Grand Isle County

Grand Isle County Courthouse
administration
US state :	Vermont
Administrative headquarters :	North Hero
Address of the administrative headquarters:	County Courthouse P.O. Box 7 North Hero, VT 05474-0007
Foundation :	November 9, 1802
Made up from:	Chittenden County Franklin County
Area code :	001 802
Demographics
Residents :	6970  (2010)
Population density :	32.6 inhabitants / km 2
geography
Total area :	504 km²
Water surface :	290 km²
map

Grand Isle County is a county in the state of Vermont in the United States . The county seat is in North Hero .

geography

The county is made up of a series of islands in Lake Champlain and a peninsula along the east bank of the lake in the far northwest of Vermont. It borders New York to the west and Canada to the north and has an area of ​​504 square kilometers, of which 290 square kilometers are water. It is bordered clockwise by the following counties: Franklin County , Chittenden County , Clinton County, New York, and Le Haut-Richelieu, Canada.

The oldest geological formations in Grand Isle County are found on Isle La Motte. There are quarries that open up one of the oldest reefs in the world: the Chazy Fossil Reef . It was formed in shallow water over a length of more than 2,000 kilometers and is considered to be one of the first reefs that corals were involved in building.

Younger are the Green Mountains , a mountain range that runs north-south parallel to the Atlantic coast and is between 70 and 120 kilometers wide. Grand Isle County is located on the western edge of this mountain range in the middle of Lake Champlain, the surface of which is only 32 meters above sea level. The Green Mountains, together with the northern mountain ranges, formed a large barrier which, when the ice cap melted towards the end of the last ice age, represented an insurmountable barrier for the meltwater. A huge lake was formed, the banks of which can still be seen in the outskirts of the Green Mountains. After the barrier towards today's St. Lawrence River had been breached , fertile land was left behind, which was quickly covered by vast forests.

history

native people

We know little about the original inhabitants of the region. The area around Lake Champlain has been around since around 8000 BC. As we know from finds of camp sites, spearheads and flint stones. During the first voyages of discovery, the French came across a settlement of a tribe of the Abenaki in the area of ​​today's Alburgh. There are also reports of a permanent settlement on North Hero. During the Indian Wars , however, these settlements were destroyed by the Iroquois . That meant the end of the permanent settlement by Indians in the area of ​​today's Grand Isle County, because the Iroquois used the area exclusively as a hunting ground. Most of the Abenaki withdrew to the areas near the Great Lakes, which had not yet been discovered by the white settlers. Only a few natives stayed in the settlement area of ​​the Europeans and mostly traded with the whites until they finally settled in their settlements. Many pay lists from the American Civil War also list Indians as soldiers; however, unlike the white settlers, not by name.

Discovery by European colonists

The exploration of the area was started from 1609 from Canada under the direction of the French Samuel de Champlain . He sailed the tributaries of the St. Lawrence River and came to the lake that bears his name today: Lake Champlain . Champlain claimed the areas he had discovered for the French crown and sought subsequent settlement by French colonists, which was only very hesitant and was only temporarily successful in the area of ​​Isle La Motte and today's Alburgh.

The British discovered the area about a hundred years later. Her expeditions followed the course of the Hudson River from the coast northwards to the vicinity of Lake Champlain from 1610 . Around 1709 they met not only the mostly hostile Iroquois and Mohawks here , but also outposts of the French settlement. Joyfully accepted by the Abenaki as allies against the Iroquois, the Indian Wars developed around 1740 - in this area mostly skirmishes between the French and British with mutual support from the allied indigenous peoples - which led to the United States being completely subjugated by the Indians for more than a hundred years should go through from northeast to southwest. The fighting was damaging to the colonization of the country. Many existing settlements were temporarily or even permanently given up, new colonists avoided the contested areas.

Boundaries and the Vermont Republic

The military decision between the French and the British in the north of the continent was made in 1759: with the capture of Quebec, the French army was largely defeated. But it wasn't until 1763 that Canada became a British colony after the Seven Years' War with the Peace of Paris .

