This article is sixth in a 30-part series on the historic quilt sewed by the Congregational Women’s Association in 1978. Each article will cover one of the 30 squares, the woman who sewed it and how each square fits into Brandon’s history.

The quilt was recently hung in the Fellowship Hall of the Congregational Church by the church deacons and Reverend Sara Rossigg. The Hall is open every Sunday from 9 to 11 a.m. You can also call the church office at 802-247-6121 to arrange for someone to let you in.

Square Six

This week’s history is on square six, the Brandon Inn, in the second row down from the top, far left.

Connie Keenan

The needle artist was Cornelia “Connie” Keenan who was 36 at the time.

Cornelia Anne Lewis was born in 1942 in East Lansing, Michigan, the oldest child of Professor Ralph Lewis and Olive Watrous. Her parents both worked at Michigan State University (MSU) where her father taught biology and science and her mother worked in the administration.

Connie grew up in East Lansing with her sister Susan and graduated from East Lansing High School in 1960, then attended MSU which she graduated from with honors with a major in Mathematics in 1964.

Connie then took a job with Bell Laboratories in Illinois. In 1968, she met Peter Keenan, who had a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Rutgers and was then teaching physics and mathematics in Bolivia with the Association for International Development. Peter later described meeting “a special young woman.”

They married in Cochabamba, Bolivia, that spring when they were both 26. They moved to Cambridge, Mass., where Peter got an MAT at Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1971.

That year, they moved to Williamstown, Mass., where Peter took a job at Mt. Greylock Regional High School teaching science. The next year, they moved to Brandon where Peter took a job teaching junior high science at Otter Valley Union High School and bought the small 2-bedroom house at 5 East Prospect Street. There they would live while Peter taught at OV until 1978.

They loved the small-town feel of Brandon, and Connie soon joined the Congregational Women’s Association and became a trustee at the Brandon Free Public Library for two years from 1975 to 1977.

When the quilt project was proposed, Connie decided to contribute a square though she had no experience sewing. She was likely tutored by the older, more experienced women.

Her choice was the historic Brandon Inn, which was only 1,200 feet south of her house at 5 Prospect Street. Her house was on a hill, when the leaves were down over the late fall and during the winter, she had a clear view across the Neshobe River of the back of the inn.

She just completed her square in time as the Keenans sold their house in November of 1978 and moved again.

After a few moves, they ended up in Maynard, Mass., where they became Quakers and joined the Acton Friends Meeting where they volunteered for many years. Peter had had a positive experience back in the 1970s when he was applying to be a conscientious objector against the Vietnam War.

Both Peter and Connie adhered to Quaker principles, as the memorial to Peter in 2015 states below:

Peter passed away in 2015, but Connie, now 83, still lives in Maynard.

The Brandon Inn

The following is extracted from a book in progress on the history of the Brandon Inn by this author with an emphasis on the early years. This book should be completed this year and anyone interested in getting a copy should contact the author at [email protected].

Jacob Simonds Sr. & Jr.

The future Brandon Inn was a roadside tavern at first, built where the inn is today around 1786 by Jacob Simonds (1720–1797). Simonds came to Brandon from Windham, Conn., along with his second wife, Mehetable, and a number of their children, including Jacob, Jr. Three of their daughters had come before them and had married Stephen Durkee, Amos Cutler and Moses Barnes, all early settlers of Brandon.

Simonds named it the Neshobe Tavern after the original name of the town, Neshobe, though the town had been renamed Brandon in 1784.

Jacob Sr. was prominent in Brandon though he only lived there less than a dozen years. The “History of Brandon” described Jacob Sr.:

When he died in 1797, he was buried in the Congregational Cemetery, though his gravestone is not visible today. The gravestones of his wife Mehetabel Simonds and many of their daughters and their families are still there in the cemetery.

Jacob Jr. certainly became the tavern innkeeper after his father’s death in 1797, a role he held until he moved west to Ohio in 1813.

Mathew Birchard (1813–1838)

In 1813, Mathew Watson Birchard bought the tavern and four-acre lot for $1,800. It was renamed Birchard’s Tavern.

He built a small store next to his tavern, operated the stage route there and also operated an ashery behind the tavern. Stage riders often stayed over at the tavern.

In 1895, a former Brandon resident recalled Birchard’s “hotel” and store:

On New Year’s Day, 1838, Mathew Birchard sold the tavern to Drances June and the now 1½-acre lot for $8,000 and moved to Detroit.

The photo below of Birchard was taken there.

Drances June (1838–1844)

Drances June (1802–1847) was the son of Daniel June and Lois Simonds. Lois was the sister of Jacob Simonds Jr., so Drances was his nephew and the grandson of Jacob Simonds Sr., who had built the tavern.

According to the deed, Drances June got all the stagecoaches, sleighs and wagons, along with eight horses, harnesses and blankets, two leads and a buffalo robe (if found!). There was evidently a livery out back for the horses.

Brandon House (1847–1891)

After June, the tavern was sold a few times until 1847, when it was bought by William Field of Middlebury for $3,500. Field was just coming off a five-year lease of the Vermont House in Middlebury (predecessor of the Middlebury Inn).

Soon after he bought the tavern, Field decided to tear it down and build a three-story brick inn similar to the Vermont House.

