In early America there may not have been a better place to watch a sunset than Burlington, which was organized as a town in 1785. On the eastern shore of Lake Champlain one could sit on a wide sandy crescent and look across the water to the Adirondack Mountains. But these sylvan pleasures would surely be intruded on in short order.
After all the natural falls of the Winooski River were begging for mills to take advantage of the water power. And when the Champlain Canal opened in 1823 to access the Hudson River and then New York City and then the Atlantic Ocean by water, the die was cast for Burlington to become Vermont’s largest and most important city.
By the middle of the 1800s, when the railroads arrived in town, Burlington was the third largest lumber port in the United States. The waterfront was a beehive of wharves and railyards and the city energetically built up the shoreline with thousands upon thousands of cubic yards of fill from the surrounding hillsides.
Meanwhile the city grew on the plateaus above the waterfront and incorporated in 1865. The new buildings were not those seen in the typical New England towns. These were sophisticated structures built by big city architects and bankrolled by wealthy local citizens. The tonnage sent out onto Lake Champlain was growing more sophisticated as well - gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel were eventually shipped on barges to and from 83 above ground bulk storage tanks on the Burlington waterfront.
Those days seem a long way away today. The barges have stopped floating - the lake’s southern end has accumulated too much silt. The biggest employers in the city in the 21st century are the University of Vermont and the school’s medical center. Down on the waterfront the freight schooners have been replaced by pleasure craft and bicycles roll where passenger trains once rumbled. And those sunsets are still sublime. To see what vestiges of the history of the Queen City remain we will begin our explorations at...
It never takes long for the fact to be mentioned that Montpelier is the nation’s smallest state capital so let’s get that out of the way up front. In spite of its size Montpelier packs an architectural wallop worthy of towns many times its population. In addition to the handiwork of local designers big-name architects made the journey up from Boston when the need arose to contribute to the town streetscape.
Colonel Jacob Davis cleared the first land and started settlement in 1787. Davis had a penchant for naming things after the French so his little enclave got the name Montpelier. Population was fewer than 100 and there was one road (today’s Court Street) when Montpelier got the nod to be state capitol.
Through the 1800s the town developed into a center for water-powered manufacturing and the Vermont Central Railroad arrived in 1849 to kickstart other businesses. Banking and insurance and, of course, government have been the primary economic engines for the last century or so.
And here is an interesting tidbit about that tiny population - the United States Census headcount in 1910 was 7,856. In 2010 the official tally was 7,855. A difference of one person in a century’s time. Our walking tour of the Vermont capital will begin with what has been hailed by some who know as the finest example of Greek Revival architecture in America...
Rutland was ushered into existence in 1761 on the pen of Benning Wentworth, accidental colonial governor of New Hampshire. In the 1740s Wentworth had been involved in some messy financial dealings with Spain over some timber sales which resulted in his personal bankruptcy. Meanwhile his father was agitating for the creation of a separate governorship for New Hampshire, which had been an overlooked slice of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Attempting to winch himself out of his financial morass Wentworth went after the British government and rather than pay him real money they gave him the governorship of New Hampshire.
Wentworth spent a quarter century in the office doling out land grants in what is now southern Vermont to pad his wallet. There was not always clear title to those lands, however, as residents of the Province of New York would attest. No matter to Wentworth - he would be in the grave twenty years before those matters would be sorted out when Vermont became a state in 1791. One of those grants went to John Manners, 3rd Duke of Rutland. The good duke never saw his verdant new lands but flipped the property to settlers along Otter Creek. For the better part of three generations the Village of Rutland trundled along like most New England towns - there were merchants and craftsmen and farmers all around. Raising merino sheep to provide high-quality wool was a popular endeavor. In 1784 Rutland became the county seat for Rutland County so a courthouse was erected.
The course of Rutland’s future changed in the 1830s thanks to circumstances thousands of miles away. In Tuscany, Italy the easily extractable marble from the quarries of Carrara - the world’s best stone - were becoming exhausted and ever greater depths were required. The locals in Rutland had been using top quality marble for headstones from outcroppings in the ground for headstones ever since the first burials in town. Now the first commercial quarry was opened in Dorset, considered to be the first marble quarry in the United States.
In the 1850s the railroad arrived in Rutland, which immediately made the town the transportation center of southern Vermont. So much marble was shipped out of Rutland that after the Vermont Marble Company was formed in 1880 it became powerful enough to control the rights to all the marble in Vermont, Alaska and Colorado. About that time the town split off. West Rutland and Proctor, where the quarries were, became separate municipalities and Rutland incorporated as Vermont’s third city.
The men who ran the marble quarries filtered their profits through businesses in Rutland and beat a steady path into politics, further wielding influence for the city. Much of the downtown area reflects the wealth from that era around the turn of the 20th century and the entire area, including 108 buildings, has been registered as a National Historic District. Our explorations to see the Marble City will begin with a work from the architect most responsible for the Rutland cityscape. Spoiler alert: we’re going to see a lot of marble...