The Third-Largest Lumber Port in America

From roughly the eighteen-fifties through the eighteen-nineties, the Burlington waterfront was buried under wood. Lumber was stacked thirty to forty feet high, covering more than thirty acres of shoreline in great walls of Canadian timber. The smell of fresh-cut pine reached clear across the lake.

Burlington became, in its lumber years, one of the most important ports in North America. Some accounts put it as the third-largest lumber market in the world, behind only Chicago and Albany. In eighteen sixty-six, the Burlington Free Press reported sixty million board feet of lumber delivered to the harbor in a single year, along with a million bushels of grain and more than twenty-five hundred shipping vessels. By eighteen sixty-eight, the lumber total had grown to one hundred twelve million board feet, worth roughly three million dollars in the commerce of that era.

The system that made this possible was the Champlain Canal, completed in eighteen twenty-three. The canal connected Lake Champlain to the Hudson River, which connected to New York City. Canadian loggers floated timber south; Burlington's mills processed it; railroads and barges carried it to the markets of the mid-Atlantic coast. When two competing railroads both reached Burlington within a week of each other in December of eighteen forty-nine, the freight network was complete.

The abundance was also the industry's undoing. The forests of the Champlain Valley were essentially clear-cut by the eighteen-eighties. Loggers pushed further into Canada, but the supply never quite matched the machine Burlington had built to process it, and the great lumber era ended with the century.

What is left is the waterfront itself, the long flat land reclaimed from the lake by all that industrial activity, now converted into parks, bike paths, and the steel frame of a former power plant that the city turned into an open-air gathering space. The lake is still there. The timber is not.