Childcare, livestock and paper preservation round out businesses moving into Chester Chester's Rising Business Scene: Part 3 of 3

By Shawn Cunningham
© 2025 Telegraph Publishing LLC

Editor’s Note: In the past two weeks The Chester Telegraph has looked at what seems to be an uptick in Chester business activity through the lens of the hospitality sector – namely restaurants and the retail marketplace.  In this final installment we look at several new developments in areas including human services, agriculture and a specialty service provider.

Merridith Sylvester started working in childcare at her mother’s home-based day-care center. Then, after years of working in others’ day-care centers, she got the education and certifications necessary to open her own place.

After creating two successful Bright Beginnings centers in Springfield, Sylvester is about to open her third, in the building that for many years housed the law firm of Dakin & Benelli on Main Street in Chester.

About this Series

• Nov. 4 – Restaurant openings point to business revival in Chester
• Nov. 12 – A new year and new businesses coming to the Green
• Nov. 19 – New childcare,  innovative farming and art and paper conservation

Her Springfield sites include a small daycare for infants 6 weeks to 2½-years-old on White Street and a larger pre-school in the Royal Diner building on River Street for children 2 to 12. The Chester center, in front of Chester-Andover Elementary, will seek to serve 59 children ages 6 weeks to 12 years,  but will focus on infants and toddlers, a segment lacking a facility in Chester. (The SEVCA Head Start to the east serves children ages 3 to 5.)

Future plans for the Chester site include rehabbing the barn behind the house for an indoor playground and a rental space for events like birthday parties.

Meeting with the DRB, working with the state fire marshal and going through the process of licensing will take time but Sylvester and her husband John are confident they will be able to open by the summer of 2026.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle Sylvester faces is finding teachers to staff the new pre-school, which will need seven more staff members. A full complement is 11, but four teachers — two who live in Chester — will be coming from the River Street facility.

The need is there, Sylvester says. Her business has been growing “every six months for the past three years.” Currently Bright Beginnings has a waitlist of 70 children, with calls coming in nearly every day. And the capacity of her business is filled through December of 2026.

“There are children yet to be born on the list,” says Sylvester.

Winter digs for Slippery Slope Goats

Aimee Braxmeier tends to a different bunch of “kids,” but her flock also is growing. With a loan from the Vermont Economic Development Authority, Braxmeier has been able to lease 8,000 square feet in a barn at the former Rhoman-Wai farm on Green Mountain Turnpike, the last dairy farm in Chester that closed two or so years ago.

She raises goats for land clearing and to sell as meat and she’s currently housing more than 150 goats there and plans to add 100 to 150 more.

Long-time Telegraph readers will remember Braxmeier and her Slippery Slope goats from articles about using a 16-goat herd in clearing invasive plants from the town land that became Brookside Trail and testing electronic collars to manage the munching of 125 goats on Magic Mountain. This past year, she was busy with a number of grazing projects, including one for the Stowe Electric, but has had to turn down many more, calling the demand for brush clearing and management “insane.”

Braxmeier’s plan is to breed between 250 to 300 does beginning in December with kids to be born in late April. That would bring her grazing herd to about 600. The addition 100 to 150 Kiko does will improve the herd.

The Kiko goats are high quality meat goats from New Zealand known for their hardiness, ability to thrive on marginal forage and parasite resistance. Braxmeier notes that are also well-known for their motherly instincts.

According to Braxmeier, the demand for goat meat is growing, especially from Halal markets in Boston and New York City. But meat processing is a bottleneck here in Vermont, so rather than sending goats to slaughter here, then to Boston and New York, she sends her animals to auction, but reaps a smaller profit from her work.

In the coming year, Braxmeier hopes to be able to hire out two of her herds for land clearing, overseen by two full-time herders each, while she works projects closer to home and manages the business.

As winter settles in, she is planning to close sections of the barn for warmth, but notes that they will be sharing the space with cattle who put out a lot of heat.

She’s also happy with the way the goats have adapted to the move from Landgrove where the goats were in three barns rather than one more spacious barn.

“They’re so calm here, they just stand around chewing their cud,” said Braxmeier.

Efficiency in feeding

In the same barn as Braxmeier’s goats, Robert Stickney’s Bovinity Farm and Vermont Cattlemen LLC are working on an experimental beef cattle feeding project with support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Stickney gave The Telegraph a tour last week. Stickney leases the barns from John G. Savage Realty which now owns the Rhoman-Wai farm.

Through the use of radio frequency identification tags — RFID — and specially set-up feeders and scales, they are trying to find which genetic strain of beef bulls bred with dairy cows produces meat most efficiently. With the offspring of five sires, the project will track how much each animal eats and drinks and how efficiently they convert those into meat.

To do this, pens are set up with feeders and waterers that can only be used by one animal at a time. When an animal puts its head into a feeder an RFID tag identifies that animal and a  scale registers how much the animal has eaten. When the same animal takes a drink of water, a scale registers the weight of the animal.

The system can also detects if an animal is not feeling well and is “off its feed” the farmer will be alerted to that earlier than if only relying on personal observation. All of this information is sent to the cloud for later analysis.

Stickney, a fifth generation Vermont farmer, says the project will involve just under 200 animals over the course of five years and will begin when calves arrive toward the end of the winter.

Works on Paper buys Vtica building

Carolyn Frisa is a well-known conservator who specializes in treating paper objects like books, documents and certain types of art works. Her work includes repairing damage and preserving papers  using painstaking techniques and often state of the art technology.

In 2008, Frisa moved from Boston to Chester and set up a studio in Bellows Falls.

In search of more space, Frisa recently she bought 15 Depot St., which had been the Chester American Legion that underwent a major renovation to become the Vermont Institute of Contemporary Art and most recently a tea room.  It includes two apartments on the second floor. Moving into this much larger space gives Frisa the opportunity to try out a number of configurations to make her company Works on Paper more efficient.

“I’m excited about the big space and deciding how I want to lay it all out,” said Frisa, adding that her business outgrew the Bellows Falls location. In Chester, she hopes to keep work areas separate from public areas and make those various work spaces function together.

On a recent day, it was hard to imagine how the vast amount of equipment, tables, sinks and other stuff would fit, but Frisa has a plan and expects it to be set up by the end of this month.

Working for museums, archives, libraries, state and town governments as well as individuals, Frisa is busy, and has stopped accepting new work until January so she can finish setting up her studio. If you have a project you would like to discuss with her, you can call or text at 802-262-5901 to set up an appointment. Works on Paper is open only by appointment.

While she generally limits her work to paper, Frisa is part of Curtains Without Borders, a group that documents and preserves “historic painted scenery … found in town halls, grange halls, theaters and opera houses” in New England and beyond, according to the organization’s website.

Fullerton auction does not meet reserve

The Fullerton Inn had been listed for sale through a real estate firm for a while now, so owner Rob Ambrose decided take a different route and try to sell it at auction.

That weeklong, online auction ended last Thursday, but without the results that Ambrose was hoping for. As expected, the bidding came fast as the 1 p.m. deadline approached. But the high bid of $810,000 did not reach the reserve set by Ambrose.

At this point, Ambrose told The Telegraph, the inn and restaurant will continue operating as usual, including the annual Thanksgiving buffet. To make reservations for the buffet, call 802-875-2444.

Cynthia Prairie contributed to this article.