Visiting the Winooski River one Sunday in 1854, Frederick William Shelton found it an almost religious experience. “(U)pon that peaceful Sabbath, with no habitations near, I heard a grander sermon than was ever preached by uninspired lips,” Shelton wrote in the Knickerbocker Magazine, a New York literary journal.
Shelton looked down from a bridge at the gorge at Middlesex and the river that raced through it. (The gorge has since been dammed). “There, riveted upon the spot, I gazed in silence on the scene — and shuddered with affright.”
Below in the waters he saw a massive millstone that years earlier had been torn from a building upstream during a flood and carried to this spot, along with other debris from the doomed mill. The scene shook him: “There is a sense of horror and of human feebleness amid such harsh convulsive elements, as if one stood almost within the presence of his God.”
In that moment, Shelton seemed to glimpse how the Winooski, like all rivers then, controlled people’s fates through their power to sustain — by driving millstones and therefore the course of industry and the pattern of settlement— and also their power to destroy.
The Winooski has climbed from its banks many times, most famously and destructively long after Shelton’s visit, during the flood of 1927. That November, rivers across the state rose up and killed 84 people.
Fortunately, the Winooski and its tributaries have usually been a beneficial force. It’s unknown when people first viewed the Winooski, but suffice it to say, it was a long time ago. Archeologists believe humans first reached what is today Vermont roughly 12,600 years ago.
Native Americans benefited from the Winooski, as well as its tributaries that reached east toward the Connecticut River and north toward Lake Memphremagog. They created paths that followed the river’s course, and found its shoreline a fertile place to live.
People first visited a site near the river’s delta, in what is now the city of Winooski, nearly 5,000 years ago, according to radiocarbon dating, and small bands of Native Americans regularly inhabited the site as early as about 400 CE and as late as the 1700s.
The lure was obvious. The river teemed with fish. Deer, bear and other important game were plentiful in the area. The river’s occasional floods made the nearby land lush with plants to forage for food and medicine.
Wild onion land
The Abenaki called the area Winooski, “the wild onion land,” for the abundant onion-like leeks that grew wild there. The river itself they called Winooskitook, or “the wild onion river.”
Europeans first traveled the Winooski in 1704, but not by choice. They were being held captive following a raid on the settlement at Deerfield, Massachusetts, by members of the Abenaki, Mohawk, Huron and Pocumtuc tribes, and were being forced to trek along the Winooski on their way north to French-controlled Montreal.
Over the years, more European captives would follow, victims — like the Native Americans who led them — in the struggle between France and Britain over control of North America. The fortunate survived the journey. Many of them were eventually ransomed and returned home, often via the Winooski waterway.
Europeans didn’t actually settle the river valley until 1772, when members of the Allen family of Connecticut became interested in the area. They formed a company to buy, sell and develop land along the Winooski and beyond, naming it the Onion River Land Company.
In so doing, they gave the river a new name, avoiding the one cartographers had assigned to it — “Ouinousqui,” a French approximation of the Abenaki name — because they feared it might deter investors by reminding them of the recent turmoil in the area.
Ira Allen, who had his pick of land, chose for his home a large parcel in what is today Winooski. What drew him were the falls and the potential they held for a large settlement. Over time, he would build mills at the site and, in fact, long after his death, giant textile mills would grow up along the river’s banks there.
Allen was hardly alone in his thinking. All along the Onion River, as everyone took to calling it, towns had begun to spring up. Six of the towns in what is now Washington County already existed, at least on paper, when Allen arrived.
In 1763, the colony of New Hampshire had chartered Berlin, Duxbury, Middlesex, Moretown, Waterbury and Worcester. But settlers really didn’t start arriving until around 1780. When they did, they found that much of the land in their towns was hilly and ill-suited for farming, so they clustered closer to the Onion and its tributaries.
The newly created Vermont Legislature began issuing charters for additional towns in the 1780s, including Wildersburgh (later to become Barre), Cabot, Calais, Fayston, Marshfield, Montpelier, Northfield, Plainfield, Roxbury, Waitsfield, Warren and Woodbury.