On December 28, 1763, the governor of New York State declared his jurisdiction over all areas west of the Connecticut River, including what is now Grand Isle County. On March 13, 1764, the governor of New Hampshire, who had previously sold the lands of what would later become Vermont to settlers, contradicted this declaration and at the same time reassured the settlers that these were purely administrative problems with no effect on them. Due to the dispute on July 20, 1764, the English King George III set the border between New Hampshire and New York on the west bank of the Connecticut River . At the same time he determined the 45th parallel as the border of the disputed area with Canada. As a result, the peninsula of today's Alburgh was assigned to the colony of New York. Due to the king's decision, New York did not recognize the previous land sales, sold land that had already been sold by New Hampshire and offered already populated parcels, often in a different layout, to the owners for renewed purchase. Those who did not accept the offer were driven from their country. This led to great unrest and partly open revolt by the settlers against New York. Citizens' militias were formed, who tried to drive the other side out of the country in mutual blows and raids. Since the king was far away and despite the intervention of the affected settlers no further decision reached the British colonies, a civil militia under Ethan Allen , the Green Mountain Boys , began to pursue the independence of what would later become Vermont from New York with military and political emphasis. In 1777 the independent Vermont Republic was proclaimed, which initially did not become a member of the United States' confederation because the conflict over jurisdiction with the state of New York had not yet been resolved and the federation did not want to take the dispute into its ranks. The final border with the state of New York was unilaterally determined on August 20, 1781 by the Vermont Congress: the islands in Lake Champlain were therefore claimed by Vermont. They had already been released for settlement as towns by the Vermont Congress on October 27, 1779 and were given exclusively to veterans of the Revolutionary War. The systematic settlement of the region began from 1783 under the leadership of Ethan Allen, who had been awarded lands on North Hero. It was not until 1790 that the state of New York confirmed the demarcation: New York waived all claims against Vermont in return for a payment of $ 30,000. Vermont was then accepted on March 4, 1792 as the 14th state in the Confederation of the United States of America.

The development to an independent county

Population development
Census	Residents		± in%
1790	1155		-
1800	2498		116.3%
1810	3445		37.9%
1820	3527		2.4%
1830	3696		4.8%
1840	3883		5.1%
1850	4145		6.7%
1860	4276		3.2%
1870	4082		-4.5%
1880	4124		1 %
1890	3843		-6.8%
1900	4462		16.1%
1910	3761		-15.7%
1920	3784		0.6%
1930	3944		4.2%
1940	3802		-3.6%
1950	3406		-10.4%
1960	2927		-14.1%
1970	3574		22.1%
1980	4613		29.1%
1990	5318		15.3%
2000	6901		29.8%
2010	6970		1 %
1790-1800 1810-1890 1900-1990 2000 Grand Isle County's age pyramid (as of 2000)

After the proclamation of independence, the originally only county of Vermont to cover the entire state area, Charlotte County, which no longer exists today, was subdivided in several steps from 1779. On November 5, 1792, when what was then Chittenden County was divided into a northern and a southern county, the island parishes, which had always been politically related until then, were divided: Alburgh, Isle La Motte and North Hero were assigned to the newly formed Franklin County, Grand Isle and South Hero stayed with Chittenden County. This provoked the protest of the residents of the five towns, who saw themselves as a political unit. He expressed himself in the form of a petition to the Congress of Vermont in September 1794 and led to the establishment of these five towns, Grand Isle County on November 9, 1802. Since then, it has remained within its boundaries.

The islands developed calmly and without further incidents into intensively used agricultural areas. Potato cultivation and sheep breeding were particularly widespread. The already mentioned stone deposit on Isle La Motte, which later turned out to be a fossil reef worth protecting, was opened up by a series of quarries that transported stones by ship over Lake Champlain and the Hudson River to New York, where they, among other things, to Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge were used.

Railway construction and industrialization

From around 1845, Vermont was built in many places at the same time. Several lines connected the towns from east to west across the mountains: from the Connecticut River to Lake Champlain or the Hudson you could travel comfortably after only two years of railroad construction in Vermont.

It was different in Grand Isle County. Since the islands were used almost exclusively for agriculture and the construction of a railway would have required large bridges, the connection was initially dispensed with. Instead, the north connection around Lake Champlain to Rouses Point in New York was forced. In fact, it became the first of two lines to cross Grand Isle County: the St. Johnsbury and Lake Champlain Railroad struck this connection in 1850 . For this purpose, two dams with bridge-spanned passages were built between Swanton , Alburgh and Rouses Point over Missisquoi Bay in the east and the northern foothill of Lake Champlain in the west. The railway line brought no industry to the county, but it did bring tourists who sought relief from skin diseases at two medicinal water springs in Alburgh and North Hero.

A second route was led from Burlington to the Grand Isle and connected in Alburgh to the Swanton – Rouses Point link. This railway line Burlington - Rouses Point was built by the Rutland Railway and operated from 1901. It also did not bring about industrialization of the islands. The quarries on Isle La Motte remained unmatched by the new transport options; the stones were sent by ship as before.

Both railway lines have now been shut down. The embankment to Burlington is now used as a hiking trail through the lake, the dams at Alburgh are used for road traffic.

