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Great Getaway of the
Month
Manchester, Vermont
Winter Wonderland
By Nancy and Richard Woodworth
In winter, few snow-clad mountain towns are more
alluring – or more accessible to most of us in the Northeast – than
Manchester in southwestern Vermont.
It’s a destination for skiers, who favor the runs at
Bromley, and for cross-country skiers, who like the trails at Hildene.
It’s a destination for shoppers, especially at the designer outlet
stores. And it’s a destination for visitors seeking cozy lodging and
hearty meals spanning a broad spectrum of prices.
A year-round resort area in the shadow of Mount
Equinox, Manchester is as favored for skiing today as it was for golf,
fly-fishing and escapes from urban life in the old days. Mrs. Abraham
Lincoln and her sons spent summers at the early Equinox Hotel as prelude
to the family’s adopting Manchester Village as its summer home.
The famous Manchester everyone knows and loves is
really Manchester Village, a mile-long stretch along Route 7A that is
vintage New England: a stately lineup of elegant white, black-shuttered
clapboard homes centered on the Equinox, still the area's premier resort
hotel. These days, Manchester’s Norman Rockwell charm as exemplified by
the village co-exists with designer-outlet chic in the other Manchesters
– Manchester Depot and Manchester Center, home to increasing numbers of
upscale outlet stores as handsome and affluent as the customers they
serve
The large, rambling Orvis headquarters store on
Route 7A in the village is just down the road from where Charles Orvis
started his fishing tackle business in 1856. The American Museum of
Fly Fishing on Route 7A displays the beautiful flies of Mary Orvis
Marbury plus more than 1,000 rods and reels owned by such luminaries as
Bing Crosby and Dwight Eisenhower.
Hildene, 940 Hildene Road off Route 7A,
Manchester Village.
President Abraham Lincoln’s descendants lived until
1975 in this 24-room Georgian Revival mansion on 412 acres surrounded by
mountains.
Named to convey “hill” and “valley,” the grand house
was built in 1905 by Robert Todd Lincoln, the only one of the
president’s four sons to live into adulthood. He had been drawn to the
area by Edward Isham, his Chicago law partner, who had a summer home
named for local Revolutionary War hero Gideon Ormsby in front of the
acreage that Lincoln purchased.
Guided tours, now offered year-round, begin with an
orientation slide show in the Carriage Barn visitor center. The
fascinating house contains family memorabilia and original furnishings,
including the 1,000-pipe Aeolian organ, said to be the oldest
residential pipe organ with a player attachment still in its original
location and in working order. A tune from one of its 242 rolls is
played on every tour.
Among Hildene’s treasures are one of the president’s
last three surviving stovepipe hats, a mirror from the White House
dressing room where the president is believed to have last glanced at
himself before heading out to Ford’s Theater the night he was
assassinated, and a number of volumes from the president's library.
In season, the formal gardens are magnificent, and
walking paths lead into the Battenkill Valley.
Winter visitors enjoy cross-country skiing and
snowshoeing around the scenic grounds. The 14 kilometers of walking
trails become ski trails with varying levels of difficulty. The Ski
Pavilion next to the visitor center becomes a warming hut and rental
shop.
(802) 362-1788. www.hildene.org. Open daily for
self-guided tours 9:30 to 4:30, guided tours at noon daily in summer and
by appointment. Adults $16, youths $5.
Southern Vermont Arts Center, West Road,
Manchester Village.
Its mountainside setting high up the slope of Mount
Equinox makes this art museum and performing arts center unique and so
popular it now operates year-round.
Hatched by five men who would come to be known as
the Dorset Painters, the oldest cultural institution in Vermont offers a
variety of art exhibitions and related activities throughout the year.
Inside a 28-room Georgian Colonial mansion known as
Yester House are ten galleries with changing art exhibits. Behind it is
the Elizabeth deC. Wilson Museum, a stunning contemporary facility with
soaring, skylit spaces in which to display the center’s 800-piece
permanent collection of 19th- and 20th-century works as well as frequent
traveling exhibitions. The center’s performance space, the 400-seat
Arkell Pavilion, hosts frequent concerts and theater productions.
