The rich architectural history is displayed by well-maintained structures that exhibit a variety of styles, including Colonial, Greek Revival, Italianate, and Queen Anne. This architectural landscape of exceptional beauty and diversity sits against a landscape that varies dramatically from the broad, intensely-farmed Mettawee Valley to the abrupt hills of North Pawlet.
The Town Hall, in Pawlet Village, is a two story Victorian Italianate structure. It has served Town government continuously since it was built in 1881. Though rearranged inside, its exterior is untouched. Across from the Town Hall, on a small green, stands the former Village School. It is a Queen Anne-Colonial Revival structure, built in 1911. Superseded by a new school in North Pawlet, recent careful restoration has converted it to a beautiful Town library.
Also in the Village, Mach's General Store sells items from groceries to hardware and provides an informal meeting place for the local populace. Built by Joseph Fitch in 1808, this was the first brick building erected in Pawlet. Fitch's Tavern and Inn is not only historic, but also unique in construction in that it extends it over the Flower Brook Gorge. A portal in the center of the store allows visitors to look directly down into the Gorge to the brook below. It may be the only indoor fishing hole in Vermont. The building today remains largely as constructed in 1808. In addition to the store and apartments, an annex holds a stone oven, organic pizza bakery.
The West Pawlet Village retains much of its character from the heyday of the slate industry. That industry had declined to only a vestige by the 1970's, impacted substantially by manufactured roofing materials. Toward the end of the twentieth century the industry greatly revived, fed by a Japanese appetite for natural building material and the consequences of the Berkeley, California fire, which spawned regulations that shifted the high-end housing market from cedar shingles to fireproof, slate roofing.
The revival employs contemporary industrial methods, but the vestiges of Victorian methods remain in evidence. Although the quarry poles that supported networks of cables for hauling slate from the pits have largely rotted and fallen, the massive piles of waste slate, often carefully stacked against encroachment on roads and parts of the West Pawlet Village, remain. Quarries extend all along the twenty-five mile vein that is the largest deposit of colored slate in the world. Most are small, independent operations. The Slate Valley Museum in nearby Granville, New York has displays, exhibits, presentations, and important photographic documentation about all aspects of the history, current operations, and science of slate quarrying in the area.
Several one-room schoolhouses survive in the Town. One schoolhouse in West Pawlet was constructed in 1880. The Pawlet Historical Society, founded in 1973, owns two of these one-room brick schoolhouses and has begun to renovate them extensively. The Society publishes a newsletter three times a year with articles of local interest, including the winning historical essays written annually by the sixth grade school children. It arranges four programs a year for the membership and the general public.
Only two churches remain standing from those built during Pawlet's history, West Pawlet's Baptist Church from 1881 and Pawlet Village's Methodist Church from 1841. The Methodist church is Gothic Revival structure built to replace a former church that burned. The replacement church also suffered a fire that destroyed its original steeple. The Church made do with an inferior substitute steeple for many years. Years of fund-raising suppers and supportive donations allowed the Church to commission a new steeple that replicates the original one. It was finally erected in 2004. Besides the history revealed in structures, several cemeteries in the Town provide historic interest.
Pawlet's varied economic past has created unique historic and cultural matters of interest. The rich farmland in the broad Mettawee Valley and other smaller valleys excited original settlers. Farming subsequently moved up into the hills as well. As early as 1768, a gristmill was established in Pawlet Village. The available water power supported substantial industry in the Village in the nineteenth century, including the manufacture of Philo Stewart's cast iron cook stoves. The advent of electrical power caused small centers of water-powered industry to fade. The creative economy has replaced the industrial one: Studios and galleries of art and craft now dot the Village and further parts of the Town. One may find ceramics, paintings, handcrafted lampshades, and traditional and contemporary sculpture.
Creativity manifests in small-scale manufacture that ranges from pickles with local ingredients to maple product specialties. In early spring, about mud season time, the Town is dotted with plumes of steam rising from small sugarhouses boiling maple sap into syrup. Warm sweet syrup fresh from the evaporator and the roar of the great fire in the arch below create memories that linger forever.
