Richmond, Vermont: The Sixteen-Sided Church

Richmond sits where the Winooski River emerges from the Green Mountain foothills. The town was created by the Vermont legislature on October twenty-seventh, seventeen ninety-four. But it is best known for something built nearly twenty years later.

In eighteen twelve and eighteen thirteen, a carpenter named William Rhodes led local craftsmen in constructing a meeting house for five Protestant congregations that shared the building and shared the cost. To accommodate everyone equally, they built it with sixteen sides, round enough for community but square enough to frame with timber. It still stands, a National Historic Landmark and likely the only surviving sixteen-sided meeting house in North America. The Round Church, as everyone calls it, is the kind of structure that stops travelers in their tracks. Richmond today is a small commuter town of around four thousand, with that improbable polygon at its center.