The last remaining slice of a state farm that once count 1,500 acres and the second largest barn in Vermont is finally going to be sold.
A 36-acre parcel in Duxbury, the only piece left of a massive farm enterprise run by the Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury for roughly eight decades, is going to become a lumber, home and hardware center, according to attorney Jeff Lively, general counsel of the Vermont Department of Buildings and General Services.
Lively said the state has reached a sales agreement with Steven Noyes to sell the parcel for $90,000 and is expected to ink the deal in early September. Noyes owns the East Montpelier Home Center and has proposed a 3,200-square-foot retail and lumber store, plus 1,500 square feet of office space, according to a permit application.
The purchase has been hung up on a series of environmental issues, including whether there were asbestos shingles buried on the site and pesticides from the farm’s former usage, Lively said.
Lively said the effort to sell the parcel has been ongoing for years.
“This has been something we’ve been trying to get off our rolls for years,” he said, praising Noyes for his “temerity and tenacity” in sticking with the project for more than two years. Noyes confirmed the sale in a brief conversation Monday.
The home center will be located downhill from the Duxbury Elementary School off Route 100, which was also built on a part of the former farm. Roughly 100 acres of the former farm site, mostly forested, has been conserved, Lively said.
The original farm was one of four once owned by the state (the other three were in Brandon, Vergennes and in Windsor at the former state prison), according to a 2009 article in the Duxbury Historical Society newsletter. The state hospital farm once had an impressive long barn, piggery, slaughterhouse and large vegetable gardens and fed roughly 1,000 patients and a staff of 300.
Patients also worked at the farm raising the fresh locally grown food that supplied the state hospital – a localvore health movement long before the word was ever coined.
The main barn burned in 1942 and was replaced by the yellow barn that stood on the site when the state began divesting itself of the property beginning in the 1970s, when the hospital population declined and the state decided to get out of the farming business, according to the historical society article.