Despite more than a century of changes, farming and quarrying remain the heart of the Town's economy and its most visible activities. They are the shapers of landscape. The quarries on the west side of town display the drama of mining, opening portals into the earth's ancient geology. Broad farm fields open vistas of valley against the rising hills. The height of cornstalks measures the passage of summer. Patches of bright green smaller fields punctuate the forests on the hills. Cows and sheep animate the meadows, and hawks soar in the wide skies. Old pictures of the Town reveal a landscape largely clear of forest, which had been cut for fuel and potash. The massive return of forest since the late nineteenth century testifies to Nature's resilience. The logging that once more contributes to the local economy now proceeds with care so as not to mar the landscape.
Pawlet has sought to preserve its rural and natural character and to support the farming economy by working with the Nature Conservancy and the Vermont Land Trust to protect open spaces, productive agricultural lands, while providing needed financial resources for farmers.
The Mettawee River flows through many scenic vistas spanning the Town from the southeast to the northwest. Button Falls in North Pawlet roars with its volume. It grows in size as it gathers from numerous tributaries and wetlands that support varied wildlife. It provides swimming and boating recreation, and excellent fishing. The largest tributary, Flower Brook, issues into a scenic mill pond in Pawlet Village. Flower Brook has its own large tributary, Beaver Brook. These two, and numerous other tributaries to the Mettawee, offer many additional fishing opportunities.
Everywhere rises a backdrop of hills. Woodlawn Mountain, Pawlet's highest, lies to the east, its three peaks rising even taller across the Town line into Danby. To the west lies the long line of The Pattern. Haystack Mountain, the Town's distinctive natural emblem, rises abruptly from the valley in North Pawlet. Conserved land, it offers an easy trail to its summit. Climbing it yields the reward of a view that is very great in proportion to the small effort the trail requires.
Haystack is southernmost of "three sisters". Middle and Bald Mountain complete the trio that forms the centerpiece of the north Pawlet hills, where approximately two thousand acres of unbroken forest survives, undeveloped and practically unimpacted by any human use since its beginnings after the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age. The forest is home to two unique natural communities, one of hickory-hop hornbeam and the other of dry elfin oak, both found on the south-facing aspects of the hills.
These unique communities also appear on the south-facing aspects of hills collectively named "The Pattern" that define the west side of the Mettawee Valley. The Pattern also comprises a wilderness that extends for fifteen miles, crossed in one place only by an active Town road. Another unique forest community, this one of sycamore, lies in to the southwest of River Road, the connector between Pawlet and West Pawlet.
Hunting opportunities abound, from birds to deer and even bear. Since Pawlet became the point for reintroduction of the wild turkey to Vermont more than fifty years ago, its habitat has proved ideal nurture for increasing flocks. Besides excellent hunting, Pawlet offers many opportunities to observe wildlife. The ubiquitous margins of wood and meadow afford great variety for the bird watcher. Attention at dawn or dusk will uncover dozens of species. Hawks are never absent from the summer skies, drawn along with owls and other raptors to the bountiful prey of field and wood. Ponds and wetlands attract the majestic Blue Heron. Long V's of geese cross the skies in spring and fall. The habitat supports numerous four-footed creatures besides those that mainly interest hunters. Beaver, mink otter, raccoons, and muskrat populate the riverine environment. An observer can also glimpse foxes, fishers, bob cats, and all the smaller land creatures. The other-worldly song of coyotes rings clear on a still night.
The old roadbed of the Delaware & Hudson Railroad, converted now to a trail, runs through the West Pawlet Village center, and the Indian River flows nearby before joining the Mettawee. The two villages and the hamlets provide varied historic interest. Both villages and the hamlet Spruce Gum, an extension of West Pawlet, are National Register designated districts. These three districts contain seventy-eight sites listed on the National Register. Over seventy sites in addition to these districts bring the Town's total to more than one hundred and fifty.
Pawlet's many pre-1850 homes offer visitors pictures of 19th century charm, while providing living shelter for their residents.
