Burlington is a bit different from the rest of Vermont. OK, it’s a lot different. But the differences we see today aren’t something new. They were there practically from the start.
Looking at things in retrospect, which fortunately is our perspective, Burlington’s transition from a tiny, rustic settlement to the trendy, cosmopolitan (by Vermont standards) Queen City we know today seems almost predictable.
But that’s not how Burlington’s early residents experienced it. They witnessed a series of quirky and curious events that conspired to create Vermont’s largest community.
When Congress admitted Vermont to the United States in 1791, what is now the city’s core — which then was more like a tiny village — had only four homes. The census reported, however, that Burlington had 330 residents. That’s because people were spread widely across the town’s roughly 36,000 acres. (Burlington is much smaller today, having ceded nearly three-quarters of its land over the years to South Burlington, Williston and Richmond.)
Horace Loomis, an early settler of Burlington, helped his family build one of those centrally located homes in July 1790, at the edge of a wooded hillside. Burlington residents joined others from Shelburne, Colchester and Essex to raise the house. “(W)e had a good time,” he wrote, “plenty of St. Croix rum, a barrel of which my father brought …”
Burlington was still a remote settlement when it received a surprising visitor in February 1793. England’s Prince Edward arrived by sleigh across the ice of Lake Champlain. Edward was the son of King George III, from whose empire America had just won its freedom, and Queen Charlotte, for whom a town just south of Burlington had already been named.
What was the prince doing in Burlington? Apparently Edward, who commanded a regiment in Quebec, had decided to tour both sides of Lake Champlain. He arrived with a large retinue and stayed for three days. When the prince reached Burlington, the village center sported all of seven houses, Loomis wrote, only one of which was large enough to accommodate the prince’s party.
Loomis’ father, Phineas, owned a newly completed two-story, oak-framed home. Prince Edward stayed there with his two bodyguards, two aides, a cook, a maid and “his lady.” The lady, with whom Loomis heard Edward speak French, was Thérèse-Bernardine Mongenet, better known as Julie, his longtime mistress.
Edward and Julie bid an affectionate goodbye to each other in Burlington, Loomis noted, then took separate routes south, as they had different business to attend to, and reunited in the West Indies.
This brush with royalty didn’t change the basic character of Burlington. But in the coming decades, Burlington would continue to grow from a rustic settlement to a bustling community. Along the way, it would prove strategically important to the American cause during the War of 1812.
The town was a major base, where troops’ duties included manning the guns at the battery that overlooked the lake, now the site of Battery Park. (As many as 500 soldiers who died in Burlington during that war, almost all of them from disease, were buried in what was then a semi-remote cemetery and is today the area around North Street.)
The peace that eventually came brought prosperity with it. By 1822, the town had become the port of entry for the Customs District of Vermont, which was only natural. The town had originally been settled because of its relatively deep and calm harbor. More than 100 trading vessels were then operating on the lake, including sloops, schooners and steamers.
A new kind of vessel soon plied Champlain’s waters: the canal schooner. These boats were specially designed to carry the maximum load possible through the Champlain Canal, which was completed in 1823. Whereas Burlington had formerly relied solely on trade north into British-controlled Canada, the canal connected the town to the New York market. These water routes enabled merchants to export lumber, wool and livestock, and import wheat and sundry finished goods.
As historian Thomas Bassett once wrote, “Burlington was a hub with half its spokes in the water.”
Though Burlington relied heavily on water transport, crude dirt or gravel-covered roads linked the town to the rest of the state. Travel by road wasn’t for the faint of heart. People rode in two- and four-wheel carriages or in stages.
“Coaches were frequently jammed, imperfectly protected against dust, rain or snow, and subject to accident,” wrote Bassett. “The hardier passengers, perched on top with the baggage, at least had air.”
Many roads were private turnpikes, where travelers paid a toll. Like taxes, the tolls were unpopular, so in some areas people constructed bypasses around the tollgates. On one route out of Burlington, a 5-mile bypass skirted the tollgate. These bypasses, where travelers could “shun” the turnpike’s toll, were called shunpikes. A Shunpike Road still exists just outside Burlington, in Williston.
The prospect of avoiding a toll must have been a powerful inducement for people to decide to cover the extra distance, given the period’s slow speed of travel.
By the early 1830s, people could see that another transportation innovation would soon change their lives. The first Vermont railroad was incorporated in 1832, though it would be a decade and a half before the tracks reached Burlington. The railroad would benefit the town by giving merchants a faster way than boats to transport goods to market.
The town’s economy grew and diversified to the point where an 1841 directory listed 250 businesses in 73 different lines of work. Burlington had grown to more than 4,200 residents by 1840, partly fueled by an influx of Irish and French-Canadian immigrants, who comprised nearly a quarter of the population.
The town’s population had been dispersed at the time of the 1790 census, but a half-century later it was mostly nestled in a single core area. The compactness of Burlington’s heart gave it an urban feel lacking in other large towns like Rutland and Bennington, which were composed of multiple smaller villages.
Geography and history dictated that most Burlingtonians resided in an area of less than one square mile located between the lakeshore and the crest of the hill on which the University of Vermont sat.
Burlington had won the right to host the state university decades earlier because of a pledge made by Ira Allen back in 1791. The old Green Mountain Boy envisioned Burlington as the intellectual capital of the new state. He pledged money and land to start the university. He offered to pay more, provided the Legislature would name it Allen University.
Allen gave 50 wooded acres from his sizable land holdings to serve as the site of the university. But Allen, who was always land-rich and cash-poor, never came up with the promised money, so the state got a University of Vermont instead of an Allen University.
To reach the university on the hill, Burlingtonians had to cross a bridge that spanned a natural ravine that ran northeast from near the waterfront and cleaved the town in two (roughly from lower King Street to today’s Prospect Street). The ravine wouldn’t be filled in until the 1870s.
Once the ravine was erased, land to the east, away from the waterfront, became more valuable, since it could now be easily accessed. Burlington development crept east, up the hill. By that time, Burlington had switched its governance from being a town to what it had long seemed, a city: still the largest, most culturally diverse community in Vermont.
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Then Again: Quirky and curious events helped to create Burlington - vtdigger.org
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