The Grout House stands at the northwest corner of Bonnyvale Road and Western Avenue (Vermont Route 9), on a generous lot in the village of West Brattleboro. It is a 1-3/4 story wood-frame structure, with a steeply pitched cross-gable roof that shelters a full second floor and a smaller attic. The front facade, facing Western Avenue, is five bays wide on the ground floor, three on the second, and one on the third. A single-story porch extends across the center three bays, supported by cruciform posts, and sporting stickwork balustrades at the ground floor and around the roof. Windows on the upper levels have elongated pyramidal hood decorations, roughly matching in angle the roof pitch. There is Stick style decorate woodwork at the gable peaks.[2]
The house was built about 1880 for Rev. Lewis Grout (1815-1905), a Yale graduate and missionary Congregationalist minister who spent 15 years at a remote missionary station in the Zulu country of South Africa.[3] On his return to the US he wrote Zulu-Land: Or, Life Among the Zulu-Kafirs of Natal, South Africa (London: Trübner, 1864). The house's architecture appears to be influenced to some degree by British colonial architecture of that period, and is extremely unusual in Vermont, where there are only a limited number of Gothic Revival houses to be found.[2]