The prime spots in those towns, and the ones around which the villages grew, were along the Onion, or its main tributaries, the Dog and Mad Rivers.
Water power
Living near fast-moving water was vital in 18th- and 19th-century America. Rivers powered the factories of their day. Vermont was studded with gristmills, sawmills, cotton mills, linseed oil mills, wool carding mills. These tiny operations cropped up from Ira Allen’s land, at the Winooski Falls at the mouth of the river, all the way up to its source near West Hill Pond in Cabot. Farms began to line the river valley, and communities grew around them.
One river community, Montpelier, had the distinction of becoming the state capital in 1805. Several other towns in the state had vied for the honor, but the Legislature picked Montpelier because it was centrally located, and therefore equally inconvenient to reach for the competing elites who lived on the east and west sides of the state.
Situated at the confluence of the Onion and its North Branch, Montpelier had many thriving mills. The natural advantages of the location had been obvious to early settlers. The Allens themselves had petitioned the Legislature for a charter to the land, but it was eventually granted to others.
In the early 1800s, the town was prosperous enough to agree to build the fledgling government a Statehouse, a prerequisite for any community hoping to be named state capital. The first Statehouse was completed in 1808, at a cost of $9,000. The building soon proved too small, so construction of a replacement, this one of stone, began 25 years later at a cost of $132,000. It was fashioned from granite quarried in Barre. The stone was delivered by horse and oxen in the dead of winter after being pulled, in part, over the frozen Onion River.
As useful as a river was in wintertime for transporting goods, the Onion was of little help in summer. Its many sections were alternately too rapid and hazardous or too shallow and slow for goods to be moved quickly and easily along it.
But the success of the Champlain Canal, which, starting in 1823, connected Lake Champlain and the Hudson River, gave some merchants an ambitious idea: They would tame the Onion River and link it with other rivers via a canal system that would stretch from Lake Champlain to the Connecticut River. The project would link Boston with points west and enrich towns along its path.
The idea had serious backing until the 1840s, when the arrival of a new, faster form of transportation — railroads — overtook the idea of a canal.
The Pearl Rush
That wasn’t the last get-rich scheme involving the Onion. During the 1860s, fishermen began pulling freshwater clams from the river. Once pried open, some of the clams were found to contain pearls. One fisherman discovered a pearl measuring five-eighths of an inch in diameter — one of the largest ever found in the United States — and sold it for a hefty sum.
Men, women and children abandoned their responsibilities to search for riches in the river. During the short-lived Pearl Rush, people flocked to the Onion armed with baskets to hold the clams, knives to open them and boxes to hold all the pearls they imagined finding. Few pearls, however, were ever discovered, and the pearl hunters returned to their regular lives.
At about this time, the people of Montpelier became irritated with something about the Onion: its name. Residents loved their community and believed it deserved better than the strange-sounding moniker Montpelier-on-the-Onion. Apparently in a nostalgic mood, or liking the ring of it, they fought to have the river revert to its Abenaki name, Winooski. The campaign succeeded and by the 1880s Vermont maps again bore the old name.
By the end of the 19th century, other changes were occurring on the Winooski. Entrepreneurs started building small dams to replace the old water wheels at the mills. The dams eventually began to generate electricity, and transmission lines followed to allow development farther beyond the river banks.
The river and its tributaries, however, have been largely left wild; and, despite the dams that have been built for hydropower and flood protection, despite the bridges that cross it and the highways that run along it, the Winooski remains one of the state’s recreational gems. Its waters are used by trout anglers and canoeists; its banks, in places, by hikers.
And who traveling along Interstate 89 or Route 2 is not struck by its pastoral beauty? Frederick William Shelton’s florid words of 1854 may still apply. He said the Winooski meandered through “one of the most magnificent valleys, which my eye ever looked upon. There were vast and level meadows, smooth and green, and close-clipped as an English lawn, with tall elms standing in them, (with) the Winooski, parted frequently by rocky islets, flowing in the midst.”
