On your right stands a commanding masonry church built from dark purplish stone, featuring a steep gabled roof and a soaring square belfry topped with an octagonal steeple. This is the First Methodist Church, completed in 1869.
Examine the walls. While people often mistakenly call it red sandstone, the primary material is actually Willard's Ledge stone, a locally quarried limestone that gives the building its distinct, rich hue. You can pull up the second image in your app to see how the builders deliberately contrasted this dark stone with the lighter grey sandstone trim, which was shipped down from the Isle La Motte quarries north of the city.
The architect, Alexander Rice Esty, designed this building in the Romanesque Revival style. That architectural style is defined by a feeling of massive, unshakeable weight, which you can see in the thick walls, the stabilizing buttresses, and the smooth, round arch tops of the windows. Esty was a celebrated designer who later oversaw construction for major federal buildings, and he clearly built this church to last.
And it needed to. This congregation laid its roots here in the 1820s, meeting in temporary spaces until they built their first house of worship on this exact spot. When they replaced it with this stone fortress, they ensured their legacy would endure. This heavy, robust construction has helped the church weather more than a century and a half of punishing northern winters. But perhaps more remarkably, it survived the wave of mid twentieth century urban renewal that swept through downtown. While neighboring congregations lost their original homes to sweeping redevelopment projects or devastating fires, this sturdy sanctuary held firm. Today, it holds the rare distinction of being one of only four churches built before 1880 that still remain standing in Burlington.
The story of a city is often told by what it manages to save, and what it dares to build next. As we leave this quiet monument to endurance, we will walk toward a massive civic project born from a completely different era of ambitious mayoral planning. Let us continue on toward the Burlington Memorial Auditorium, about a six minute walk from here.
