Alexander Twilight House // c.1830

The highlight of the town of Brownington, Vermont is the Old Stone House Museum & Historic Village, a collection of amazing 19th century architecture set amongst the rolling hills of the Northeast Kingdom. One of the buildings in the village is this structure, the Alexander Twilight House. Alexander Twilight (1795–1857) was born in Corinth, Vermont, on September 23, 1795. He was raised by a fair-skinned mother, Mary Twilight, and a mixed-race father, Ichabod Twilight. Twilight entered Middlebury College in 1821 and graduated in 1823, possibly making him as the first person of color to graduate from an American college. Alexander Twilight accepted the call and moved to Brownington to serve as the town’s reverend.  He also served as headmaster of the Orleans County Grammar School.  To meet growing enrollment needs, he designed, raised funds for, and built the first granite public building in Vermont, Athenian Hall, which contained classrooms and a dormitory. He had this Federal style house built in the village, large enough to house some students in his home. Before building his Federal style home, he lived in a much smaller, vernacular home, which was added onto the rear of this home as an ell (later separated by the museum). Elected to the Vermont General Assembly in 1836, Twilight became the first African American to serve in a state legislature in the United States. In 1847, after conflicts with the Orleans County school administrators, Twilight moved to Quebec, Canada for five years, but then returned to serve as headmaster in Brownington.  He died on June 19, 1857 and is buried in the Brownington churchyard

Original Twilight House

Black Whipple House // c.1780

Brothers Prince and Cuffee Whipple were born in Ghana to relatively wealthy parents, and were sent to study in America in 1750 at roughly age 10. During the journey, they were kidnapped by a slave trader and sent to a prison in the Caribbean. Prince, his brother, and hundreds of other enslaved Africans at the prison were sold to a sea captain, with a majority of the prisoners sent to sugar and tobacco plantations in the West Indies and the Southern British Colonies. Prince and Cuffee were not among those sold in the plantations, but instead were sent to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to be house slaves, soon after purchased by William Whipple, a sea captain and merchant from Kittery, Maine. William Whipple, who married his first cousin Catherine Moffat in 1767, moved into the Moffatt-Ladd House on Market Street in Portsmouth in 1769. Upon the beginnings of the American Revolution, Whipple asked Prince and Cuffee Whipple to fight alongside him, promising to emancipate him after the war, and he did. After the war, the “Black Whipple Brothers” and their wives, Dinah and Rebeccah, were given lifelong use of a plot of land by their former enslaver in Portsmouth, NH, just behind his walled garden. In a house they had built on this site, the two couples worked and ran a school for free Black children. After all four died, the house began to deteriorate and was demolished. The present building (though altered), was constructed on the original foundation and is now a stop on the New Hampshire Black Heritage Trail.