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YANKEE MAGAZINE DEEMS BRANDON A HIDDEN JEWEL: Town is Named as One of Five Extraordinary Places to Live in New England |
| The May 2004 issue of YANKEE Magazine deems Brandon, Vermont one of New England’s "Hidden Jewels." Brandon is one of five communities named an "extraordinary place to live." Reprinted with permission from Yankee Magazine: Deciding where to live can be exhausting, frustrating, and expensive. So many factors come into the mix. With the spike in real estate values in most of New England in the past few years, prices for starter homes now exceed $200,000 (or even $300,000) in many cities and towns. Price aside, there are plenty of other things that we look for when considering where to live. We want a place that is safe and offers a sense of community. We seek tranquility, but not boredom. We want a home that will prove a wise investment. We want convenient access to goods and services, but we don’t want to see the back of a Wal-Mart from our living room window. We want to move to a place where, 10 years from now, we’ll be delighted with the decision we made. We searched for New England towns and cities that had certain highly desirable qualities. First, they had to be affordable, with decent homes available for about $150,000 or less. Second, they had to be communities that were on the rise — cities and towns that are good places to live now and are likely to be even more desirable a decade from now. We found five such communities (we had to relax our price standards a bit for Connecticut, which has some of the highest priced real estate in the country), as well as one place not far from New England where you can still find a reasonably priced vacation home near the ocean. Here are our picks. … Brandon, Vermont In late 2002, folk artist Warren Kimble and others to thinking about how to support the arts in this town on the western slope of the Green Mountains. They hit upon the idea of getting sponsors to buy full-size white fiberglass pigs, which would then be painted by artists in town and auctioned off. "We got 40 people to put up $500 each for the pigs, which was remarkable," says Kimble, who’s lived in Brandon for 34 years. Those pigs, displayed around town all summer and auctioned in the fall, raised about $120,000 to support the artists’ guild and arts programs in the schools. (They’ll do it again this year, but with birdhouses instead of pigs.) It’s the kind of community project that tells you something about a town. "I’ve always said that people care about people here in Brandon," says Kimble. "You know your neighbor. There’s contentment." Recently there has been a revival in Brandon. "The whole town has really come alive over the past couple of years," says Fred Rowe of Rowe Real Estate. Kimble agrees and notes that he moved his studio and gallery to downtown Brandon last year for just that reason, renovating a large downtown building for the purpose. Brandon offers a lot. All 243 buildings in the core village are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Two cascading waterfalls give the village a dramatic touch. There’s a charming historic covered bridge. Walking around town, you can browse through shops and galleries, ambling past resaurants, the library, the town hall, and a grocery store, all of which make downtown a destination for visitors as well as for the town’s 4,000 residents. Brandon is well situated, 15 miles from Lake Champlain, 15 miles from the college town of Middlebury, and 15 miles from Rutland, which has plenty of shopping and services, including a commercial shuttle from its small airport to Boston. Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, is 60 miles to the north. The town has an appealing housing stock as well. "Brandon has a lot of older homes — Federals, Greek Revivals, and Victorians," says Rowe. Some of the larger ones that have been restored are selling in the $300,000 range, or more. But smaller homes and those on side streets or outside the village can be had for much less. Rowe mentions an in-town Italianate Victorian with a barn, four bedrooms, one bath, and almost 2,000 square feet of living space that sold last year for $102,000. A classic Greek Revival with columns on the porch, four bedrooms, and two baths went for $125,000. Outside the village, Rowe says, an early-1800s Country Cape with three bedrooms, one bath, and a two-car garage, all surrounded by preserved farmland, sold for $140,000." Other New England towns/cities selected in Yankee Magazine’s "Hidden Jewels" are Keene, New Hampshire; Bath, Maine; North Adams, Massachusetts; and Lebanon, Connecticut. Back to other media articles about Brandon |
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