Georgia, Vermont: Named to Flatter a King
Near Burlington, Vermont
The small town of Georgia, just south of Saint Albans in Vermont's Franklin County, carries a name chosen for political reasons rather than geographic ones. New Hampshire's Governor Benning Wentworth chartered it in seventeen sixty-three, one of many such New Hampshire grants. The name Georgia was intended to honor King George the Third, a deliberate gesture from the New Hampshire colonial government, which was trying to win royal favor in a fierce land dispute with New York over who actually controlled the territory that would become Vermont.
The flattery didn't resolve the dispute, but the name endured. The first settlers didn't arrive until the seventeen eighties, two decades after the charter. Today Georgia is a quiet residential town of roughly five thousand people, part of the greater Burlington metropolitan area, with Lake Champlain a short drive to the west.