The expansive lower meadow and rolling lawns provide
a dramatic showplace for internationally known sculptors whose works
come and go in the mobile Sculpture Garden. For summer visitors, the
sprawling 407-acre “campus” includes the Boswell Botany Trail, a
three-quarter-mile walk past hundreds of wildflowers and 67 varieties of
Vermont ferns, all identified by Manchester Garden Club members who
maintain it.
The Garden Café is a fine place for lunch or Sunday
brunch in season..
(802) 362-1405. www.svac.org. Open
Tuesday-Saturday 10 to 5, Sunday noon to 5 (closed Sunday,
January-April)..
The American Museum of Fly Fishing, 4070 Main
St., Manchester.
This one-of-a-kind institution holds the largest
collection of fly-fishing paraphernalia, art and artifacts in the world.
The oldest documented flies are among the 20,000 flies in the Mary Orvis
Marbury collection at the museum, which moved in 2004 from its location
near the Equinox resort to larger quarters just south of the Orvis
flagship store. On display are more than 1,000 rods and reels owned by
such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, Bing Crosby, Babe Ruth and Dwight
Eisenhower.
(802) 362-3300. www.amff.com. Open
Tuesday-Saturday 10 to 4. Adults $5, children $3, family $10.
Bromley, Route 11, Manchester Center.
Six miles east of Manchester Center, Bromley was the
area’s first ski resort, and is cherished for its sunny, south-facing
trails that make for pleasant skiing on cold days. It is also known for
wide, easy skiing on manicured slopes – not for nothing is one of our
old favorites called Boulevard. The newer East Face has some challenging
runs, for example Havoc, which our then teenagers liked for its moguls,
and Pabst Peril, for its steep cruising. The area is proud of its
firsts: first slopeside nursery, first major snowmaking installation –
and its awards for family programs, trail grooming and value. Ten lifts
take skiers and snowboarders up the 1,334-foot vertical rise. Winter is
not its only gig. The Bromley Thrill Zone bills itself as Vermont’s
largest summer fun park, with an alpine slide, a water slide, space
bikes, go-karts, a 24-foot climbing wall ride and, oh yes, scenic
chairlift rides.
(802) 824-5522. www.bromley.com. Open 10 to 5
daily, mid-June to Labor Day; weekends in June and September to
mid-October. Winter, open daily 9 to 4, from 8:30 on weekends. Lift
tickets: adults, $65 weekends, $49 midweek; teens aged 13 to 17, $55
weekends, $49 midweek; juniors aged 6 to 12, $39 weekends, $39 midweek.
SHOPPING. It’s a stretch to call this “Fifth
Avenue in the Mountains,” as some do. But shopping certainly is big
business, more than in similar resort areas, as evident from all the
designer outlets that have moved into the area in the last two decades.
The designer outlets – more than 120 and counting – are spread along
Main Street and Depot Street (the principal Routes 7 and 11/30
respectively) in Manchester Center. They’re housed in new clapboard
buildings and old, individually or collectively, with convenient parking
but good pedestrian access between them. Over-all, the combination is
more inviting than, say, North Conway or Freeport. The most distinctive
are high-end: Giorgio Armani, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Baccarat,
Coach, Escada, Anichini, Peruvian Connection and such.
Some of our favorites are longer established. The
Frog Hollow Vermont State Craft Center is a big draw among the Equinox
Village Shops across from the Equinox resort in Manchester Village.
Gallery North Star is one of Vermont’s better art galleries.
The large and rambling Orvis Flagship Store is part
fishing museum, part natural history center and a total shopping
experience, from the predictable fishing gear to clothing, home
furnishings, gifts, kitchenware and specialty foods. It has an indoor
trout pond and a private gun room, but for some the attraction is the
store’s centerpiece stained-glass window, a sixteen-by-twelve-foot
beauty called “The Lure of the Fly.” It took a local craftsman three
months and 1,100 pieces of glass to create.
The Jelly Mill & Friends Marketplace is a fun,
four-story collection of shops in a century-old dairy barn. It typifies
more traditional Vermont merchandising, from toys to apparel to gifts to
crafts, plus a good little restaurant called The Buttery.
(Material
updated from The Ultimate New England
Getaway Guide, by Nancy and Richard Woodworth. Copyright 2006.)
Wood Pond Press
365 Ridgewood Road
West Hartford, CT 06107
Phone: (860) 521-0389
© Copyright 2012
All rights reserved.
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