Jigsaw for September 5, 2026:
https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/white-river-junction-1919
You are looking south down Main Street. The building with the long porch across the front and the pointed tower is the Junction House. Samuel Nutt started it in 1849 by hauling the Grafton House over from Enfield, New Hampshire. Let that sink in for a minute.
This is the 1879 replacement. Than Wheeler renamed it the Hotel Coolidge in January 1925. Later that same month, on the twenty-ninth, an oil heater exploded on the second floor and the building burned, the largest fire White River Junction has ever had. Today's Hotel Coolidge went up on the same foundation over the next two years.
Here is a trick question: which Coolidge did Than Wheeler have in mind? I will leave that one for you.
That open ground in the foreground is the Square, and for most of the nineteenth century it was not a square at all. It was a triangular swamp, and the village used it as a dump. A footbridge ran across it so travelers could walk straight toward the depot. They still had to cross the tracks. The village filled it in and planted it in 1902. The National Register nomination puts the rest in one flat sentence: the space, “originally a shallow swamp and later a tree-covered park, is presently a treeless parking lot.”
Fourteen tracks ran through the Junction at its peak. The day after the fire shown below, the Barre Daily Times argued for a new station built with “subways to the business streets of the village.” One was eventually dug, sometime in the twentieth century, though I have not been able to find out when. It ran from the station to these storefronts, carried the mail in its later years, and was blocked up around 1992. It is still down there. I wrote about it, and about the reader who had been inside, in the Union Station post: https://www.curioustorian.com/p/union-station
Play this jigsaw again: https://puzzles.curioustorian.com/white-river-junction-1919
Full-resolution images
The two views side by side. Click the picture for more detail.
More from White River Junction
The first one below holds both street scenes looking up toward this same Square.
Thanks for your support, as always,
Cameron Cross
Sources
Hero image: postcard captioned “White River Junction, Vt.” above the image and “The north end of Main Street, showing the Square in 1919” below it, publisher unidentified. The hero has been colorized from the black and white card; the colorizer predicts color for pixels that already exist, so nothing in the frame has been moved, added or removed. Second image: the present-day view, from Google Street View, color-balanced and cropped to the postcard's proportions. Third image: the 1911 station fire, which first appeared in our own Union Station post in December 2025; its original source was not recorded. The swamp, the footbridge and the parking lot come from the 1980 White River Junction Historic District nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, quoted on the Connecticut River Joint Commissions heritage pages: https://www.crjc.org/heritage/V11-8.htm . The Junction House and Hotel Coolidge sequence, the fourteen tracks and the tunnel blocked up around 1992 come from the 2018 update to that nomination: White River Junction Historic District, National Register nomination, 2018
Very nice! I've never seen this particular postcard or view of the Square before. One small correction: this view is looking south down South Main St., from the viewpoint where South Main and North Main intersect.