Bradford, Vermont

Bradford, Vermont was chartered in seventeen seventy and settled where a falls on the Waits River drops into the Connecticut, a classic New England combination of waterpower and trade route. By the early eighteen hundreds, Bradford had a tannery, a woolen mill, and a small but active commercial main street that served the surrounding hill farms of Orange County. The town is best remembered today for the Bradford Academy, founded in eighteen twenty, which for generations educated students from across the upper Connecticut Valley. It remains a working small town, the commercial center of a stretch of river valley where farming and forestry still define the rhythm of the year.