We are a member organization of NeighborWorks America, a national organization that creates opportunities for people to live in affordable homes, improve their lives and strengthen their communities. We’re delighted to have our work, and the work of the broader community in Bellows Falls featured in their blog! Please view the blog in the original format with beautiful picture of the Town, Bellows Falls Garage, and Petroglyphs HERE
by Madelyn Lazorchak, Senior Communications Writer 01/24/2024
If you were taking a country drive toward Vermont’s Route 5, a highway that traces the path of the Connecticut River, you’d have to choose your direction. Would you go south toward Bellows Falls? Or drive north instead?
For years, Emmette Dunbar, board president of the Downtown Business Alliance, feared people would turn north if they were looking for lunch or a cute town to explore, dissuaded by the dilapidated, concrete building that marked the entrance to Bellows Falls. Known as The Garage, the building was one of the first poured concrete buildings in the country. But while it was interesting, it was also run down.
So when Windham & Windsor Housing Trust picked Bellows Falls as a priority community and tried to determine, with residents, what to do first, the NeighborWorks network organization heard from people across the county: Do something about that building.
The organization investigated refurbishing and preserving it, since it had some historical significance, says Elizabeth Bridgewater, executive director. But in the end, there were too many structural issues. So they started over. The result is a new-and-improved Bellows Falls Garage, which houses 27 apartment units, many of them affordable for low-income residents. But the views, which overlook the river, Fall Mountain and the Bellows Falls canal, are “million-dollar views,” Bridgewater says. And the building, which includes nods to historic architecture, changes the whole gateway of the town.
“That building is the gateway,” Dunbar said at the Bellows Falls Garage Redevelopment Ceremony. “This building is the piece that was needed.”
Windham & Windsor’s philosophy, in working with the village, is known in affordable housing and community development industry as “comprehensive community development,” an approach that considers the whole community. NeighborWorks America has been a supporter of this approach, offering grants and technical assistance to 39 organizations over the last two fiscal years. Windham & Windsor was awarded a grant during fiscal year 2022.
“This is a huge piece of a broader vision,” Bridgewater says of The Garage. “We dealt with one huge problem that had been plaguing this town for decades. We replaced a derelict building with something beautiful.”
While things have changed most obviously for the people living in the new apartments, the community as a whole is drawing more resources because of them. The village is one of four that the Vermont Agency on Commerce and Community Development visited in the fall. “There’s a new narrative now, that this town is on the move,” Bridgewater says. When they began working with the rural village, she says, they didn’t know the whole of how it would unfold. But they’d done their preparation. And when there were opportunities, the organization took them.
A lasting story
While the history of The Garage dates back well over a hundred years, the stories of the land date back much farther. As Windham & Windsor looked at that history, Bridgewater says, they realized that they needed to connect with the Elnu Abenaki tribe, which included descendents who still populate the area. “We had been talking about the history of the town,” Bridgewater says. “But the history goes back thousands of years.”
“We knew that this area was important,” adds Windham and Windsor’s Marion Major. “The town was developed at a confluence of rivers with petroglyphs not far from where the village center is today. Although the land has been industrialized and redeveloped time and time again, erasing artifacts over the past centuries, this didn’t diminish the fact that this land remains and this water remains and the Abenaki culture, too, remains.”
They connected with Rich Holschuh, director of the Atowi Project, a nonprofit that provides cultural education to both mainstream and Native American communities. Holschuh is also chairman of the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs and a spokesperson for the Elnu Abenaki tribe.
The connection, he says, was made not just to better understand the history and relationship with the land but to look for ways to work together to elevate the present-day Elnu Abenaki in this time, in this newly redeveloped space.
“Most folks don’t know what has been here for thousands of years – and what continues,” says Holschuh. “It’s not in the past. Our goal is to help people understand. It’s all about our shared relationship with the land.”
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