Grand Isle and the Hyde Log Cabin
Near Burlington, Vermont
Grand Isle is one of a chain of islands in Lake Champlain between Vermont and New York. After the Revolution, Ira and Ethan Allen acquired large land grants on the islands and sent a surveyor named Jedediah Hyde Jr. to map them.
In seventeen eighty-three Hyde built himself a small cabin of peeled cedar logs on the island, not knowing he was constructing what would become one of the oldest surviving log cabins in the United States. The Hyde family lived in it for a hundred and fifty years. When it faced demolition in nineteen forty-six, the Vermont Historical Society moved it to safety.
It now sits on Route Two as a small museum, a twenty-by-twenty-five-foot reminder that before Vermont was a state, these lake islands were wilderness being parceled out to Revolutionary War veterans.
