Before Burlington: Abenaki Land and the Lake Between
Long before any township existed on paper, the Champlain Valley was home to the Western Abenaki, part of the broader Abenaki and Wabanaki world. Archaeological and oral evidence places Native presence in the region for roughly 13,000 years.1 The Abenaki called their homeland Ndakinna — “our land” — and the lake itself Pitawbagw, “the lake between,” or in other renderings “the water that lies between,” referring to its position between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks.13 Western Abenaki communities were semi-nomadic, moving seasonally to fish the lake's tributaries, hunt in the surrounding forests, and cultivate corn, beans, and squash along fertile floodplains such as the mouth of the Winooski River just north of present-day Burlington.13
European contact and the epidemics, warfare, and land pressure that followed it devastated Abenaki populations and disrupted their communities over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Vermont's own state government spent much of the twentieth century officially denying that Abenaki people still existed within its borders — a policy of erasure that was reversed only in the 2000s and 2010s, when several Abenaki bands received Vermont state recognition.1 Any honest history of Burlington starts by acknowledging that the “founding” described below is a European and American story layered on top of a much older one, and that Abenaki people remain part of Vermont today.13
The 1763 Charter and the Allen Family
Burlington's official birth certificate is a New Hampshire land grant. On June 7, 1763, colonial governor Benning Wentworth — who chartered more than a hundred towns in the disputed territory that would become Vermont — issued the charter for “Burlington” to Samuel Willis and sixty-three other proprietors.4 Accounts differ on the name's origin: one theory credits Edward Burling, a wealthy New York landholder with grants in the area; another credits Richard Boyle, the 3rd Earl of Burlington.448
The grant sat mostly on paper for its first decade. The real work of turning it into a settlement fell to the Allen family — most famously Ethan Allen, leader of the Green Mountain Boys and hero of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, but for Burlington specifically, his younger brother Ira Allen mattered more. In 1771, Ira went to work as a surveyor for the Onion River Land Company, a land speculation venture the Allen brothers and their associate Remember Baker had formed to buy up New Hampshire Grants land along the river now called the Winooski.56 Starting in 1772, Ira surveyed and platted lots around Burlington in anticipation of settlers, and over the following years he became the largest individual landowner in the area — by some estimates controlling roughly 200,000 acres regionally.9 Ira Allen would go on to be one of Vermont's founding statesmen: state treasurer, a framer of the state's institutions, and eventually the man who gave the University of Vermont its land.
The first European settlers reached Burlington in 1773.6 Settlement barely got started before the American Revolution intervened — many of the small population left to fight or fled the frontier violence that swept the Champlain Valley — and the town's real, permanent growth didn't resume until after 1783.46 The first recorded town meeting took place March 19, 1787.4
An Independent Republic, and a University Is Born
Vermont's political status in this period was unusual: from 1777 to 1791, it operated as an independent republic, printing its own currency and governing itself while New York, New Hampshire, and the Continental Congress all disputed its right to exist. It joined the United States in 1791 as the fourteenth state — the first admitted after the original thirteen.
That same year, on October 24, 1791, the Vermont legislature voted on where to locate a new state university, and Burlington won with 89 votes.10 Ira Allen had lobbied hard for the town, offering fifty acres of his own land for a campus and pledging £4,000 sterling toward construction — a promise he never fully honored, even though as the region's largest landowner he had the means to.9 The University of Vermont — Universitas Viridis Montis, “University of the Green Mountains” — was thus chartered in 1791, though it existed on paper for nearly a decade before it opened. Daniel C. Sanders was hired as its first president in 1800, and instruction finally began in 1801.1011
War of 1812 and the Fight for the Lake
Burlington's geography — a lake town within cannon-shot of the Canadian border — made it strategically important the moment the United States and Britain went to war again in 1812. The town became a major staging ground and hospital post: at points during the war, as many as 5,000 U.S. troops were quartered in and around Burlington, actually outnumbering the civilian population, and roughly 500 soldiers are believed to have died there from disease bred by crowded, unsanitary camp conditions rather than combat.4
Burlington itself came under fire. Accounts differ on the date and details: one describes a brief British bombardment from the lake on August 2, 1813 — a roughly ten-minute cannonade that caused no casualties — while another, tied specifically to the site of today's Battery Park, describes American gunners on August 13, 1813, aided by the U.S. Navy vessel President, repelling a British squadron under Lieutenant Colonel John Murray.436 What's well documented is that Battery Park takes its name from the artillery battery the U.S. Army stationed there on the bluff above the lake to defend the town, and that the land was formally deeded to the city in 1870.3637
The larger and more consequential fighting happened thirty miles north, across the water, in what's usually called the Battle of Plattsburgh or the Battle of Lake Champlain, fought September 6–11, 1814. American naval forces under Thomas Macdonough defeated a British squadron on the lake, forcing a much larger British invasion army to abandon its push south and retreat to Canada. Vermont militia — mustered in part through towns like Burlington — helped defend the Plattsburgh shore alongside New York troops and regular Army units.3334 The American victory at Plattsburgh strengthened the U.S. negotiating position at the Treaty of Ghent later that year, effectively ending the war on terms that changed no borders.33
Queen City of Commerce: The Lumber Port Era
Burlington's nineteenth-century fortune was built on wood and water. The completion of the Champlain Canal in 1823 connected Lake Champlain to the Hudson River and, through the Erie Canal (1825), to the port of New York; the Chambly Canal, completed in 1843, opened a route north into Quebec.1214 Suddenly Burlington sat on a through-route between Canadian timber country and the booming markets of the eastern seaboard, and the city's waterfront filled with lumber yards, sawmills, and wharves.
