The town of Essex was chartered on June 7, 1763, and named for the English county. Settlement lagged the paperwork by two decades: the first documented settler, Samuel Smith, arrived along the Winooski River in 1783.4 Not long afterward, Ira Allen built a dam at Hubbell's Falls. The falls powered a sawmill and later a hydroelectric station, anchoring the area's first industry.1
A crossroads formed where two roads out of Burlington met. An early tavern there later became Lincoln Hall, and the intersection took the name Five Corners — still the civic heart of Essex Junction.1 The “Junction” arrived with the railroad. By the 1850s, six lines converged there. The station was platted as “Painesville,” but conductors called the stop Essex Junction because this was where riders changed trains, and the informal name stuck. At the rail era's peak, 36 trains a day passed through on four tracks, supporting a hotel, restaurants, and the Drury brick yard, which produced more than 500 million bricks over a century.12
The growing settlement wanted sidewalks, sewers, and fire protection that rural Essex was not funding. In 1892 it incorporated as the Village of Essex Junction, nested inside the town but running an increasingly separate government. It formed a volunteer fire department in 1893, gained electricity and trolley service in 1895, established a police department in 1896, and opened a library in 1899.13
The village's economy changed in 1957, when IBM opened a manufacturing facility.6 IBM grew into Vermont's largest private employer; its local campus eventually covered more than 700 acres and employed around 8,000 people at its 1982 peak.3 In 2015 IBM transferred its Essex Junction and East Fishkill semiconductor plants to GlobalFoundries in a deal that included roughly 3,000 jobs, 16,000 patents, and $1.5 billion in cash.5
Meanwhile, the village-inside-a-town arrangement wore thin. Village residents paid taxes to both governments, and disputes over costs fed more than twenty merger or separation efforts.812 In 2020, village voters approved a merger charter, but town voters rejected it by 19 votes in March 2021 and again by 26 votes that April.712 Village leaders then turned toward full independence.
On November 2, 2021, Essex Junction voters approved separation, 3,070 to 411.9 Governor Phil Scott signed the enabling legislation the following April, and on July 1, 2022, Essex Junction became Vermont's tenth city — no longer a village inside Essex, but an independent municipality with a City Council replacing the old Board of Trustees.1011 Essex and Essex Junction phased apart their remaining shared services over the following year.10