Cultural Landscape: European Settlement

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Most of the cultural landscape features you see today in Vermont are from the historic era. Europeans arrived in Vermont in 1609, and some early French settlement occurred along Lake Champlain. But the major impact of the Europeans came with the English settlers from the south in the late 1700s. When the Europeans arrived, they came to an almost entirely forested landscape, and systematically transformed it, over several generations, to an almost entirely cleared farming landscape with occasional small villages. This enormous landscape change is the underlying framework of most of the cultural landscape we see today. The landscape continued to evolve and is still evolving today, and we have remnants in the landscape of all the eras in European use of the land.

As the initial clearing of the forested landscape progressed, the nineteenth-century Vermont farming landscape evolved into thousands of farmsteads dispersed over almost the entire state (below about 2000' elevation). Each farmstead eventually consisted of a farmhouse and cluster of farm buildings surrounded by farm fields, hay meadows, pastures, and woodlots. In the higher elevations above 2000', logging cut over virtually all of the land at one time or another.

Over the last 100 years, the landscape has evolved back into a mostly forested landscape again. The farming landscape is greatly reduced in extent and is now concentrated along the flatter and lower elevations lands, and the mid and high elevation hills are largely grown back to forest again. Cities and suburbs have developed, and the landscape has seen a repopulation of rural areas with residential housing.

Villages also developed very early in European settlement history. The first villages were centered around the waterpower sites, or near the geographical center of town. Many villages of today have retained their 150 year old core and grown only at the edges, and others have evolved into cities. If you are interested in more detail about village and city landscapes, see the following section.

Vermont also has a history of small resource-based industries, such as marble quarries, that have developed outside the boundaries of villages and cities where other industry has traditionally been based. A short section on these special cases can be found below.

The landscape patterns we see today are a mix of pieces left from all the previous eras in settlement history. Sometimes a feature retains its original use, such as an old schoolhouse still in use. Sometimes old features are updated but still serve essentially the same purpose, such as a modern tarmac road along the trace of a 250 year old military road, Sometimes features are altered and used for different things, such as a 100 year old hotel made over into apartments. But with the assistance of research tools, you can learn to decipher even the most complex of human landscapes, and tease out the original layers of the human use of the landscape.

Historic Landscapes: European Settlement in Shelburne:

Abstract lot lines became tangible and are visible from the air

The colonial governor of New Hampshire, Benning Wentworth, established Shelburne's town lines in 1763, and, soon thereafter, lines were drawn on the town map dividing the entire town into large rectangular lots. Lots were sold to farm families mostly from southern New England, and settlers came and began to clear the land. As they established their fields, pastures, and fence lines, the abstract lot lines drawn on the eighteenth-century paper plan became tangible and visible on the landscape. Many of those original lot lines persist on the land today, and give the landscape much of its underlying geometry.