The Pine Street Barge Canal

What looks like a quiet industrial waterway behind the Pine Street corridor has been, in its lifetime, a lumber highway, a coal-gas processing site, and a Superfund contamination case that took decades of litigation and cleanup.

The Pine Street Barge Canal was dug in eighteen sixty-eight by a businessman named Lawrence Barnes, who needed a way to move lumber directly inland from the waterfront. Burlington was at the peak of its lumber era, and the existing dockside space was overwhelmed. Barnes excavated a new channel through the wetlands south of the main harbor, allowing canal boats loaded with timber to float directly to mills further from the water. The canal worked. The lumber moved.

When the lumber era ended, the waterfront industries shifted. In the early nineteen hundreds, the barge canal area became home to a coal gasification plant, which processed raw coal into gas that was then piped into Burlington homes for heat and light. Coal gasification is effective and it is also toxic. The byproducts, including coal tar and cyanide compounds, were discharged into the surrounding marshland for roughly six decades. The plant operated until nineteen sixty-six.

The full scope of that contamination was not well documented in its time, and exactly how much material was discharged into specific areas of the wetlands is not entirely resolved in the public record. What is established is that the Environmental Protection Agency added the Pine Street Barge Canal to the Superfund National Priorities List, and cleanup of the contaminated sediments and soils has been a long, expensive, and technically difficult process involving the city, the state, and multiple responsible parties.

The barge canal today is part of an evolving arts and food district. Old brick factories hold breweries, galleries, and studios. The cleanup continues in the ground beneath all of it.