Colchester's paper trail begins on June 7, 1763, when New Hampshire Governor Benning Wentworth issued its charter as part of the New Hampshire Grants. Town histories attribute the name to the Earl of Colchester, one of the English titles Wentworth favored for new townships.12 Ira Allen surveyed land here in 1772 and that winter formed the Onion River Company with his brothers and cousin Remember Baker. Baker's family is generally credited as the first to live in Colchester after the charter.3
The town changed sharply in 1922, when the mill village of Winooski separated to become its own city, taking much of Colchester's industrial population and tax base. Colchester's recorded population fell by more than 60 percent between the 1920 and 1930 censuses as a direct result.24
Another part of Colchester's story arrived in uniform. The Army authorized a cavalry post on high ground in 1892, and the 3rd U.S. Cavalry rode into Fort Ethan Allen when it opened in 1894.56 The fort became a major cavalry and field-artillery training post. From 1909 to 1913 it was home to the 10th Cavalry, the Black regiment known as the Buffalo Soldiers, and descendants of some of those soldiers still live in the area.5
The Army deactivated the post in 1944. After service as an Air Force radar station and then Ethan Allen Air Force Base, the property was declared surplus in 1962. Roughly 787 acres went to the Vermont National Guard for what is now Camp Johnson, while a 1964 agreement gave other acreage to the University of Vermont and Saint Michael's College.6
Saint Michael's had already taken root nearby. The Society of Saint Edmund, a French religious order that fled anticlerical persecution in 1889, opened Saint Michael's Institute in 1904 on Michael Kelly's former farm; his farmhouse became the core of Founders Hall.78 After World War II, the college met a GI Bill enrollment surge by hauling surplus Fort Ethan Allen barracks onto campus for classrooms, a library, and student housing.69
Along the water, Colchester ran on another clock. Lake Champlain's steamboat era took off in the early nineteenth century, and by 1835 the Champlain Transportation Company held a passenger-service monopoly that lasted through the century.10 Malletts Bay drew a cottage and camp culture that still shapes its shoreline, with some family camps converted into year-round homes and shoreline associations persisting today.11 In 1901, the Rutland Railroad pushed a three-mile causeway across the lake for its Island Line. After the railroad collapsed in the early 1960s and the state acquired the corridor, the route became today's Island Line Trail, or Colchester Causeway.12
Colchester is now Vermont's most populous town, with 17,524 residents counted in 2020.2 Subdivisions, retail corridors, converted fort buildings, and two colleges have replaced any single village center, but the water remains central to town life through beaches, boat launches, marinas, Malletts Bay, and the bike path running out along the old rail causeway.212