Walk into Mills Riverside Park on a Thursday afternoon this month and you cross the same covered bridge that has marked the entrance for years, pass tables from Birch Hill English Muffins and Cloverdale Flower Farm, and hear at least one vendor mention that the season is almost done. Four Thursdays remain before the Jericho Farmers' Market closes out 2026 on October 8.
A short drive away in Burlington, a different kind of countdown is underway. The Jericho Historical Society, which has spent more than fifty years keeping Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley's photographs inside the walls of the Old Red Mill, is now sending them somewhere else entirely. Lyric Theatre is building its production of Disney's Frozen at the Flynn around Bentley's actual snow crystal images, worked directly into the set. Two of Jericho's oldest institutions are moving in opposite directions this fall. One is winding its public season down to a close. The other is taking its most private holding and putting it on a Burlington stage for the first time.
Bentley's Negatives Get a Second Life on a Burlington Stage
The Jericho Historical Society formed in 1971 with one job: save Chittenden Mills, the grist mill on the Browns River that everyone in town calls the Old Red Mill. The building earned National Historic Site status the following year, and the Society has run it ever since as a museum, with the entire first floor given over to milling artifacts and the Snowflake Bentley exhibit. That exhibit is not a reproduction. It holds the actual cameras, microscopes, glass negatives, and slides Bentley used to photograph more than five thousand individual snow crystals, the work that gave the world the idea that no two snowflakes are alike. The Craft Shop next door sells prints from those negatives alongside Danforth Pewter jewelry and pieces from local woodworkers and photographers.
The Society has a new partnership with Lyric Theatre, which is staging Frozen on the Flynn's main stage, and set designer Tomomi Ueda is weaving Bentley's original photographs directly into the production's design. The Society's own description of the collaboration puts it simply: "Real snowflakes. Real history. Real inspiration." It is a short phrase, but it marks something worth noticing. The archive that has lived quietly in a nineteenth century mill on Route 15 for half a century is, for what appears to be the first time at this scale, going out into a professional Burlington production rather than waiting for visitors to come find it.
Four Thursdays Left at Mills Riverside Park
Back at the market, the roadside field on Route 15 has been running every Thursday, rain or shine, since May 21. Here is what's left before it goes quiet for the winter.
| Date | Status |
|---|---|
| Sept. 17 | Regular market, 3:00 to 6:30 p.m. |
| Sept. 24 | Regular market, 3:00 to 6:30 p.m. |
| Oct. 1 | Regular market, 3:00 to 6:30 p.m. |
| Oct. 8 | Final market of the 2026 season |
The market draws more than 25 vendors and is run by a volunteer board that reads like a directory of small Jericho and Underhill producers. Eric, who started as a vendor in 2022 before joining the board, owns Birch Hill English Muffins, based right in town. Hannah Doyle spent five years selling at the market as the owner of Boneyard Farm before joining the board this year. Andy Houle and his husband run Cloverdale Flower Farm out of an 1849 farmhouse in northern Underhill, the same couple who ran Green Mountain Pet Professionals for the greater Burlington area until they moved that business to Underhill in 2012. Market manager Elizabeth King and assistant manager Deanna Bartlett handle the week to week logistics, from vendor scheduling to the kids' programming that runs alongside the produce tables. The market also accepts EBT and Crop Cash, a deliberate choice by a board that describes itself as trying to keep fresh, local food within reach of the whole community, not just the people who can already afford a Thursday farmers market habit.
After October 8, that field goes back to being just a field until next May.
What the Park Board Has Been Tending to Before the Leaves Turn
Mills Riverside Park is bigger than the market that sets up in its front field one afternoon a week. The Jericho Underhill Park District, the small governing body behind the park, has been quietly keeping the trail network in shape ahead of foliage season.
- The park's entrance is a covered bridge off Route 15, between Jericho and Underhill, opening onto open fields with a direct view of Mount Mansfield before the trails duck into the trees.
- The main loop runs 4.5 miles with about 459 feet of climbing, a moderate hike that takes most people an hour and a half to two hours.
- The Browns River cuts along the park's edge, and the off-leash section near the water is one of the most used parts of the property for anyone walking a dog.
- The board has kept up ongoing trail work on the Fieldstone Loops, including culvert clearing and the removal of dead ash trees, the kind of unglamorous maintenance that keeps the trails passable once leaf peepers start showing up in numbers.
The park also hosted a summer concert series every Wednesday night in July, a reminder that its calendar runs on more than hiking traffic even in the warmer months.
The Historical Society's Other Kind of Night
The Flynn partnership is not the only way the Society shows up for the town. Its history includes plenty of programming that never leaves Jericho at all: a talk by longtime Vermont folklore collector Joseph Citro called "Vermont's Grand Ghosts and Weird Wonders," held at the Jericho Community Center in partnership with the Deborah Rawson Memorial Library, and a walking tour of Jericho Corners led by town historian Gary Irish, the same person who wrote the text on the historic marker that stands at the mill today. Neither event needs a stage or a set designer. Both run on a guest speaker, a room full of neighbors, and whatever the library has printed on a flier that week.
Taken together, it says something about how the Society operates. The organization now sending its archival photographs into a professional Burlington production is the same one that has spent decades filling a community center with local folklore and a Saturday morning with a walk around the Corners. Both are the Society doing its job. They just look nothing alike.
The Market Clock Is the One That's Actually Running Out
The Flynn production and the Society's community talks happen on their own timelines, set by a theater season and a library calendar that aren't tied to this particular week. The farmers market is different. It has a hard closing date, and it is the one piece of this fall in Jericho that is actually counting down right now.
If you're already spending your Thursdays at Mills Riverside Park or you're just getting to know this stretch of Route 15, The Hammond Team spends a lot of time in towns like this one across Chittenden County. Contact The Hammond Team if you want more of what's actually happening in the towns you live in, or if a move to a place like Jericho is somewhere down the road for you.
