The Hartness House Inn
Springfield, VT
The Hartness House Inn was built in 1904 for James Hartness, an inventor, machine tool industrialist, and eventual Vermont governor who died in 1934. Hartness was 42 when construction began. He had an underground complex built beneath the front lawn — a private office and astronomical observatory connected to the house by a 240-foot tunnel — to escape the noise of daily life. After his family sold the property, it passed to local machine shops as a guest facility and was later developed into a boutique inn.





