A schoolhouse turned double house
The Shearer and Corser Double House at Summer Street in St. Johnsbury began around 1854 as a one-room schoolhouse, was moved to its present site in 1864, served briefly as an armory, and was converted into a two-family residence by Leroy Shearer and Brackett Corser after 1878. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994.
A schoolhouse was moved and became an armory
Near here stands the Shearer and Corser Double House, a wood-frame house now split into two homes. It began life around 1854 as a one-room schoolhouse at the corner of Summer and Winter Streets. In 1864, the town picked the whole building up and moved it to its present spot. For a while afterward, it served as an armory, storing guns and gear for local militia before it ever became anyone's home.
Shearer and Corser split the building in two
Leroy Shearer and Brackett Corser bought the building from Fairbanks in 1878. The house still carries their two names. Historians credit the pair with turning the old schoolhouse into a proper two-family residence, cutting it into matching halves with their own entrances. By a tax sale record in 1883, it was already listed as a double house, so the split happened fast.
An owner added the two-story porch out front
Sometime in the 1910s, an owner added the two-story porch that still runs across the front. Tuscan columns hold up its roof, and low metal balustrades trim the shingled skirts below. By then the house had passed through several hands, each one leaving the two front doors and their shared stone lintel alone.
The house earned National Register recognition in 1994
In 1994, the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places, recognized for its mix of Italianate and Colonial Revival work layered onto a schoolhouse frame. Inside, the two halves still carry original 19th-century woodwork. Beyond the house, Summer Street carries its own older history: the ground where the county courthouse now stands was once a burial ground, used from 1790 until families moved its dead to Mount Pleasant Cemetery in the 1850s. Archaeologists later found 144 grave shafts still there, under what is now a courthouse lawn.
The double front doors and shared porch still mark where one schoolhouse became two family homes.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.