Vermont’s ‘Brat’ Is a Town Worth Savoring : From brickwork buildings to ‘60s-style restaurants, Brattleboro combines tradition and the unconventional.

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. —  Whether you call it the Gateway to Vermont, the Country Town with Cosmopolitan Flair, the College Town Without a College or just plain Brat, Brattleboro’s plethora of nicknames is anything but confusing. In fact, they are all rather appropriate: In its 168 years, this Vermont town has been reinventing itself regularly.

Fortress, trading post, industrial center, health spa, publishing hot spot, hippie mecca--Brattleboro has been all those things.

But throughout its many incarnations, different as they may seem, one thing has never changed: Brattleboro is a great place to hang out.

Just ask the crowd sipping steaming cups of espresso and bowls of cafe au lait in the subterranean Mocha Joe’s. Or the gang at the Windham Brewery, quaffing fresh-brewed ales and lagers in the just-renovated Art Deco-style Latchis Hotel. (Next door, the Latchis Theatre shows first-run films in a 1938 movie house decorated with terrazzo floors, murals depicting Greek myths and a ceiling emblazoned with the zodiac.) Or ask the ponytailed hipsters in their tie-dyed shirts seated around the homey wood tables of the Common Ground, the worker-owned restaurant that serves up some of the best vegetarian food this side of California.

Brattleboro’s envious setting at the confluence of the West and Connecticut rivers--which, not co- incidentally, has made it a popular center for canoeing, mountain biking, hiking and (in winter) cross-country skiing--is made even more dramatic by the looming Wantastiquet Mountain, rising just across the border in New Hampshire. Nearby, you can find some of Vermont’s prettiest villages and enough good scenery to satiate the most tireless sightseer. Within a 45-minute drive are the ski areas of Mt. Snow, Stratton and Bromley.

Brattleboro also prides itself as a cultural and arts center. The town boasts a performing arts center, a museum and arts center, three live theater companies and a pair of galleries.

All of which makes Brattleboro a likely target for wanderers casting about for a different destination.

Many flatlanders who’ve passed through Brattleboro regard the place as a pit stop, a town conveniently located just off the interstate where they can grab some gas and grub before speeding somewhere else. That kind of hit-and-run approach won’t endear anyone to the Brat. This unpretentious mini-city is best savored slowly, on foot.

Brattleboro oozes a genuine, down-to-earth charm. Its ranks of brickwork buildings, each three or four stories, suggest a community built with care. And the populace of this quintessential small town is so easygoing that even strangers strike up sidewalk conversations.

Along those sidewalks, small shops with distinctly hip sensibilities offer everything from tall glasses of wheat grass juice, crystals and homeopathic remedies to Buddhist statues from Thailand, drums from New Mexico’s Taos Pueblo and handmade chairs from Vermont.

Many of those shops were once little more than pipe dreams. Vermont was the promised land for hippies seeking a return to the land in the late ‘60s. Hundreds of folks with names like Star and Earth streamed toward the Green Mountain State. Many ran out of steam once they crossed the Vermont border and plopped down in Brattleboro. Communes sprouted like magic mushrooms in the surrounding hills.

Somehow the ‘60s never really ended in Brattleboro. The longhairs never left. Some studied massage, herbal healing and meditation; others eventually moved into vacant shops to set up businesses devoted to crafts or holistic living--organic grocery stores, vegetarian restaurants, import and craft shops, music stores specializing in drums and dulcimers. Their efforts helped spur revitalization of the then-down-at-the-heels town. Today, there’s more long hair and tie dye in Brattleboro then you’d see at a week of Grateful Dead concerts.

The epicenter of hipness is the Common Ground, a cooperative restaurant that served its first bowl of stir-fried veggies 21 years ago. Built in a former firehouse, the place has become a local landmark. Its bare plank floors, mismatched tables and chairs, and the solarium perched over newly yuppified Elliot Street create a relaxed ambience. The open kitchen and constant clatter of pots and pans add to the homey atmosphere.

Brew-your-own herbal teas, serve-yourself hearty soups and sumptuous salads are mere forerunners to generous portions of inventive vegetarian cuisine: winter Oriental burritos, seitan fajitas and a platter of specially adapted Indian and Mexican foods.

To get to the second-story loft that houses the Common Ground, hungry customers climb a battered staircase bounded by a patchwork of notices for roommates, rides and workshops in Kundalini yoga, as well as hand-scrawled ads offering ’67 Valiants for sale and opportunities to attend massage workshops in Portugal.

Brattleboro has always had something of a tradition of nurturing offbeat souls.

Best known was British author Rudyard Kipling, already rich and famous at age 26 when he moved halfway around the world from India in 1892 after marrying a young Vermont woman, Carrie Balestier.