Rail arrived in December 1849 with the completion of the Rutland and Burlington Railroad and the Vermont Central Railroad, giving the port a year-round overland connection that the lake, frozen half the year, could never provide on its own.7274 The combination of rail and water traffic put Burlington among the busiest lumber ports in the country — by some accounts the third-busiest.4121314 By the 1880s, four major lumber firms — Skillings, Whitney & Barnes; Shepard & Morse; Mathews & Hickok; and Bronson, Weston & Dunham — dominated the yards between Kilburn and Pine streets, and the stacks of drying lumber were so extensive that the paths between them were given their own street names.7576
The boom didn't last. Lumber began declining around the turn of the twentieth century as Canadian timber sources were depleted and rail patterns shifted, and by 1926 the harbor was receiving only about thirty boatloads of lumber a year — a trickle compared to its Gilded Age peak.1213 Burlington was incorporated as a city in 1865, and it was the city's first mayor, Albert L. Catlin, who coined its enduring nickname in an 1866 address, predicting Burlington would become “the Queen City of New England.”47
Rails, Wharves, and New Arrivals
Prosperity drew people, and nineteenth-century Burlington became a genuinely immigrant city. French-Canadians arrived first and in the largest numbers: by 1850, roughly 14,000 French-Canadians lived in Vermont, concentrated in the northwest corner of the state, and Burlington hosted the country's first French national Catholic parish, established in 1850.4445 Irish immigrants followed a similar path south from Quebec, many having fled the Great Famine, and the need for railroad labor in the 1840s pulled in still more; by 1850, Irish-born residents and their families made up nearly a quarter of the combined population of Burlington and neighboring Colchester.44
Later in the century, Italian immigrants, largely from southern Italy and Sicily, settled in a compact neighborhood bordered roughly by Pearl, Main, St. Paul, and Battery streets — a district that came to be known locally as Little Italy, complete with its own church, schools, gardens, and shops.1518 At the same time, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants — many of them Litvaks from towns like Čekiškė in Lithuania, along with families from Russia, Poland, Germany, and elsewhere — settled along North Street in what's now the Old North End, building a community dense enough with synagogues, kosher bakeries, a ritual bathhouse, and Yiddish-speaking households that it earned the name “Little Jerusalem.” By the early twentieth century it was home to more than 1,400 residents living a life that consciously echoed the shtetls of Eastern Europe.4041 Assimilation, intermarriage, and the passage of generations gradually dissolved Little Jerusalem as a distinct community by World War II, though its built legacy — modest wood-frame houses, a handful of surviving synagogue buildings — still marks the Old North End.4041
The Industrial South End
South of downtown, the waterfront's lumber economy fed a broader industrial district along Pine, Battery, and South Champlain streets. By the turn of the twentieth century this area — now recognized as the Pine Street Industrial Historic District — hosted an unusually varied mix of manufacturing: cotton cloth, brush fibers, maple syrup packing, kitchen utensils, breakfast cereal, marble and granite finishing, spools and bobbins, Venetian blinds, even candy and cigars.7576 It was blue-collar, immigrant-staffed Burlington, distinct from the grander residential streets — South Union, Main, South Willard, Prospect — where the lumber barons, bankers, and railroad men built their late-Victorian mansions up the hill, deliberately distant from the noise and smell of their own mills.7778 Battery Street itself, running along the old shoreline (once called Water Street), preserved an unusually intact mix of residential, commercial, and industrial buildings from the 1790s onward, work that's now protected as the Battery Street Historic District.77
Prohibition and the Lake
When the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act made alcohol illegal nationwide starting in 1920, Lake Champlain's proximity to Quebec turned Burlington's waterfront into smuggling country. There were no formal checkpoints on the lake, only islands, inlets, and tributaries that gave “rum-runners” endless places to hide.5153 Boats specially rigged for the trade — some fitted with surplus World War I aircraft engines for speed — carried Canadian liquor south under cover of night; if a smuggler was intercepted, the standard trick was to dump the cargo overboard and claim an innocent midnight cruise.51 A federal Lake Champlain Boat Patrol wasn't organized until 1924, leaving several years of the decade essentially uncontested, and even a casual, part-time rum-runner could earn around $125 for a single night's run — a substantial sum against an average yearly income of roughly $1,300 to $1,400 at the time.54 Local industry got in on the trade too: the family behind the Venetian Soda / M. & F.C. Dorn beverage operation on Pine Street later told stories of bootlegging worked into the business's early years.87
