is to grow basil in amongst your tomatoes to ward off the tomato hornworm.

Then, after plants are harvested, you just chop and drop, leaving the roots in the soil and the stalks or leaves on the surface as a mulch. SD: That all makes sense, but with decomposing newspapers and spent plants, it could all look a bit messy. Do I just need to get over that? CN: It is a different aesthetic. You certainly can get around that a little bit. Let’s say you grew bush beans: Cut and leave the greens on the soil surface to let them die back a little. Then come in with a layer of compost, cover them and then plant your fall crops. That way you’re keeping the soil intact, you’re adding your organic matter, but you don’t necessarily have to be looking at it. m This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

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Samantha Ford speaking with Steve Goldstein at his home in Shelburne

Samantha Ford sees dead people — and brings them to life. An archaeologist of sorts, she digs into documents, not dirt. Instead of a spade and sieve, her tools are deeds and vital records.

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Turn Stone Research uncovers the stories that make history

Ford’s enterprise, Williston-based Turn Stone Research, can put the limbs on your family tree, find secrets buried beneath the hearth, or help you record and preserve your home’s historical records. While the future is unknowable, the past can literally be an open book. We found this out a few weeks ago when Ford, a 32-year-old Charlotte native, sat on the porch of our house on Falls Road in Shelburne and, like a latter-day Scheherazade, told the tale of the land. The road takes its name from the falls of the LaPlatte River, which powered a thriving commercial district in the 1800s and early 1900s, she told us. A towering sycamore, thought to be close to 200 years old, is a local landmark. Ford’s investigation revealed that the owner of a large swath of land surrounding a sawmill, gristmill, forge and woolen mill was Ira Allen (younger brother of Ethan), a lieutenant in the Green Mountain Boys and a land speculator who helped found the University of Vermont. To my wife and me — newcomers to the state — this connection to Vermont’s most famous family was, well, thrilling. “Allen didn’t live here, but he spent time here overseeing the building of the mills,” Ford explained. “Eventually, he sold the property to some other wealthy men.” And there was more: In the 1780s, a speculator named Thaddeus Tuttle bought the property, then sold the mills in 1795 to a Connecticut Yankee named Joshua Isham for “60 pounds of lawful money,” including “5 potash kettles.” That same year, Isham purchased the adjoining farmland holdings for “182 pounds of lawful money.” The land changed hands many times before Jeremy and Elizabeth Smardon bought it in 2005. Using architectural details of the Smardon house to aid her research, Ford determined that the structure was likely built in the 1890s and at one time housed a tannery and a carpentry business. Jeremy Smardon revived the carpentry operation before selling the house in 2017 to Scott Gardner of Building Energy in Williston. Gardner hoped to renovate the old house, but its poor condition ruled out

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that option and, following Shelburne Village historical district dictates, he constructed a near replica on the same site. Our 2020 home — on whose porch we sat — cost a hell of a lot more potash kettles. Ford unearthed this history by spending hours combing through town records and knowing where to look for them, skills that presaged a career. At 19, she’d already tried attending ColbySawyer College and Green Mountain College, and neither was able to keep her. Back home, her best friend’s mother offered her a job “so I had some stability until I figured out college,” Ford explained. The woman was then-Williston town clerk Deb Beckett, who hired

“So, yeah, I can’t imagine what I would be doing if I hadn’t taken Deb up on her offer,” Ford said. She called Beckett, who died last year, her “mentor and cheerleader.” Family legend has it that, at age 5, Ford was already watching the History Channel. Perhaps that made her more attentive to history close to home. One of the oldest buildings in the area, a log cabin built by French Canadian homesteader Antoine Lorraine and christened the Settlers’ House, had been located near the Ford home in East Charlotte. It was later moved to the grounds of the Shelburne Museum. “I was volunteering at the museum’s preservation and landscape department a few years ago,” Ford said, “and I found

IT’S AMAZING WHAT YOU CAN LEARN ABOUT FAMILIES BASED JUST OFF OF THEIR DEEDS AND VITAL RECORDS. SAMAN THA FORD

Ford as her administrative assistant. Ford thought a desk job came with chains, but “the office drew me in,” she said. She spent the next seven years there and eventually became assistant town clerk, as well as registrar of vital statistics, and learned the dark art of managing land records. “It’s amazing what you can learn about families based just off of their deeds and vital records,” Ford said. “Our Vermont records date back to the 1700s, and you can learn about someone’s lifestyle, their values, their families and their land.

photos of the cabin in the process of being moved and was able to pinpoint our property by means of an old ash tree.” When Ford was 14, she recalled, her grandfather took the family to an exhibit at the Timothy Knapp House in Rye, N.Y., the oldest residential dwelling in Westchester County. They were amazed to find an exhibit on “the Fords of Rye.” Grandpa Ford casually explained that he’d lived there as a youngster before going to boarding school. Ford was fascinated by this bit of family lore but didn’t know what to do with this interest until she was studying at

