Fort Ethan Allen
Near Burlington, Vermont
The handsome brick buildings spread across the hillside in Colchester were once one of the largest cavalry posts in the United States. Fort Ethan Allen was established in eighteen ninety-two and began operating as a cavalry installation in eighteen ninety-four, named for the Vermont Revolutionary War hero whose family had once owned the surrounding land. For fifty years it trained cavalry and field artillery on ground that looks out toward Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks.
The most remarkable chapter in the fort's history arrived in July of nineteen oh nine, when the Tenth United States Cavalry rode in from the south. The Tenth was one of the original Buffalo Soldier regiments, formed in eighteen sixty-six when Congress created the first peacetime all-Black units in the regular army. These men had served in the Indian Wars on the Great Plains and in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Now they were being posted to Vermont, a state that prided itself on its abolitionist heritage.
The reception was more complicated than that reputation suggested. Burlington's population of about twenty-five thousand included fewer than one hundred twenty Black residents. When the regiment arrived, seven hundred fifty enlisted men plus roughly the same number of wives, children, and camp followers, the demographic shift was immediate and jarring. A brief item in the Burlington Free Press in July of nineteen oh nine reported that white people were leaving restaurants when Black troopers entered, and that some white soldiers physically removed Black soldiers from establishments in Winooski. One historian called it demographic shock.
Yet the regiment served its four-year assignment and gradually built ties to the community, hosting performances, parades, and sporting events. The Tenth Cavalry left Fort Ethan Allen in nineteen thirteen. The post stayed active through two World Wars before closing in nineteen forty-four. The grounds today form a national historic district straddling the Colchester and Essex town line, the old brick officers' quarters now converted to private residences, the cavalry long gone but the bones of the post unchanged.