From Business College to Champlain College
Higher education in Burlington wasn't limited to UVM. In 1878, entrepreneur G.W. Thompson opened the Burlington Business School to train young men for commercial careers; over the following decades it changed hands and names repeatedly — the Queen City Business College, the Green Mountain College of Commerce, Champlain College of Commerce — before settling on Champlain College in 1958, when it also moved to its present campus in Burlington's Hill Section.4950 It began as a scrappy, nearly-failed operation with about thirty students in the mid-1950s and has since grown into one of the city's two major colleges alongside UVM.49
Urban Renewal and the Loss of Little Italy
Burlington's mid-twentieth-century story includes a genuine civic wound. Like many American cities, Burlington embraced federally funded “urban renewal” in the 1960s, targeting the old Italian-American neighborhood downtown — by then officially labeled “blighted” — for demolition under the Champlain Street Urban Renewal Project. Demolition crews began work in 1966, and the last home in the neighborhood was razed in 1968.1617 The toll was severe: more than 140 homes, along with businesses, gardens, community centers, a Catholic cathedral, and schools, were leveled, and 167 families plus 67 single residents were displaced, many scattered to the city's outer edges.16 The city used its power of eminent domain to acquire the properties, at prices many displaced residents later argued in court were unfairly low.16 In place of a walkable neighborhood of backyard gardens and two elementary schools rose freestanding office buildings, a hotel, and an enclosed, largely windowless shopping mall attached to a parking garage.16 It took decades for the city to formally reckon with the loss: an official Vermont historic marker commemorating the neighborhood was finally dedicated on October 8, 2011, at the foot of Cherry Street on the Battery Park Extension.1639
Civic Landmarks of the Boom Years
Even as the waterfront's fortunes rose and fell, Burlington kept building monuments to its own confidence. The Fletcher Free Library, endowed in 1873 by Mary Martha Fletcher, outgrew its original Church Street home and in 1901–04 built a new Beaux-Arts building at 235 College Street with a $50,000 gift from Andrew Carnegie — the first of Vermont's four Carnegie libraries.666768 A 1973 structural crisis, caused by the building having been constructed over a filled ravine, nearly led to its demolition; a citizens' campaign saved it, won it a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, and secured funding for repair and a 1981 addition.66
Downtown's civic core took shape in the 1920s. After the 1850s-era city hall deteriorated and was further damaged by a 1925 earthquake, the city commissioned a replacement from the prestigious New York firm McKim, Mead & White, selected out of a twenty-six-firm competition; architect William M. Kendall's Neoclassical design, finished in 1928 at a cost of $475,000 and built almost entirely from Vermont brick, marble, and granite, still stands at 149 Church Street as Burlington City Hall.8384 Just up the street, Memorial Auditorium was built in 1927–28, financed by a $750,000 bond, to honor Burlington's war dead going back to the Revolution while doubling as the city's civic and convention hall; Amelia Earhart addressed 4,000 schoolchildren there in the 1930s, and Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, and Simon & Garfunkel all played the room in the 1960s. Decades of deferred maintenance forced its closure in 2016 over structural safety concerns.798082
Bernie Sanders and a City Reinvents Its Waterfront
By the late 1970s, the industrial waterfront that had built the city was mostly derelict — a stretch of rail yards, oil tanks (roughly ninety of them at one point), and abandoned lumber infrastructure cut off from downtown by rail lines and neglect.4 The pivot toward today's public waterfront began with an unlikely political upset: on March 3, 1981, Bernie Sanders, a democratic-socialist independent with no prior elected office, beat five-term incumbent Democrat Gordon Paquette by just ten votes to become Burlington's 37th mayor.2123 He served four terms, from April 1981 to April 1989, building a coalition — later nicknamed the “Sanderistas” — that reoriented city government toward neighborhood preservation, affordable housing, and public control of the waterfront rather than turning it over to private condominium development, which was the leading rival plan at the time.22
Two of his administration's legacies now define the city. First, the Church Street Marketplace: the idea dated back to 1958 and gathered real momentum after a wildly successful one-day street fair in 1971 drew roughly 15,000 people to four blocks of Church Street. The two central blocks were permanently closed to car traffic on July 7, 1980, and after a full redesign by the Cambridge firm Carr, Lynch Associates, the Marketplace formally opened on September 15, 1981 — a pedestrian downtown that predates most American cities' pedestrian-mall experiments and, unlike many of them, actually succeeded long-term.242526 Second, working with his administration, the city fought a lengthy legal and political battle (reaching the Vermont Supreme Court by 1989) to establish that the old rail-yard waterfront should be redeveloped as public parkland rather than private commercial property, laying the groundwork for today's Waterfront Park, bike path (completed 1990), and boathouse.4