Kipling spent four mostly happy years living in Dummerston, just outside Brattleboro. During his stay he wrote some of his best-loved books--including “The Jungle Book” and “Captains Courageous”--and built his dream house, which he dubbed Naulakha, Hindi for “900,000 rupies.”

The boat-shaped home, unoccupied for the last 50 years, has long been closed to the public. But soon vacationers will be able to spend a week in this Vermont house, redolent with remembrances of Kipling and the Raj.

Landmark Trust, a British company devoted to restoring famous historic homes, is returning Naulakha to all its Kiplingesque finery, complete with furniture the author collected in India. When completed late this year, the home will be available for rent on a weekly basis; prices will range from $600 to $1,000 weekly, depending on the season.

Photographs and memorabilia associated with Kipling’s stay in Vermont can be found among the exhibits at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center.

Then there was native son Col. James Fisk Jr., better known as Jubilee Jim. As the Michael Milken of his day, Fisk’s financial adventures included wresting control of the nation’s railroads and, later, ruining hundreds of investors in what came to be known as Black Friday in 1869. The lover of champagne, oysters and diamonds is buried in Brat, in a gaudy tomb decorated with partially clad women caressing bags of money.

The sculptor of Fisk’s memorial, Larkin Mead Jr., was a local boy who rocketed to wider prominence after he spent a frigid New Year’s Eve using snow and ice to create an eight-foot statue of an angel.

And no one could forget Madame Sherry, the New Hampshire bawdy house owner who often sashayed through Brattleboro dressed only in a fur coat and garter belt.

Perhaps the most bizarre tale to come out of Brattleboro concerns a tramp printer, T.P. James, who became a sort of channeler for the spirit of Charles Dickens. With no writing experience, James would slip into trance as eerily Dickensian prose spilled from his pen. James eventually completed Dickens’ “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” a work left incomplete upon the author’s death in 1870.

The T.P. James story might seem even stranger but for Brattleboro’s long-standing reputation as a center for publishing. Although most publishers have since left town, they left behind a rich assortment of bookstores. Browsers will find waiting sofas and lots of book-filled wooden shelves at shops such as the Book Cellar, Brattleboro Books, Everyone’s Books and Green Mountain Books.

Another of Brattleboro’s incarnations was as a spa town. After Dr. Robert Wesselhoeft, a German physician, discovered pure springs along the Whetstone Brook on its course through the center of town, Brattleboro became one of those storied places where taking the waters was reputed to ease aches and pains.

Wesselhoeft established the Brattleboro Hydropathic Institute about the middle of the 19th Century and promoted a regimen that included hot sweats, soaks in the cold springs, long walks through the woods and a Spartan diet of healthful food. Though many dismissed Wesselhoeft as a quack, the institute attracted clients such as author Harriet Beecher Stowe and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Presumably, the people who came to what was then the nation’s most famous--and priciest--spa were only too happy to get soaked.

Though the spas have long since disappeared, Brattleboro is still a town that invites its visitors to dive right in.

GUIDEBOOK: Thorough Brattleboro

Getting there: The nearest major airport is Bradley International Field near Hartford, Conn., about 90 minutes’ drive south. There are daily connecting flights from LAX on American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, TWA, United and USAir. Currently, the lowest round- trip fare is $560. Car rentals are available at the airport. It’s a 90-minute drive north on Interstate 91 to Brattleboro, at Vermont Exit 2 just past the Massachusetts state line.

Amtrak trains stop at Brattleboro once daily northbound, at 3:15 a.m., and once southbound, at 12:15 p.m., on their route between Washington, D.C., and Montreal.

Where to stay: The newly renovated Latchis Hotel, 50 Main St., Brattleboro, Vt. 05301, (802) 254-6300, offers rooms and suites in an Art Deco atmosphere at $46-$68 per person, double. The Brattleboro area abounds with inns and bed and breakfasts, and a strip of inexpensive motels follows U.S. 5 north of town.

For reservations at Naulakha, the former Rudyard Kipling home, write Landmark Trust, Shottesbrooke, Maidenhead, Berkshire, England SL6 3SW. For a handbook describing all Landmark Trust properties including Naulakha, write Landmark Trust, 28 Birge St., Brattleboro, Vt. 05301, or call (800) 848-3747. The handbook costs $18.50.

Where to eat: Brattleboro’s unique vegetarian restaurant, the Common Ground, is at 25 Elliot St., (802) 257-0855. Dinner for two runs about $25. Peter Havens, 32 Elliot St., (802) 257-3333, features continental cuisine, with the accent on seafood; $30-$45 for two. In the Latchis Hotel are the Latchis Grille, (802) 254-4747, serving international cuisine ($25-$45 for two), and the Windham Brewery (same phone), a small-scale brewery serving ales, porters, lagers and specialty brews.

For more information: Write the Brattleboro Area Chamber of Commerce, 180 Main St., Box B, Brattleboro Vt. 05301, or call (802) 254-4565.