Montpelier: The Smallest Capital in America
Near Stowe, Vermont
Montpelier is the smallest state capital in the United States by population, the twenty twenty census counted eight thousand and seventy-four people. It is also the only state capital in the country without a McDonald's. Those two facts, taken together, tell you something about what kind of place this is.
The city's first settler, Colonel Jacob Davis, built a log cabin here in seventeen eighty-seven or eighty-eight, in the wooded hills where the North Branch meets the Winooski River. The charter had been granted in seventeen eighty-one, but settlement came slowly in the Green Mountains. The town was named for Montpellier in southern France, in gratitude for France's role in the American Revolution, a detail that placed a bit of Languedoc nomenclature in central Vermont.
Montpelier became the state capital in eighteen oh five, chosen after years of dispute between eastern and western factions of the legislature. Its central location in the Green Mountains made it a compromise no one could object to. To sweeten the deal, residents pledged eight thousand dollars toward the construction of a state house. A wood-frame building rose in eighteen oh eight; two more followed over the next fifty years, including the current granite structure finished in eighteen fifty-nine.
Today Montpelier runs almost entirely on state government, insurance, and a lively food culture. It has the density of engagement you might expect from a city where one in five residents works in some capacity connected to the statehouse, lawyers, lobbyists, policy writers, journalists. For its size, it punches well above its weight in civic life, which is perhaps what you would expect from a capital that chose itself by being too small to be threatening.
