Waterbury: Ice Cream, State Hospitals, and the Green Mountains
Near Stowe, Vermont
Waterbury sits at the foot of the Green Mountains in central Vermont, where Interstate Eighty-Nine begins its climb toward Montpelier, and it holds an unlikely pair of claims to fame.
The first is ice cream. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield opened their first scoop shop in a converted Burlington gas station in nineteen seventy-eight. Within a decade their company had outgrown every location in Burlington. They built a factory in Waterbury in nineteen eighty-five, and that factory became one of Vermont's most visited tourist attractions, offering tours of the production line and a Flavor Graveyard where discontinued flavors get mock-solemn headstones.
The second is more somber. The Vermont State Hospital operated on a large campus in Waterbury from eighteen ninety-one until two thousand eleven, when Tropical Storm Irene flooded the facility and made it impossible to reopen. At its peak the hospital held more than seventeen hundred patients in conditions that varied widely across its long history. After the flood, Vermont moved toward a community-based mental health system rather than rebuild the institution. The campus now houses state government offices.
Waterbury itself is a small town of about five thousand people, bookended by those two stories: the one that draws visitors with free samples, and the one that most visitors never ask about.
