From the Boston Globes website Boston.com aticle “A Living Museum”
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Photo Essay on Saint Johnsbury from the Boston Globe
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On the Passumpsic River, “St. Jay” is a town of high-style Victorian buildings and high-minded institutions built by a local philanthropic family. That legacy makes the Main Street historic district nearly a museum unto itself, with an athenaeum and gallery, a natural-history museum, and a private academy, which residents can attend as their public school.

St. Johnsbury came of age in the Industrial Revolution, and Yankee ingenuity, with a boost from the railroads, soon made it a shipping hub for locally produced maple sugar, wood products, and, most famously, platform scales.

From the National Geographic Adventure article “Your Kind of Town: St. Johnsbury, Vermont” by Dan Grushkin
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This can-do Yankee attitude pervades the whole of Vermont’s rural, forested Northeast Kingdom, of which St. Johnsbury is the hub. Three hours north of Boston, “St. J” (as it’s known to residents) is an old New England original with late 19th-century Victorian homes, a Main Street, and hardly a drop of sprawl. An active effort is under way to lure newcomers; the entire Northeast Kingdom region has development programs for small-business entrepreneurs—an important part of the local economy. These innovative initiatives, including a tax credit for those who renovate historic homes, offer clues to the type of person who might want to move here: civic-minded, self-motivated, slightly utopian.

From the National Geographic Society Press Room:

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NORTHEAST KINGDOM GEOTOURISM MAPGUIDE DEBUTS AT VERMONT TRAVEL INDUSTRY CONFERENCE

MapGuide Highlights Local Environmental and Cultural Experiences

STOWE, VT (Nov. 28, 2006)– Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom premieres a National Geographic geotourism map at the Vermont Travel Industry Conference that is one of the first of its kind in the world. The Northeast Kingdom Geotourism MapGuide promotes distinctive visitor experiences following the principles of geotourism, defined as “tourism that sustains or enhances the geographical character of a place — its environment, culture, aesthetics, heritage, and the well-being of its residents.”

Community input was essential to the creation of the MapGuide, and residents of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom — Orleans, Caledonia, and Essex counties — were asked to nominate their favorite places and events in the Kingdom for inclusion. Entries best support the Northeast Kingdom’s character of place and reflect visitor interests from historic landmarks and natural attractions to music venues and restaurants

From the New York Times article “A Corner, A Kingdom, In Vermont” by Barry Estabrook
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Senator Aiken, who died in 1984, was referring to the state’s three northeasternmost counties, Orleans, Essex and Caledonia, which form a crude triangle wedged between the Connecticut River and Canadian border. The name stuck. It evokes the region’s beauty, mystery, remoteness and even the quirky independence that caused its residents to help send Mr. Aiken down to Washington for more than three decades. The Northeast Kingdom is what the rest of Vermont used to be before it made a self-conscious effort to appeal to tourists.

During my rambles in the Northeast Kingdom last month, I lost myself on back roads surrounded with views of tranquil farms and soaring, distant mountains. I fell asleep under down comforters in quiet inns. I rubbed elbows with local people over a hearty breakfast at a small-town diner. I visited an outstanding gallery of 19th-century American landscape art. I even established a personal relationship with a llama.

From the USA Today article “Get (actively) romantic in cozy Vermont” by Josh Roberts
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Morning arrives cold and crisp on this gray winter day in northern Vermont. I’m a mile deep into the state’s Kingdom Trails network, snowshoes under foot and a trail map in hand. The trees are heavy with snow, the river banks lined with two-foot drifts, and I’m following fox tracks through the otherwise untouched wilderness. As winter trails go, this one’s a keeper. The trail map, on the other hand, could use some improvement.

“That kind of looks like a trail,” my wife suggests, only half serious.

I laugh and nod my head, not because I agree, but because it’s still early, there’s a peacefulness to these woods, and I can see the snow-covered Darling Hill Ridge — where our day began at the Wildflower Inn — towering over the woods from here. In other words, even when we’re lost, we still know where we are. Mostly.

From the article “A Realm of Woods and Water” by Howard Frank Mosher
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Heading north on Interstate 91, you’ll notice the change in the terrain as you leave St. Johnsbury and crest the height of land into the mountainous St. Lawrence watershed: smaller working farms, sharp granite outcroppings (among the oldest on earth) and mile upon mile of dense, Canadian-looking forest that is still home to healthy populations of white-tailed deer, black bears, coyotes and ruffed grouse. Not to mention the gigantic tail-walking rainbow trout that leap the Willoughby River falls in Orleans, just off I-91, by the thousands each spring. Inveterate fly fisherman that I am, they drew me to the Kingdom in the first place.

From the article “Northeast Kingdom is Shear Poetry” by Gregory Dennis
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In the summer of 1909, poet Robert Frost and his family traveled north to spend the summer on the shores of a remote lake. An amateur botanist, Frost wanted to explore the untrammeled forests of northern Vermont.

An inn now occupies the property where Frost camped in a tent that long-ago summer. But if Frost were to return today, he would probably find much of the Lake Willoughby area as it was nearly 90 years ago.

Lake steamers no longer ply what Frost called Willoughby’s “fair, pretty sheet of water.” But the lake’s fiord-like beauty, guarded by the towering heights of mounts Pisgah and Hor, continues to draw summer visitors. Deep forests still line the edges of the 5-mile-long lake, and the area continues to inspire writers.

Even in one of the nation’s most rural states, the region around Willoughby known as the Northeast Kingdom is notably pristine.