History of the Southern Vermont Arts Center

A Short History of SVAC

Yester House
In or around 1917, Mrs. Gertude Divine Ritter, late of DeKalb County, Illinois, and New York, New York, thought a place in the country might be just the thing for summertime diversions out of the city and so commissioned the construction of a "summer cottage" at the base of Mt. Equinox, in Manchester Vermont.

Built largely on land purchased from the estate of Charles F. Orvis, the 28 room Georgian Revival mansion, dubbed Yester House, opened its welcoming doors in the summer of 1918 and was an instant hit and a cooling breeze in the rarified air of the East Coast’s hot summer social season.

After a redistribution of marriage vows, the former Mrs. Ritter emerged in 1923 as Mrs. Gertrude Divine Webster and got down to the business of philanthropy, horticulture, art glass collection and grand-scale entertainments with gusto – Mrs. Webster’s parties boasted as many as 200 attendees, the more fortunate of whom would arrive in Manchester aboard the Webster’s private rail coach.

Yester House remained a coveted destination for years to come until, following her husband’s death, Mrs. Webster relocated west to the Phoenix area where she became a passionate devotee and financial protector of the area’s unique desert landscape. She passed away, in Phoenix, in 1947.

The Southern Vermont Artists purchased Yester House and its 407 acres three years later for the remarkable price of $25,000 (the estate’s original price tag, in 1917 dollars, read $65,000). The mansion hosted its first art exhibition in 1951 and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. Today, Yester House Gallery houses the Southern Vermont Arts Center’s administrative offices and its 10 beautiful galleries.

Given that the history of the Southern Vermont Arts Center is peopled by heroes and heroines embarked upon a noble quest, it’s tempting to begin with a familiar "Once upon a time…" But no. Although that noble quest begins humbly, succeeds against great odds and ends happily, the Arts Center’s tale is one of real people, with real vision, who made their own magic from a relatively simple plan.

That simple plan was hatched in Dorset, Vermont, on a late summer day in 1922. On that day, Edwin B. Child, Francis Dixon, Wallace W. Fahnstock, John Lillie, and Herbert Meyer, five gentlemen who would come to be known as the Dorset Painters, got together to show their wares at the Dorset Town Hall.

"On that August day," says historian Mary Hard Bort, in Art and Soul, her definitive history of the Arts Center, "local people came to see the work of their neighbors, visitors stopped by to see what was going on, summer people came to assess the quality of the work, and the ladies of the village served punch, tea and cookies to all. It was a Dorset social event and the start of something much bigger that would encompass the entire Battenkill Valley."

Two years later, Francis Dixon and Frank V. Vanderhoof, a summer resident and fellow painter, arranged an exhibition of paintings at Manchester’s Equinox Pavilion by a group that would come to be called the "Southern Vermont Artists." It was just three years after that, in August of 1927, the ten-day Fourth Annual Exhibition of the Artists of Southern Vermont featured over 100 paintings and drew more than 1,600 visitors from twenty-eight states, Canada, Norway, England, Wales and Algeria.

This annual celebration of art relocated to the gymnasium of the Burr and Burton Seminary (now Academy) and continued to strengthen and grow yearly, attracting soon-to-be internationally known talent – Luigi Lucioni and Ogden Pleissner first exhibited in the 1930s; Dean Fausett in 1940; Norman Rockwell joined in 1945. And while art and artists blossomed in the foreground, a group of prominent residents and business owners, looking to insure the longevity of this budding organization, formed the Southern Vermont Artists, Inc.

Mary Hard Bort tells us that "Eleven men and one woman, only one of them an artist, signed the Articles of Association. These incorporators were, variously, the president of the Village and former proprietor of the Equinox House, wealthy benefactor and chairman of the Beechnut Packing Co., Manchester’s poet laureate and prominent businessman, president of the Factory Point Bank, artist and summer resident, grandson of Robert Todd Lincoln, husband of artist Harriet Miller, prominent Bennington attorney, prominent Dorset businessman and owner of the marble quarries, summer visitor and Bennington County Probate Judge."

The various people behind those impressive titles – Mrs. George Orvis, Bartlett Arkell, Walter R. Hard, William H. Roberts, H.D. Schnakenberg, Lincoln Isham, Harlan Miller, Luther R. Graves II, Ernest West, Edward F. Rochester, and Edward Griffith – were, in effect, the first board of trustees for the Arts Center.

By the late 1940s, the trustees and the Southern Vermont Artists’ first Executive Director, Richard Ketchum, were actively pursuing a permanent home for the organization. Dean Fausett headed up the Building Committee; as it happened, a piece of property was then under serious consideration – initial architectural sketches were being prepared – when Ketchum heard that the former Webster Estate – the current home of the Arts Center – was for sale for, give or take, $25,000.00. Dean Fausett was vacationing in Mexico at the time.

"I went up and looked at it," Dick Ketchum told Mary Hard Bort, "liked what I saw, spoke with the realtor, and when Dean called one day from Mexico, I told him about it. ‘Tell them we’ll buy it!’ he practically shouted. ‘I’ll head home tomorrow and raise the money.’"

Raise the money he did, and over two days, July 15 and 16 of 1950, the Southern Vermont Artists accepted the terms of the sale; thanks to a flurry of last minute fund raising and some judicious forestry management, the mortgage amount was reduced to $12,000, payable in three years, at 2%. It was also at those meetings that the name Southern Vermont Art Center was officially adopted.

The ensuing fifty-four years have witnessed growth and invigoration akin to that experienced by the original SVA in the 1930s and, with the addition of the Arkell Pavilion’s wonderfully intimate performance space, the studios of the Madeira Education Center (and the incredible expansion in quantity and quality of art workshops offered annually therein) and the Elizabeth de C. Wilson Museum, the Arts Center has truly become Vermont’s Premier Home for the Arts and a most fitting tribute to those devoted folks – artists and otherwise – who’ve gone before.

Had we begun with "Once upon a time…" we’d be obliged to ring off with an airy "And they all lived happily ever after." But that just wouldn’t be right. That line, after all, signals the end of a story. Anyone involved with the Arts Center – from the artists, members, guests and staff to the art instructors, the countless and selfless volunteers, committee members, the Executive Director and the Board of Trustees – will tell you very honestly that this story has just begun.

Founders
c.1930's