Sanders's administration also pioneered a housing model that's since spread nationwide. In 1984, working within a hostile federal funding climate under the Reagan administration, the city seeded the Burlington Community Land Trust — now the Champlain Housing Trust — with municipal grants and technical support, making it the first community land trust in the United States created by a city government rather than a nonprofit or private group.5961 The model keeps housing permanently affordable by separating ownership of the land from ownership of the home built on it. It's since been replicated in roughly 300 land trusts across the country, and Sanders continued championing it after leaving Burlington, securing the first federal funding dedicated to community land trusts as a congressman in 1992.59
Ben & Jerry's and a New Kind of Local Business
Three years before Sanders took office, in May 1978, two childhood friends from New York, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, opened an ice cream shop in a converted gas station at the corner of College and St. Paul streets downtown, financed by a $5 correspondence course in ice cream making from Penn State and about $12,000 in savings and loans.3032 The original gas-station building is long gone — it was eventually demolished for a parking lot — but a plaque was set into the sidewalk in 1988 to mark the tenth anniversary, and the company (later headquartered in Waterbury) became one of the most recognizable brands to come out of Vermont, closely associated with the state's countercultural, socially conscious self-image ever since.3031
Firsts: Electricity, Land, and Music
Burlington kept collecting civic firsts into the twenty-first century. In September 2014, after Burlington Electric Department voters approved a $12 million bond to acquire the Winooski One hydroelectric plant, the city's electric grid — drawing on a mix of biomass at the McNeil wood-fired plant, hydropower, wind from nearby Georgia Mountain, and solar — became the first in the United States to source 100% of its electricity from renewable sources.272829 The city held its electric rates flat for roughly a decade afterward and has stated ambitions to become the first U.S. city that is net-zero energy overall, not just on electricity.2728
Music has its own local mythology. Phish formed in Burlington on October 30, 1983, and by late 1984 the young band — guitarist Trey Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, drummer Jon Fishman, and later keyboardist Page McConnell — had found a regular home at Nectar's, a Main Street restaurant and bar that owner Nectar Rorris had opened in 1975.5557 The band played dozens of shows there through the late 1980s, crediting Rorris with giving them a stage to experiment on while they were still finding their sound; their 1992 album A Picture of Nectar is a direct tribute, its cover superimposing Rorris's face on an orange.55 Nectar's closed for good in the summer of 2025 after fifty years in business, a casualty of a Main Street construction project and a lease dispute with its landlord — closing the loop on a venue that helped make Burlington a stop on the American jam-band map.5658
The Waterfront Today
The waterfront's most recent transformation is the Moran Plant. Built in 1954 as a coal-fired municipal power station at 475 Lake Street, it was converted to wood-chip fuel in the 1970s energy crisis, then decommissioned entirely in 1986 once the newer McNeil plant took over generation.64 The building sat vacant, slowly decaying, for more than three decades — occupied only in part by the Lake Champlain Community Sailing Center — before the city broke ground in August 2020 on a plan to strip the structure to its steel skeleton, stabilize it, and reopen it as an open-air public pavilion. Phase one was completed in October 2022, and the building, rebranded as the FRAME, opened to the public for the first time in its history — an industrial relic turned into a deliberately unfinished monument to the waterfront's working past.626365
Together, the FRAME, the ECHO science center anchoring the south end of Waterfront Park, the restored Union Station (rebuilt in 1916 as a joint project of two railroads and the city, and reconnected to Amtrak service via a new platform completed in 2022), and the pedestrian-friendly bike path form the modern face of a waterfront that spent most of the twentieth century as a working industrial yard.7274 Burlington today reads as a layered city: a lake port's bones, a college town's rhythm, an immigrant city's surviving neighborhoods, and the imprint of a mayor who insisted, against the era's conventional wisdom, that the shoreline belonged to the public.