Courthouse Chronicles
“Alienation of Affection” Woodhouse versus Woodhouse – December, 1922
Lorenzo and his wife Mary Kennedy Woodhouse had a young son, Douglas, who in 1917 caught the eye of the beautiful Dorrit at a UVM dance. Dorrit Stevens, the daughter of a poor soap salesman, grew up in Burlington in the shadow of the Woodhouses’s South Willard Street mansion.
The Founding of Chittenden County and Its Courts
Thomas Chittenden’s Fourteen-Year Fight for the Fourteenth State.
At the same time America was fighting for independence from the British, Thomas Chittenden was fighting for Vermont’s independence from New York and New Hampshire. Each had a claim on the land that was then called the New Hampshire Grants.
Until 1969 all Vermont counties were responsible for their own prison systems. In Chittenden
County in the shire town of Burlington, many will remember a stately, elegant Main Street Victorian mansion… with a jail attached. This memorable house was built in 1888, the jail was added to it in 1907 and stood until 1972.
The Side Judge – A History of Vermont’s Assistant Judges
In crafting the Vermont Constitution, the perceived need for “local knowledge” in a court case resulted in the establishment of the position of Assistant Judge. The Assistant Judge was to be a locally elected citizen to act as an intermediary between the traveling judge, who may have been from New York or Boston, and the local lawyers and townspeople.
The Estate of Susan Hamilton, 1989
Although the cornerstone of the American Constitution is its proclamation of equality for all, over the course of our history, it’s been the day-to-day courtroom battles that have moved equal rights from ideology to reality.
Although the Traveling Judge or Circuit Judge is a character known to most of us from history
books and tales of the Old West, the reasons for these mobile judges was based on one simple fact – there weren’t enough judges to go around,
State of Vermont versus Cyrus B. Dean – Chittenden County Court’s First Criminal Case
By land or by sea, smugglers trafficked goods through the rugged Green Mountains (Smugglers’ Notch) and across the blue-grey waters of Lake Champlain. It was smuggling on Lake Champlain that led to Chittenden County Court’s first recorded criminal case – a murder trial that was to become known as “The Black Snake Affair.”
If you happen to visit Montpelier’s Washington County Courthouse you will notice the building’s brick, four-pillared, Greek revival design and elegant curvilinear stairway leading to the upstairs courtroom. You may also notice the flood of 1927’s high water mark just above your head in the lobby. You will not, however, notice the courthouse’s most omnipresent inhabitant, Mildred Brewster, because she’s invisible. Mildred is a ghost.
“Bad Cop” – The Paul Lawrence Affair
The movie Serpico, released in 1973, became a big hit for Al Pacino, who played Officer Frank
Serpico, a real-life undercover detective in New York who helped expose corruption in the
N.Y.C. police department.
Coincidentally, during that same time period in Vermont, a series of events took place that oddly paralleled the Serpico movie. A young 21-year-old undercover police detective named Kevin Bradley played the Pacino-like role in a case that rocked the perceived unimpeachable integrity of Vermont, and challenged the local belief that something like that “couldn’t happen here.”
“Judge Eaton” – The ‘Duke’ of Woodstock
Like many college graduates born in Vermont, Duke Eaton considered the opportunities of an out-of-state career. But he was too proud of being a Vermonter to be lured away from his home state. He once statedto a colleague: “Why play for an away team when you can play for the home team?”
On any given day, people from varied walks of life, including lawyers and
judges, accusers and the accused, pass through the doors of the Judge Edward J.
Costello Courthouse complex at 32 – 36 Cherry Street in Burlington. Just who was
this man whose lifetime of work on the bench merited the high honor of having a
Chittenden County courthouse named after him?
In 1971, the Chittenden County Courthouse was as much a fossil as the fossils
embedded in the Isle La Motte blue-grey stone that trimmed the classic Redstone block
walls of the century-old Burlington landmark.
Crescent Bay is a natural horseshoe-shaped harbor on the eastern shores of Lake Champlain, carved between the shale outcroppings of Rock Point to the South, and Appletree Point to the North. Between the two geological landmarks lies a beautiful stretch of beach appropriately named “Crescent Beach.”