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L. Knowles driving the Cabot stage
The story of Cabot, Vermont mirrors agricultural history of Northern New England. In Vermont, retreating glaciers left rolling hills and low mountains. Fertile soil, along river valleys, let settlers practice subsistence farming.
Small rural towns, like Cabot, grew along rivers and important roads. Villages often had a central town green, ringed by public buildings, such as schools, churches, mills, and stores. Founded as a frontier settlement in the forest, alongside the Revolutionary War Bayley-Hazen military road, Cabot grew into a farming community. Early New England towns.
As water power developed, many residents left their first homesteads on Cabot Plains, along the military road, and then the second group of settlements, at the Center of Town, to move down to the banks of the Winooski River. By 1820, most commercial activity was along the river, in Cabot Village and Lower Cabot. Ponds & Watercourses
FIRST INDUSTRIES In 1788, Lieutenant Thomas Lyford, third settler in town, and first settler at the village, bought a lot from Jesse Leavenworth and Lyman Hitchcock. This is now the village of Cabot ("upper village"). Thomas Lyford was a millwright. There was no sawmill within ten miles; he built an up-and-down sawmill, on his lot, alongside the Winooski River, in 1789. Lyford and his son, Thomas Jr., next built a gristmill. About 1794, Lieutenant Lyford built the first house in the village. His son, Thomas Jr., operated the mills. The gristmill was at the northeast corner of present Elm and Main streets. It was demolished in the1940s.
Cabot grew rapidly in the early 1800s. In September 1823, The Gazetteer of Vermont, wrote, "At the centre is a small village, in which are a meetinghouse, erected in 1823, a store, a tavern, and some mills and other machinery. There are, in town, three physicians, two ministers, two stores, two taverns, four saw mills, two grist mills, one fulling mill, one carding machine and one tannery. Population 1032." The Congregational meetinghouse was moved from the Center of Town, downhill to Cabot Village, ca. 1826-27.
Others soon used water power to start businesses. More sawmills, a wool carding and cloth dressing shop, a tannery, starch factories, a carriage, wagon, and sleigh shop, blacksmith shops and a small foundry followed in succeeding years. In the upper village, a wool carding mill began in 1833 and continued for 44 years.
In Lower Cabot, in 1797, Moses Stone, from New Hampshire, built a saw-mill. In 1801, Clement Coburn built a gristmill there. In 1803, he sold a privilege to Joseph Coburn, on the opposite side of the river, to put in a fulling-mill. Before that, cloth was spun and woven at home. Joseph Coburn was called Lieutenant Coburn. He was born in 1775 in Charlton Mass. He came to Cabot in 1803; he was a clothier by trade. He died of spotted fever (typhus) in the epidemic of 1813. Although only thirty years old when he died, he was called the richest man in town.
Thomas Coldwill was the next fulling-mill owner; he soon sold to William Ensign, John R. Putnam, and Horace Haines. Haines moved the shop to the site of the Moses Stone sawmill in 1825, and added carding works. In 1835, Alden Webster bought the works, adding machinery, a spinning-jenny, hand-looms. That let him manufacture full cloth. In 1849, Webster sold the factory back to Horace Haines, who continued the business with his son, E. G. Haines. They built a new factory in 1849, with water-power looms and modern machinery. After Horace Haines and two sons died, Ira F. Haines became owner. The Haines mill burned in 1925.
EARLY AGRICULTURE. Settlers cleared forests. There was no easy way to sell timber. Instead, they burned trees to make potash and pearl ash for fertilizer. They grew subsistence crops and raised some livestock. About 1800, 14 crops - wheat, barley, rye, corn, oats, beans, peas, hemp, flax, red clover, white clover, timothy, and other grasses - were grown widely. They raised grain for home use by humans and livestock. They made maple sugar. Tanneries and lumber mills were numerous.
Butter, cheese, beef, and pork were plentiful. Cattle, sheep, lambswool, horses, pork, butter, and cheese were sold. Cattle were driven to markets in Boston, New York, and even Philadelphia. Sheep were mainly for wool.
Potatoes were a cash crop, used to make starch or whiskey. The early to middle nineteenth century in New England had dry summers and bitter cold winters. Potatoes had large yields; they provided more calories per acre than other crops. Many other crops failed in the cold. Potatoes tolerated cold, were cheap, grew fast, and fed humans and livestock.Vermont farmers sold potatoes to starch factories, in Cabot and throughout the region. The factories sold potato starch to agents for large cotton textile mills in Lowell and Providence, Massachusetts.
