Brownington: Alexander Twilight's Granite School

In eighteen twenty-three, a man named Alexander Twilight graduated from Middlebury College, becoming the first Black person to earn a college degree in the United States. He came to Brownington, a small hill town in the Northeast Kingdom, as principal of the Orleans County Grammar School. Thirteen years later he built Athenian Hall with his own hands, a massive four-story granite building that served as a dormitory and school, the first granite public building in Vermont.

That same year, eighteen thirty-six, he won a seat in the Vermont House of Representatives, making him the first African American elected to any state legislature in the country, and the only one to serve before the Civil War. That building still stands in Brownington as the Old Stone House Museum, a quiet monument to a man who preceded most of American history's milestones by decades.