A schoolhouse turned Colonial Revival duplex
The Shearer and Corser Double House on Summer Street in St. Johnsbury began around 1854 as a schoolhouse at Summer and Winter Streets, was moved to its present site in 1864 to serve as a town armory, and was converted into a two-family residence after Leroy Shearer and Brackett Corser bought it from Franklin Fairbanks in 1878.
A schoolhouse was moved and became an armory
The Shearer and Corser Double House started life as a plain schoolhouse, built around 1854 at the corner of Summer and Winter Streets. Ten years later, the town moved the whole building to its current spot on Summer Street. Once there, it stopped teaching children and started storing weapons, serving as the local armory.
Fairbanks sold the schoolhouse to Shearer and Corser
In 1870, the town sold the building to Franklin Fairbanks, co-owner of the Fairbanks Scale Works, the town's biggest employer. The Fairbanks family had laid out Summer Street itself and shaped how it grew. Fairbanks held the building only eight years before selling it in 1878 to Leroy Shearer and Brackett Corser. The two men are credited with turning it into a two-family house, the layout a tax record still showed in 1883.
A Colonial Revival porch was added to the duplex
After the 1883, tax sale, the double house passed through a string of owners. The building kept its two-family shape, each half with its own front door and its own staircase. Sometime in the 1910s, somebody added the porch that still runs across the front of the house today. It's a two-story Colonial Revival porch, held up by Tuscan columns, with shingled skirts and low metal railings on top. The two entrances sit side by side in the center of the house.
The double house joined the National Register in 1994
In 1994, the Shearer and Corser Double House was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The listing recognized its mix of styles: Italianate brackets and cornices from its earlier life, and the Colonial Revival porch added decades later. The corner pilasters on the building's edges still rise up to a bracketed cornice, a detail that may date back to the Fairbanks family's ownership or to Shearer and Corser themselves after 1878. Nobody is certain which of them added the Italianate touches. Inside, the two halves of the house still mirror each other, and some original 19th-century woodwork survives in each unit.
The house stands on Summer Street, between Webster and Mt. Pleasant Streets, in a quiet residential stretch northwest of downtown St. Johnsbury. A short walk away, the Maple Street–Clarks Avenue Historic District holds a cluster of 19th-century homes built for Irish and French Canadian immigrant families, some arranged in courtyards to support large extended households. Closer still, the Caleb H. Marshall House tells a similar story of a single building serving many uses: built around 1858, it later became one of the town's first sanatoriums during the 1918 flu epidemic before being carved into apartments.
The double house still stands on Summer Street, its two front doors and shared porch marking a dwelling built for two families rather than one.
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