The first Cabot distillery was built on Cabot Plains, by Hanson Rogers, in 1809. Until the War of 1812, the distilleries sold to a home market and to distant Boston and Portland. Whiskey and cattle were smuggled into Canada, along Bayley-Hazen Road. At that time, there were 12 distilleries in Cabot. Smuggling on Lake Champlain.
During the War of 1812, when smuggling across the Canadian border offered to certain venturesome spirits a quick but rather dangerous way to money, the Yellow House became the headquarters of a famous gang of smugglers. This gang openly declared that their guiding motto was, “If thine enemy thirst give him drink.” So they sent vast quantities of potato whiskey to the British armies in Canada. And with the whiskey went tons of beef on the hoof. They used the barns of the Yellow Tavern while they collected their trail herds, and in its cellar stored their stout oak barrels of whiskey until the portents were right for running it across the border.
A mile or so north of the old tavern—stand is a small lake that used to be called Smugglers’ Pond; and there is an old tale about a certain zealous customs officer who attempted to stop a trail herd in the road near the pond and was thrown without ceremony into the depths which contain more mud than water.
Subsistence farming reached its peak about 1850, when railroads changed markets in twenty years. Railroad building eased marketing to east coast cities, but also brought competition from the West. Cheaper livestock from prairies and free ranges of the West led to a decline in Vermont sales of beef cattle and sheep.
Sheep were widespread in Vermont from 1810 to 1840, but led to deforestation, when valleys and mountainsides were cleared for pasture. Wool prices gradually declined from 1850 to 1880, except for demand spikes in war years.
Vermont shepherds could not compete with cheaper wool, shipped on the new railroads, from large ranches in the Midwest, where land cost less. Dairy cows were more important than sheep by 1850.
By 1880, dairy cattle began replacing beef breeds and dual purpose breeds. Butter was sold to other states. From 1850 to 1880, butter production trebled. Cheese was less important than butter. Dairy breeds improved. Jerseys began to replace Shorthorns, which had displaced the earlier "black cattle." Jerseys predominated on farms selling butterfat or cream. Around 1890, Vermont began to ship fluid milk. Holstein-Friesians became popular. Guernseys and Ayrshires were secondary dairy breeds.
Before refrigeration, milk was made into cheese or butter before it spoiled. Butter making dominated the dairy industry until the early 20th century. In 1893, Fred A. Messer started a creamery to make butter in Cabot Village. He operated Cabot Creamery Company from 1911 to 1919. In 1919, 94 farmers bought his firm for $3,700, including ice, sawdust, spring rights, and fuel. They started the Cabot Farmers Creamery Co., Inc. Cabot Creamery History
Stony hillsides make for small farms, under 200 acres. After the Civil War, dairy cattle and hay dominated. Vermont agriculture grew from 1850 to 1880, as self-sufficient farming gave way to commercial agriculture. Mechanization and rail made larger farms more profitable. Vermont dairy herds grew from about 17 cows per farm in 1950, to 180 cows per farm in 2020. Fifty-nine large farms, each with more than 500 cows, produce more than half the state's dairy production. The number of Vermont dairy farms plummeted, from 10,637 in 1953, to just over 700 by 2021. As herds grew larger, small farmers failed. Causes include economies of scale, fluctuating milk prices, and federal programs that favor larger and fewer farms. Many small farmers decided stainless steel bulk milk tanks that milk handlers required, starting in the 1950s, were too costly. Where small poor hill farms shut down, forests began to regrow.
The population of Cabot peaked in 1840, then declined until 1970, when it began to rise. Reasons include railroads bypassing Cabot.,This made transportation to distant markets costly, time-consuming, and often uncompetitive. Summer residents built cottages around Joe's Pond, starting about 1900. The Winooski valley region of Cabot has the densest population, centered on Cabot Upper Village and Lower Cabot. Small mills, merchants, tradesmen, and professionals plied trades there, serving fellow villagers and nearby farms. Some Cabot businessmen and their work are in links here and below. Business Directory 1883-84 1889 Business Directory
21st Century - Studies aimed at returning small businesses to Cabot:
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