The construction of the new Brandon House was started in late 1846 and finished by late summer 1847. The Burlington Free Press gushed over “the very handsome and commodious” Brandon House as compared to the “sprawling wooden Old Stage House” it replaced:

At the same time the old tavern came down, Field had the store to the east removed and the building to the west. He then had built a new store to the west and a new brick house to the east:

The brick store across the alley to the east was leased to a merchant for five years, then sold to Volney and Ephraim Ross for $3,000 in 1853. It would later burn down in a fire in 1919 and be replaced by the Prime Block, which is there today.

On the east side of the new Brandon House, at what is now 22 Park Street, Field erected the brick house that eventually became the Inn Annex in 1910. Today, it’s a restaurant called 22 Park Eatery.

In 1853, the great drawing of the Brandon House below was included on a map of Brandon.

In 1859, twelve years after the inn was built, Field added two wings to the building and, in 1860, he sold the Brandon House to James Hastings for $12,000.

The photograph of Mr. Field below was taken some time between 1881 and 1890 when he was president of the Rutland Savings Bank (1881–1890):

The next three owners were James Hastings, Julius Harlow and John Stinson through 1871.

The rare photo below shows the Brandon House in 1870, when Stinson ran it:

Stinson sold the inn on March 1, 1871, to four prominent men in town — Nathan Sprague, Jr., Volney Ross, George Parmenter and Charles Pitts — for what he had bought it for, $20,000.

These four prominent Brandon businessmen owned it until 1887 and hired a number of professional hotelkeepers to manage it. In January of 1885, the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company created a map of the businesses in downtown Brandon, including the Brandon House, which is shown below:

Just before Christmas, on a very cold afternoon on December 20, 1890, the Brandon House was totally destroyed by fire.

The Rutland Herald carried a very long and detailed account of the fire:

In July 1891, Frank E. Briggs bought the empty lot for $5,000 and work on rebuilding the inn on the same footprint was begun in earnest. The new hotel was finally finished in May of 1892. Brandon had been without a first-class hotel for almost 1½ years.

The new Hotel Brandon was lauded by the Rutland Herald:

One of the earliest photos of it:

By 1899, it was called the Brandon Inn. Through 1910 it was owned and managed by different people with both good and bad years.

Town Ownership (1910–1961)

Leading citizens and businessmen in Brandon thought the inn had “been conducted for several years to a disadvantage as far as the town of Brandon was concerned.” In late 1909 and early 1910, they began looking at purchasing the inn themselves. After consulting with the town’s leading benefactor, Albert G. Farr, and with Henry R. C. Watson, an astute real estate investor and others, they decided to form a company to raise the funds and buy it.

The Brandon Inn Company was formed and 400 shares were sold to many citizens and businessmen in town, raising $40,000. The inn lot would cost $20,000, the Humphrey property next door (soon to be the Inn Annex) $6,000, leaving $11,000 for renovations and repairs and $3,000 for a sinking fund or cushion.

The Brandon Inn was now owned by the Brandon Inn Company, predominantly Brandon citizens. A share certificate is shown below:

The inn was owned by the Brandon Inn Company, which was run by a board of Brandon businessmen for 51 years. Over that timeframe there were a number of innkeepers, the longest-serving being Charles and Ruth Moore from 1912 through 1941.

The inn continued to be the community center for many social and business activities like it had since it was built in 1892. These activities ranged from lectures, dinners, concerts and dances to club and business meetings and conferences. Holiday dinners were hugely popular, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The Mitroffs (1961–1982)

In 1961, Al and Trudy Mitroff bought control of the Brandon Inn Company and they would run it for 23 years with help from their three children, Jack, Bill and Ann-Marie, shown below around 1970:

In 1976, the inn was added to the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Brandon Village District, along with 244 other buildings in town.

Quilt Square Six

In 1978, while the Mitroffs were running the inn, Connie Keenan chose the Brandon Inn as the subject for her square. As said previously, Connie could see the inn through the trees and across the river from her house at 5 Prospect Street.

In 1983, the Mitroffs sold the Brandon Inn and surrounding five acres and retired to Springfield, Vermont.

Louis & Sarah Pattis

There were three owners after the Mitroffs over the next six years until 1988 — Holtzman, Rimokh and Hauptli — before Louis and Sarah Pattis from New Jersey bought the inn in 1988.

The Rutland Herald again ran a story on the Brandon Inn exchanging hands for the fourth time in the 1980s:

Louis already had extensive experience as a hotel chef and schooling in hotel administration. They both were excited to embark on their caretaking of “the grand old lady,” as Sarah put it.

They would be the longest family owners of the Brandon Inn, stretching over 34 years from 1988 to 2021, through mostly good times and a number of challenging years (COVID and Segment 6 disruption).

They sold the inn in 2023, but continue to live in town.

Darcy & Joel MacClaren (2021–2023)

Darcy and Joel MacClaren were from Madison, Connecticut. They would own the inn for only two years.

Sid Beccar-Varela & Carolina Schilling (2023–present)

On April 26, 2023, the MacClarens sold the inn and 3.65 acres to Sid Beccar-Varela and his wife Carolina, and they became the newest stewards of the historic hotel.

Three generations of innkeepers celebrate the sale of the Brandon Inn. (L to R) Sarah Pattis, Louis Pattis, Isidro “Sid” Beccar-Varela, Darcy MacClaren, Joel MacClaren.

In their three years of running the Brandon Inn, Sid and Carolina have become a vibrant part of the community, in the rich tradition of a long line of village innkeepers.