The New England Appalachians contain two north-south–trending sets of gneiss domes. The western belt, which includes the Chester dome, contains 13 domes that expose either 1 Ga Laurentian basement rocks or ca. 475 Ma rocks of the Shelburne Falls arc. The eastern belt contains 21 gneiss domes cored by either 600 Ma crust of possible Gondwanan affinity or ca. 450 Ma rocks of the Bronson Hill arc. Domes in both belts are surrounded by Silurian and Early Devonian metasedimentary rocks, which were deposited in two north-south–trending basins before the Acadian orogeny. The Chester dome in southeastern Vermont, the main focus of this study, is an intensively studied, classic example of a mantled gneiss dome. Lower Paleozoic units around the Chester dome are dramatically thinner than they are elsewhere in southern Vermont, and are locally absent. A strong spatial correlation between the highly attenuated mantling units and highly strained, mylonitic rocks suggests the presence of a ductile, normal-sense shear zone. Garnet-bearing rocks in the core of the dome record metamorphism during decompression of 2–3 kbar, whereas rocks above the high-strain zone were metamorphosed during nearly isobaric conditions. Strain markers and kinematic indicators suggest that extension occurred during northward extrusion of lower- to middle-crustal wedges of Proterozoic and Ordovician quartz-feldspar–rich gneisses below and up into a thick tectonic cover of Silurian mica-rich metasediments that had been transported westward in large-scale nappes. If the ductile, normal-sense shear zone was responsible for synmetamorphic decompression, as we propose, extrusion occurred at ca. 380 Ma.