The civil war and the aftermath

Just as the War of Independence spared what would later become Grand Isle County, the American Civil War (1861 to 1864) stayed away from the islands. There were no battles, raids, or actions in the county; the closest, isolated civil war action was the St. Albans Raid , which took place in neighboring Franklin County. Only the provision of soldiers from the ranks of the citizens showed what was happening in the United States. The county had been populated by Revolutionary War veterans; The willingness to fight on the side of the northern states was correspondingly high. Compared to other rural counties, the payment of severance payments and the number of ransom purchases from military service remained relatively low. Unfortunately, exact figures cannot be given for North Hero and Grand Isle due to the lack of information. The available sources allow an estimate of a total of around 250 soldiers. According to the same lists, the rate of ransom and substitute men is below 10%. Likewise, the number of dead and wounded cannot be meaningfully reconstructed with the available sources. In other towns in the area it is usually between 15 and 20%, so that around 30 to 50 people can be assumed for this.

The rediscovery of the location of the first St. Anne's Chapel on North American soil in 1892 led a year later to the establishment of a pilgrimage church on Isle La Motte by a parish from Burlington. This site quickly developed into an important place of pilgrimage for Vermont, New York and southeastern Canada, which still attracts several thousand visitors annually.

The Great Depression of 1929

Due to the largely lacking industry and, at the same time, a self-sufficient economy, the effects of the global economic crisis that began in 1929 on the islands remained small. For this reason, no New Deal measures for economic development, such as those carried out in other counties, were planned. However, the migration of residents to the economic centers also began on the islands . From 1930 through the 1960 census, the county's population fell by about a quarter.

After the Second World War

Lighthouse on the Isle of La Motte

Secluded Grand Isle County was not directly affected by World War II and its aftermath on the American economy. The intensification of private transport and the resulting increased mobility of the Americans, however, had two effects: On the one hand, the islands developed into a local recreation center for the metropolitan area of Burlington , which since the end of the war more and more developed into the industrial and population center of Vermont, on the other hand discovered the inhabitants of the metropolitan areas of the east coast, especially the New Yorkers, the hinterland. Several landscape and wildlife sanctuaries have been created in Grand Isle County that act as tourist magnets. Fishing spots, tent sites and marinas were also built. Agriculture is still the islands' main source of income, but tourism is growing in importance. The establishment of second homes and the urban escape from the nearby Burlington area reversed the effect of population decline since Black Friday of 1929: From the 1960s until the 2010 census, the population has more than doubled. According to the 2010 census, around 7,000 people now live in the towns of Grand Isle County, with an upward trend, which in the decade 2000 to 2010 was 1%, however, below the average for all Vermont towns (around 3%).

cities and communes

In addition to the independent municipalities listed below, the town of Alburgh also has the Village Alburgh, which has independent rights and is co-administered by the higher-level Town Alburgh.

Locality	status	Population (2010)	Total area [km²]	Land area [km²]	Population density [inhabitants / km²]	founding	Specialty
Alburgh	town	1,998	126.4	75.5	26.5	23 Feb 1781
Grand Isle	town	2,067	91.0	42.5	48.6	Oct. 27, 1779
Isle La Motte	town	471	43.2	20.4	23.1	Oct. 27, 1779
North Hero	town	803	120.6	34.9	23.0	Oct. 27, 1779	County Seat
South Hero	town	1,631	123.0	38.6	42.3	Oct. 27, 1779

literature

• Hans R. Guggisberg: History of the USA , 4th expanded and updated edition; Stuttgart 2002; Kohlhammer Verlag, ISBN 3-17-017045-7 .
• AJ Coolidge, JB Mansfield: A History and Description of New England, general and local . Boston 1859 (English). Therein Chapter VIII – IX, pp. 705–960.
• Abby Maria Hemenway: The Vermont Historical Gazetteer: A Magazine, Embracing a History of Each Town, Civil, Ecclesiastical, Biographical and Military . AM Hemenway, 1871, p. 473–486 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).

Web links

Commons : Grand Isle County, Vermont  - collection of pictures, videos, and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Grand Isle County in the United States Geological Survey's Geographic Names Information System , accessed February 22, 2011
2. ^ Abby Maria Hemenway: The Vermont Historical Gazetteer: A Magazine, Embracing a History of Each Town, Civil, Ecclesiastical, Biographical and Military . AM Hemenway, 1871, p. 481 ( books.google.com ).
3. ↑ Preparation of historical data from the University of Virginia
4. ↑ Extract from Census.gov . Retrieved February 28, 2011
5. ↑ Excerpt from factfinder.census.gov. Retrieved on February 28, 2011
   
   The population data before the county was founded was created by adding the values ​​of the towns that were later included.
6. ↑ Population data from the 2010 US Census in the American Factfinder

Coordinates: 44 ° 48 ′  N , 73 ° 17 ′  W