South Burlington owes its existence to a fight over sewage. The land was granted as part of Burlington township in 1763, and Burlington organized as a town around 1785.1 For the next eighty years, the waterfront village and its rural hinterland shared one government. That ended in 1865, when the densely settled lakeside area became the City of Burlington and the surrounding farmland incorporated separately as South Burlington.12
The immediate trigger was public health. A typhoid outbreak was traced to sewage discharged near Burlington's water intake, and village residents wanted a longer outfall pipe. Farmers outside the village, who felt little of the risk, balked at the cost, and the two constituencies went their separate ways. By 1870, South Burlington counted 791 residents against Burlington's 13,596.2
The new town was agricultural, with dairying at the center of local life. As late as roughly 1950, cattle crossings on Williston Road routinely stopped traffic.2 Then the landscape changed fast. The population climbed from 3,279 in 1950 to 6,903 in 1960 and 10,032 by 1970, as returning veterans and Burlington's crowding pushed subdivisions onto former farmland.12 The University of Vermont acquired most of its large South Burlington holdings in the 1960s and kept extensive tracts undeveloped for decades.3 By some accounts, Interstate 89's arrival in the same postwar era reinforced the town's role as a commuting and commercial corridor between Burlington, the highway, and the airport.
Burlington International Airport sits partly within South Burlington beside the postwar Chamberlin neighborhood. Beginning in the 1990s, the FAA, the state, and the city of Burlington, which owns the airport, bought homes most affected by aircraft noise. By 2016 more than 100 properties had been purchased, and a final proposed round targeted 39 more using a $14 million FAA grant.45 The buyouts became more contentious as residents anticipated the arrival of F-35 jets. In early 2017, South Burlington city councilors sought to halt the final round, objecting especially to the loss of Lily Lane cottages built with affordable-housing covenants.6
South Burlington became a city in 1971, but for decades remained a place without a traditional center. A 2015 survey found that more than 55 percent of residents felt the city lacked a discernible identity.17 The city answered with a City Center plan adopted in 2012 and $29 million in voter-approved bonds for rebuilding Market Street. Construction began in 2017, a city hall and library opened in 2021, and by April 2024 the 103-acre district between Dorset Street and Hinesburg Road had 232 completed homes and 551 more under construction.7 Vermont's newest city was finally building the downtown it had never had.