Champlain Housing Trust is working to acquire three vacant buildings in Fort Ethan Allen in Colchester that used to be dormitories and office space for St. Michael’s College.
The halls — Dupont, Hamel and Purtill — would be converted into about 60 mixed-income apartments, Amy Demetrowitz, the trust’s chief operating officer, confirmed Monday.
“We just feel like the location is fantastic,” Demetrowitz said. “And we always love to reuse existing buildings, because it’s the most efficient way. We don’t want to let these buildings not be used.”
Hamel and Purtill halls most recently functioned as dormitories for students at St. Michael’s College, just down Route 15 from Fort Ethan Allen, but have been vacant for the past five years. Dupont Hall was outfitted for office space, which the college leased out to local businesses, but recently became vacant as well.
Fifty of the apartments will be single-bedroom, Demetrowitz said, and average roughly 650 square feet. Four of the apartments will be three-bedroom, and the remaining six will be studio-style.
Champlain Housing Trust and St. Michael’s have not yet agreed on a purchase price, Rob Robinson, the college vice president of finance, said in an email.
However, Demetrowitz estimates that the all-in price of the project will be around $20 million. That includes buying the buildings and renovating them.
The large, U-shaped halls are on Ethan Allen Avenue and look quite different from their modern housing development counterparts. All three have brick and slate exteriors, and are two stories with front-facing porches with thin columns.
The trust is calling the project 10th Cavalry Apartments, a salute to the 10th Cavalry Regiment of the U.S. Army, which once used the halls as barracks.
The regiment was a segregated army unit composed solely of Black soldiers and was one of the “Buffalo Soldiers” regiments in the post–Civil War Army. These regiments were most frequently involved in battles along the country’s western frontier, called the Indian Wars. The Indigenous people they encountered gave them the “Buffalo Soldiers” nickname.
Their stay at Fort Ethan Allen between 1909 and 1913 was initially met with racist attacks in the local press and “de facto segregation” by local businesses.
Though St. Michael’s and Champlain Housing Trust have made considerable progress, the project’s overall timeline is still unclear.
“Whether it’s going to be this year or in three months, I can’t really say. There’s too many factors on that one,” said Joel Ribout, director of facilities at St. Michael’s.
Champlain Housing Trust is also working on a separate project in the area: renovating Fort Apartments — a pair of similar U-shaped buildings just down the street — into 55 affordable apartments. Demetrowitz said the trust will renovate the kitchens and make the buildings more energy-efficient.
“It’s a great neighborhood that’s very desirable. People love to live at the fort,” Demetrowitz said.
The trust is working on the project with Evernorth, a frequent partner. Evernorth will handle the tax credit financing component of the project, Demetrowitz said, and work with the town of Colchester to obtain the permits needed to do the work.
Fort Ethan Allen is in an area designated as a historic district in the National Register of Historic Places.
St. Michael’s acquired the three buildings in the 1960s. Until the mid-1980s, the college had a much more active presence in the fort, but construction projects on the college’s main campus moved more and more activities there, and away from the fort.
