Derby Center, Vermont

Derby Center is the historic village core of Derby, Vermont, in the heart of the Northeast Kingdom near the Canadian border. Derby was chartered in seventeen seventy-nine and occupies a ridge between Lake Memphremagog to the west and the Clyde River drainage to the east. The adjacent town of Derby Line, a few miles north, is famous for the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, a building deliberately straddling the international border, with the entrance in Vermont and the stage in Quebec.

Derby Center itself is the quieter half, a classic Vermont common town with the town hall, church, and library arranged around a green that has not changed its essential outline in two centuries. The Northeast Kingdom's defining quality, that sense of being slightly outside the main current of things, sits especially heavy this close to the border, where the nearest large city is Montreal, not Burlington.