Benchmark Inns offer a unique lodging experience in the Woodstock area
About the Woodstock area
There’s reason enough to linger in Woodstock, VT, often called the prettiest town in North America. For starters think Dartmouth College and Vermont Law School, fine and casual dining, gallery hopping, cycling, walking and hiking the Appalachian Trail. Also, going in any direction from Woodstock, in under two hours you can be anywhere in Vermont: the Shelburne Museum on Lake Champlain; Hildene, a Lincoln family home in Manchester, a shopping mecca; King Arthur Flour in Norwich; and others too numerous to name.
Woodstock is the kind of place where you exhale and relax because you feel like you’ve come home. The town has never been restored because it has never been damaged, so you see intact 18th century homes and shops. While it’s not in the history books as such, Woodstock is also the birthplace of the environmental movement in the US, thanks to George Perkins Marsh whose name joins two other important residents and thinkers at the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, the only National Park in Vermont. Here, too, is the Billings Farm & Museum, a turn of 20th century working farm that has an impressive collection of antique farming tools and artifacts.
The town, that itself has 200 historically significant buildings, is bracketed by two important buildings, both former textile factories: the Bridgewater Mill in Bridgewater, a massive wooden structure housing a prominent fine furniture maker and potter, Shackleton Thomas, and in Quechee Simon Pearce, an equally massive brick building that’s home to the hand-blown glass of Simon Pearce as well as an excellent restaurant.