Virtual Walking Tour: Main Street, Manchester Center

Along the west branch of the Battenkill River stretches Main Street in Manchester Center, a picturesque New England downtown with parks, restaurants, and our famous bookstore. In the Factory Point era, it was an industrial center, producing woolen blankets for Union soldiers and leather goods from the tannery, with teamsters hauling blocks of marble from the quarries on Mt. Aeolus… and a vampire tale! Join Bill Badger and MHS curator Shawn Harrington for a look back at the transformation along Main Street from the eighteenth century through today.

GUEST SPEAKERS:
Bill Badger is a 1970 magna cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College (B.A. Art History, Phi Beta Kappa) and a 1974 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Fine Arts (M. Architecture). He received a summer fellowship in Early American Arts and Decorative Arts from Historic Deerfield and a Dales Traveling Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania. For several summers he worked as an architectural historian for the Historic American Building Survey (U.S. Department of Interior). He is a founding member and current Membership Chair of the Rutland Railroad Historical Society. Bill has been a dedicated board member of MHS for several decades. He and his wife, Pam, live in Manchester.

Shawn Harrington serves as Curator of the Manchester Historical Society and is a lifelong resident of Bennington County. His interest in history began at an early age when -as a second grader – he discovered The Shires of Bennington: A Pictorial History of a Vermont County (edited by Tyler Resch, Bennington Historical Society, 1975) in the library at the Shaftsbury Elementary School. Over the past 8 years, he has been digitizing the thousands of pieces in the MHS collection to use for outreach and education at local schools, as well as in print and social media. He has worked for the past two decades in the financial services industry with a tenure as a member of the New York Stock Exchange and resides in Manchester Center with his two sons.