VTVermont Fun Facts

Montpelier is the smallest state capital in the country, with roughly 8,000 residents. Burlington, the largest city in Vermont, holds fewer than 45,000 people, which makes it the smallest biggest-city of any state in the Union.

Facts most people get wrong

• Montpelier did not ban McDonald's. It is true that no state capital except Montpelier is without one, but there is no ordinance behind it. The chain simply never opened downtown, and the nearest location is in the next town over.
• Vermont was not one of the original thirteen colonies. It declared itself an independent republic in 1777, minted its own copper coins, ran its own postal service, and did not join the United States until March 4, 1791, as the 14th state.
• Grade B maple syrup no longer exists. The old letter grades described color, not quality. Under standards adopted in 2014, all table syrup is Grade A, sorted into golden, amber, dark and very dark. The darker jugs still taste stronger.
• Ben and Jerry's is no longer Vermont owned. It started in a converted Burlington gas station in 1978 and was sold to Unilever in 2000, though the deal kept an independent board for its social mission.
• The billboard-free roads are not an accident of zoning. Vermont banned billboards outright in 1968. Only Maine, Hawaii and Alaska have done the same.
• Lake Champlain was briefly the sixth Great Lake. A federal bill in March 1998 designated it as one, which unlocked research funding. Objections came fast and the designation was pulled back within weeks.

Records and firsts

• Vermont makes about half of all maple syrup produced in the United States, more than two million gallons in a strong year. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to boil down one gallon of syrup.
• The 1777 Vermont constitution was the first in North America to prohibit adult slavery, and it let men vote without owning property.
• The first ski tow in the United States started turning in January 1934 on a hill near Woodstock, a rope pulled by a Model T engine.
• The Rock of Ages quarry in Barre is the largest deep hole dimension granite quarry in the world, cut roughly 600 feet down into the hillside.
• Vermont was the first state to legalize civil unions, in 2000, and in 2009 the first to legalize same-sex marriage by legislature rather than by court order.
• Vermont has more covered bridges per person than any other state, with about 100 historic ones still standing.

Geography that surprises

• Vermont is the only New England state with no ocean coastline, and one of only two landlocked states in the eastern seaboard region.
• Lake Champlain runs about 120 miles along the western border and drains north into the Richelieu River and the St. Lawrence, so Vermont water ends up in Canada rather than in Long Island Sound.
• The state is a wedge. It measures about 90 miles across at the Canadian border and narrows to about 41 miles at the Massachusetts line, over a length of roughly 160 miles.
• The northern border is in the wrong place. An eighteenth century survey of the 45th parallel came out too far north, and the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 made the error permanent.
• In Derby Line the Haskell Free Library and Opera House sits on the international line on purpose. The audience sits in Vermont while the performers stand in Quebec.

Where the name comes from

Vermont is French, from vert mont, green mountain, after the Green Mountains that run the length of the state. The name was proposed in 1777 and is usually credited to Dr. Thomas Young, an ally of the Green Mountain Boys.

The French is slightly off. Correct French word order would be mont vert or les monts verts, so the state carries a coined name rather than a real French phrase. The mountains gave the state its nickname too, the Green Mountain State, and the sugar maple that grows on them is the state tree.

State basics

Bordering states

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