Central lobby of the Hyde Park building
The village of Hyde Park hosts the headquarters of Vermont's Federal Bureau of Parautility.
The town was named for Captain Jedediah Hyde, an early landowner and veteran of the American Revolutionary War. Hyde spent much of his later life pushing Ira Allen to more deeply investigate the anomolies of the state, but it wasn't until Chittenden's election that Hyde found a true ally. A small investiagive body, tempered with Hyde's military background, started in a farmhouse.
Over the decades and centuries to follow, and especially after Vermont's independence, that small operation grew into one of the largest single employers in the state.
The FBP's headquarters combines administration, records-keeping, R&D, training, and elements of manufacuring in one town, with duties roughly distributed between the town's several villages:
A group of FBP scientists at North Hyde Park in 1961
Incident management and rapid response
While the area around Hyde Park is covered by QRF Jeffords, the facilities themselves have dedicated response staff on-site in Garfield. The formerly-abandoned village is steeped in low levels of paranatural energy and regular thick mists that create a challenging training environment.
Garfield also serves as the headquarters for the Bureau's cross-agency incident response center.
An FBP incident response shock team training at the Garfield training center
The Special Court for the Paranatural is located in the historic Lamoille County Courthouse
Administration and records-keeping
Centerville is the heart and soul of the Bureau. The Deputy Director and Chief of Staff offices are here, alongside the Bureau's library and paper archives. These days, most records are stored digitally in a bunker beneath Butternut Mountain. Every report of a paranatural event, from the tiny to the catastrophic to the flat-out-incorrect, is preserved, analyzed, and managed.
The Special Court for the Paranatural sits in the historic courthouse on the town green, and a large number of restaurants cater to the army of bookkeepers who work here.
R&D and special projects
Research into the paranatural has two main branches: utilization and containment. The minds of the Davenport Center explore both. At 2,000,000 square feet, the main building is the largest of its kind in the world.
While other locations, like Sites Rho-7 or Rho-3, may work more directly with specific anomalies, the broad work at Davenport lays the foundation for technologies like the LaBerge Reality Anchor, temporal munitions, reinforced Kevlar, and more.
One recent, significant breakthrough involed the reverse-engineering of the fog-repelling light given off by lunar mollusks, freeing more of the harvest for sale and improving boating safety.
Researchers at Davenport in the 1950s
Close parternships with the University of Vermont College of Parautility and Imperial College London (through the now-publicized Hyde Park → Hyde Park gate) help the FBP retain top Vermont and global talent to work in the complex after graduation.
Manufacturing and public outreach
Hyde Park Village is the historic center of industry in the wider area. Water-powered sawmills on the Lamoille River evolved into coal-fired factories by the turn of the century, but as Vermont moved to cleaner forms of energy, production was outsourced to other centers like Essex and Brattleboro. The only manufacturing that remains is prototyping facilities for Davenport and a few start-ups. Most old factory buildings were converted to apartments for the new technical workforce.
Additionally, Hyde Park Village is home to one of the original buildings of the FBP, which is now a museum. In the rear, a reconstruction of Jedediah Hyde's first farmhouse can be seen.
The original headquarters of the FBP, now home to a museum