For at least a thousand years before any European saw it, the land where Burlington sits belonged to the Western Abenaki, who called the lake Pitawbagw — “the water that lies between” — and the surrounding land Ndakinna, “our land.” They fished, hunted, and grew corn and squash along the shore, and their descendants still live in Vermont today.123
Burlington's paper history starts on June 7, 1763, when New Hampshire's colonial governor Benning Wentworth chartered the town to Samuel Willis and 63 others, one of hundreds of townships he sold off sight unseen.4 Ira Allen — younger brother of the more famous Ethan — surveyed the land for the family's Onion River Land Company starting in 1772 and became the town's dominant early landowner and its chief booster.56 Settlement got underway in the 1770s, stalled through the Revolutionary War, and resumed in earnest after 1783.4
Vermont spent 1777 to 1791 as its own independent republic before joining the Union as the fourteenth state — and that same year, 1791, the Vermont legislature chartered the University of Vermont in Burlington, with Ira Allen donating fifty acres to make it happen.789 The War of 1812 brought thousands of federal troops to town. Accounts differ on the date and details of a brief 1813 British action from the lake, but Battery Park, on the bluff above the water, is named for the American gun battery that defended the town.41819
Lake Champlain was Burlington's fortune. Once the Champlain and Erie canals opened in the 1820s, the city became a booming inland port, and by the 1870s it ranked among the busiest lumber ports in the country — by some accounts the third-busiest.101112 Railroads arrived in 1849 and locked in the city's role as a shipping and manufacturing hub, drawing waves of immigrants: French-Canadians and Irish in the mid-1800s, followed by Italians and Eastern European Jews by the century's end. Jewish immigrant families built such a dense, self-contained community along North Street that the neighborhood became known as “Little Jerusalem.”2021 Burlington incorporated as a city in 1865 and picked up the nickname “Queen City” from its first mayor the following year.22
The 20th century wasn't kind to some of what earlier generations built. Lumber's collapse left the waterfront a rail yard and later an industrial wasteland, and in the mid-1960s the city bulldozed its own Little Italy — 140-plus homes, gardens, a church, and two schools bordered by Pearl, Main, St. Paul, and Battery streets — in the name of urban renewal.131415
Recovery came from an unlikely direction: Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist who won the mayor's office by ten votes in 1981, pushed to reclaim the derelict waterfront as public land and backed the Church Street Marketplace, the pedestrian downtown that opened that same September and remains the city's civic living room.16172324 His administration also seeded the Burlington Community Land Trust in 1984 — the first land trust created by a U.S. city — a model since copied nationwide.2930 Three years before Sanders took office, two friends named Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield had opened an ice cream shop in a converted gas station downtown, a business that would later become inseparable from Vermont's identity.2728
Burlington kept building on that reinvention: it became, in 2014, the first U.S. city to source 100% of its electricity from renewable sources.2526 Today it's a small, walkable city that reads at once as a college town, a lake town, and a place still working out what to do with its industrial bones — from the old Moran power plant, reborn as an open-air public pavilion called the FRAME, to Nectar's, the Main Street club where a young band called Phish found its footing in the 1980s before closing its doors in 2025.31323334