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UVM in 2012 and walked into a classroom MADE IN VERMONT, USA where Vermont history was being taught. “I remember sitting in that class and just being so overwhelmed and excited. I was like, Finally, someone has brought this full circle for me,” Ford recalled. Kevin Thornton, who taught the course, said Ford’s enthusiasm made an impression on him. “I was never very good at remembering students, but Sam was memorable,” he said in a phone interview. “She was an eager historical student and understood how you can find history in the landscape.” Ford enrolled in the historic preservation program — which is now on the chopping block at UVM (see Seven Days story on page 42) — and emerged with NOW AVAILABLE AT a master’s degree in 2013 and a vision of the path open to her. “I was totally floored that old buildings could be my career, and learning about them and saving them,” she said. But the Wild West lured her away for OR VISIT a couple of years. PLEASANTRANCH.COM Following graduation, Ford went to visit a friend in Wyoming and fell for the frontier. She snagged an internship and then a full-time job at the Jackson N8h-pleasantranch121620.indd 1 12/3/20 Hole Historical Society & Museum. She became an ardent student of Western history and was struck by the easy accessibility of historical structures. Her one complaint? They weren’t old enough. “I was really missing that magical 1700s date that was back here in Vermont,” Ford said. “And I started to get worried that, the more I was away from it, the more I would start to lose my training specifically to Vermont history and our landscape and the architecture.” She returned to the state in 2015. Ford launched Turn Stone Research about a year ago — perhaps not the best timing, at the beginning of a pandemic. But she knows there’s strong local interWork with an agent est in the past based on the historical who knows your market. field workshops she has led. Cady is a native Vermonter Not long ago, she said, while leading one of her walks, a participant asked, who understands the value “‘I’ve got an old house; I’d love for you to Vermont offers as come take a look at it and maybe do a title a place to call home. search to figure out who lived here — and how it changed over time.’” Noting the Reach out today! recorded age of the house, the person 802.238.5879 excitedly described it as “a once in a 200year opportunity” to uncover its secrets. cady@rrvermont.com “That,” said Ford, a smile evident in her eyes, “was a really neat take on what I do.” m

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F UR NI S HI NG S Grace Elletson at her studio in Shelburne

Color Coordinator Grace Elletson gives vintage furniture a makeover BY MAR GA R ET G R AY S O N • margaret@sevendaysvt.com

BEAR CEARI

MARGARET GRAYSON

Grace Elletson remembers walking into her grandmother’s house and noticing a new deep-blue chest in the hallway. She loved it immediately. “Where did that come from?” she asked. Her grandmother said that the chest had always been in the hallway but that Elletson’s mother had recently painted over the dark-brown wood. “I noticed it when it was painted because it just lit the whole hallway,” Elletson said. “You use the modernity of paint to accentuate the vintage shape of it, which I love. So then I was like, ‘I love painted furniture … I want to paint furniture.’” After moving to Vermont in 2019 for a reporter job at VTDigger.org, Elletson started doing just that. First, she found secondhand furniture she wanted for her apartment and gave it a fresh coat of paint. Before long, she was selling pieces online under the name Graceful Designs. Today, Elletson works out of an old milking COLOR COORDINATOR

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stall in a barn-turned-artist-collective in Shelburne, though you wouldn’t know it from looking at her photos. Her feed displays sleek furniture with shiny hardware, staged smartly against a white wall and wood floor — really a makeshift wall and a patch of laminate flooring set up for exactly this purpose. Elletson, 23, grew up in Cape Cod in Massachusetts and attended Ithaca College in New York. She said she inherited her interior design sensibilities and frugality from her mom. “She was just so good at making spaces look beautiful when we had no money,” Elletson said. “I bring that to refurbishing, because I take furniture that is on its last leg. People are throwing it out.” Transforming a large piece of furniture, such as a desk or a dresser, from junkyard-bound to Insta-ready requires some 20 hours of work. Elletson sands and primes every part of the wood, hand-paints, sprays a topcoat, and often replaces the hardware. Some pieces need more repairs, if a drawer is falling apart or a leg is wobbly. Elletson, who said she’s dedicated her life to journalism since she was 15, appreciates having something else to focus on when she’s off the clock. Sanding the top of a dresser is a welcome distraction from covering Burlington politics. “I love the therapy that this brings me on the weekends, where I can just keep my brain from thinking about things that are going to drive me nuts,” Elletson said. “I think about fun stuff that’s going to drive me nuts instead.” Painting furniture is not without controversy — as evidenced by the comments on Elletson’s TikTok page. She sometimes posts her process and finished pieces on the video-sharing app, and one particular video was viewed more than 400,000

times. Though some commenters loved it, others decried her use of paint on a midcentury-modern piece. “I have all these people commenting being like, ‘How dare you paint this desk?’” Elletson recalled. “And I’m trying

to explain to people, sometimes you just have to paint a piece of furniture because veneer’s peeling, or there are chunks missing out of the wood. Also, people just don’t have an affinity for brown furniture like they used to.”

Still, she understands the purists to a certain extent. “That’s why 90 percent of the furniture that I paint is furniture that is irreparable — the wood simply can’t be restored,” she said. Elletson tries to resist trends and pick muted tones or timeless colors, such as black and white. But sometimes she lets herself lean into her love of pink and other bright shades. “I treat this as an art,” she said. “You have to sometimes just do what your soul wants you to do with a certain color and a certain piece. And at the end of the day, you can always repaint it.” Elletson also shares tips on her social media pages. “I don’t want to be the only one who’s saving old furniture,” she said. “I want old furniture everywhere to be saved.” When scouting for vintage pieces, she suggests not being afraid to check out the ugliest pieces, because sometimes they have the best bones. She pays attention to joinery, particularly on drawers; dovetail joints or — the holy grail — pin-and-cove joints are a sign of a quality vintage piece. She also sometimes snags tables with laminate tops, because with sanding and the right primer, laminate can be painted to match the wood. For hardware, Elletson shops at D. Lawless Hardware, Amazon and Etsy. She likes to keep vintage hardware if she thinks it matches the overall look of the piece. Her primary rule is not to worry too much about other people’s opinions. “Give yourself a pink dresser. Who cares if some baby boomer is going to look at it and be like, ‘How dare you paint that vintage dresser hot pink?’ You’re building a space to feel happy in,” Elletson said. “You can break interior design rules if breaking those rules produces happiness in your home.” m

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See Grace Elletson’s work on Instagram and TikTok at @graceful_designs_vt.

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