BRATTLEBORO —
Brooks House was one of the largest hotels in New England, a popular summer resort, and a year-around meeting place for citizenry. Its verandah served as a viewing stand for majestic parades and afforded a view of activities along the entire length of Main Street.
The hotel was famous in New York and Boston, and many elegant parties were held in the spacious ballroom. As a “stagecoach” and rail hostelry, it was a transportation center without equal for miles around.
It is considered one of the finest extant examples of the provincial Second Empire style, once common for hotels and commercial buildings throughout the country.
George Jones Brooks, a native of Brattleboro, made his fortune as a dry goods wholesaler in San Francisco during the early days of the California gold rush. Homesickness brought him back to Brattleboro in the 1860s, and he commenced to lavish his fortune upon a number of public projects.
Apart from the Brooks House itself, which was viewed more as an act of civic philanthropy than as a profit-making venture, he also constructed the Brooks public library as a gift to the town.
In 1869, a catastrophic fire wiped out the entire south side of Main Street bounded by the two principal intersections, Elliot and High Streets. Totally razed in this October 31st disaster were the Blake Block, originally a Federal style private house and later an inn with retail shopfronts; the Brattleboro House, the town's major stage house at that time; and other important buildings.
In 1870, George J. Brooks bought most of this charred land from Charles Chapin and commissioned E. Boyden & Son of Worcester, a major commercial architectural firm of the time, to design a hotel in the then-fashionable Second Empire style.
The style seems to have originated in New York City, but quickly spread to smaller cities and larger towns throughout the country. Other examples that were similar to the Brooks House were the St. Julian Hotel in Portland, Maine;Newton's Hotel in Woodbury, N.J., and especially the Towsley House Hotel in Waterloo, N.Y., which was so similar to the Brooks House in general plan and detail as to suggest that Boyden & Son had plagiarized it.
However, the Brooks House was considerably larger than any of these, and was quite possibly the largest Second Empire structure outside of New York City.
Interestingly, in 1871, the same year construction began, the plans for the nation's two largest and “full-blown” Second Empire buildings, the City Hall of Philadelphia (John McArthur Jr.) and the Executive Office Building of Washington, D.C. (Alfred B. Mullet), had just been placed on the drawing board.
These and other grandiose public buildings in the most elaborate French manner are similar to the Brooks House only in the most basic concepts of Second Empire, and hence the Brooks House and similar buildings have to be called “provincial” Second Empire.
The total cost of the land and the building thereon was in the vicinity of $150,000, suggesting that George Brooks spared no expense in making it the Brooks House superior among the hotels of New England.
For its opening, in an attempt both to justify the construction of so large a hotel in such a relatively small town, and to attract clientele, a prospectus was printed and widely distributed. It read, in part:
“The desire, so marked, of late years, to turn the tide of Summer Travel from the current of the European Tour, formerly so fashionable, to a trip among the Mountains, Valleys, and Sea-Coasts of America, is gradually producing the desirable result of causing to be provided for our home tourists the proper hotel accommodations.
“It has been with the view of aiding in perfecting these facilities for home travel, during the coming seasons, that in the beautiful town of Brattleboro, Vermont, at the head of the Connecticut Valley, and amid the glories of scenery and healthful atmosphere of the Green Mountains, there has been erected a hotel building, which, in all its departments, is the equal of the best establishments in the Metropolis."
Although Brattleboro's population at the time was only 6,000, the town was a major rail transportation center, a thriving industrial community (home of the Estey Organ Works), and a recipient of the largesse of its most famous native son, Jim Fisk, the robber baron of the Erie Railroad.
Contemporary newspaper accounts indicate that the Brooks House was a great success from the beginning, and continued to have high occupancy rates until the middle of the twentieth century, when competition from motels caused its decline.
Every Main Street has (or should have) its dominant landmark structure, and the Brooks House remains conspicuous not only because of its size, its central location at the principal intersection, and its aristocratic Second Empire style, but also because the combination of these factors gives it a towering presence among the cluster of also-but-not-equally impressive brick buildings of the nineteenthcentury downtown area.
Brattleboro in particular, and the architectural preservation movement in general, are indeed fortunate that one man, Norman B. Chase, saved the Brooks House from demolition in 1970.