Start from 23 curated places around St. Johnsbury, VT, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Whirligig Brewing
A small Railroad Street brewery that takes its sours seriously — the house wild ales and Berliner Weisses are genuinely craft-focused — while pairing them with a kitchen menu that ranges from Japanese curry rice bowls to smash burgers to weekly specials that drift across cuisines. The space is warm and art-hung, cans are available to go, and the staff knows what they're talking about when you ask about the beer.
Prohibition Kitchen
The restaurant inside St. Johnsbury Distillery occupies a speakeasy-themed space with pressed-tin ceilings, low lighting, and a bar stocked entirely with spirits made in the building next door. The menu runs gastropub — shepherd's pie, smash burgers, wood-fired flatbreads — and cocktails use house gin, rum, and maple vodka as the base of everything. The most atmosphere-forward dinner option in town.
Trails & outdoors
Dog Mountain Yellow, Green, and Blue Trail Loop
A short wooded loop on the Dog Mountain property that winds through meadows and forest to hilltop views, past swimming ponds where dogs run completely off-leash. It's easy and accessible enough for older visitors and kids, the wildflowers in June and July are excellent, and snowshoeing the loop in winter is a local ritual. The chapel at the midpoint adds something the trail descriptions never quite capture.
St. Johnsbury Town Forest Red and Yellow Trail
The accessible trail network that locals use for weekday runs and dog walks — the Red and Yellow loop follows the Moose River through mixed hardwood forest and then climbs a gentle ridge through conifers. At 1.7 miles it's doable in under an hour, the footing is solid, and it's one of the few places within walking distance of downtown where you feel actually out in the woods.
Things to do
St. Johnsbury Distillery
A small-batch distillery making gin, rum, and maple-infused vodka on the eastern edge of downtown. The tasting room tours walk through the production process and end with pours of everything they make — the maple spirits are the most locally distinctive, and the staff is genuinely enthusiastic about what they're producing and about the region. A real craft operation, not a tourist-facing shell.
Kingdom Trails
A 100-mile network of mountain bike trails in East Burke, about 20 minutes from St. Johnsbury, with a legitimate national reputation among mountain bikers. Trails weave through private farmland and forest with a mix of beginner double-track and expert singletrack. Non-bikers can walk or run the trails. The whole system is maintained by a nonprofit and a day pass gets access to everything.
Landmarks & sights
Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium
A Victorian Romanesque brick hall built in 1891 that houses one of the most eclectic natural history collections in New England — floor-to-ceiling glass cases of stuffed birds, insect portraits, and ethnographic objects from around the world. Vermont's only public planetarium runs shows upstairs, and the native butterfly house opens each summer. Plan at least 90 minutes; the building itself is worth the trip.
St. Johnsbury Athenaeum
An 1871 library and art gallery that has barely changed since it opened — the reading room with its dark oak shelves and spiral staircases is a working public library, and through a doorway at the back sits a collection of over 100 Hudson River School paintings hung floor to ceiling, salon style. The centerpiece is Albert Bierstadt's massive Domes of the Yosemite. It's free, it's extraordinary, and almost no one outside Vermont knows it exists.