The Old Round Church
Near Burlington, Vermont
The Old Round Church of Richmond, Vermont is not actually round. It has sixteen sides, built between eighteen twelve and eighteen thirteen by self-taught carpenter William Rhodes, making it one of the rarest surviving building forms in North America and possibly the only sixteen-sided meeting house left on the continent. Five Protestant congregations, with Congregationalists holding most of the pews, pooled resources to build it as a shared house of worship and community meeting hall, an unusual act of ecumenical cooperation on the Vermont frontier.
Rhodes adapted patterns from architectural guidebooks of the period and produced a form so distinctive that people immediately called it the Round Church, a name that stuck despite the geometry. Some retellings say that the sixteen-sided shape was deliberate: a house with no corners leaves nowhere for the devil to hide. The National Park Service designated it a National Historic Landmark in nineteen ninety-six.
