Vergennes — Vermont | Shared Latitude

Vermont's smallest city has a waterfall running straight through its downtown and a naval history I never expected to find this far from the ocean. I kept forgetting Vergennes only has twenty-six hundred people, because it doesn't act like it.

I heard Otter Creek Falls before I saw it — a steady rush of white water audible from the sidewalk on Main Street, which is a strange thing to encounter in the middle of a city’s downtown until you realize Vergennes was built specifically around this drop in the creek. Chartered in 1788, it’s the smallest incorporated city in the United States by land area, population somewhere around twenty-six hundred, and yet it carries itself with the infrastructure and ambition of somewhere much bigger: a proper Main Street, a historic opera house, streetlights that still look vaguely nineteenth-century. I stood on the bridge over the falls for a long while just watching the water drop past old brick mill buildings that once ran on exactly that current.

A fleet built in a hurry

What I hadn’t known before visiting is that Vergennes played a real role in the War of 1812. In the spring of 1814, Commodore Thomas Macdonough oversaw the construction of an entire American fleet here — ships built with astonishing speed from local timber, then sailed down Otter Creek to Lake Champlain, where that fleet went on to win the decisive Battle of Lake Champlain later that year. Standing by the falls, it’s hard to picture full-sized warships being assembled a few hundred yards from where I was standing, but the historical markers around the falls make the case in enough detail that I believed it by the time I left.

The falls and old mill buildings along Otter Creek in downtown Vergennes, Vermont

Basin Harbor and the lake beyond

A short drive from downtown, Basin Harbor opens out onto Lake Champlain itself, and I spent an evening there watching sailboats come in as the light faded over the water toward New York. The Vergennes Opera House, tucked above the city offices on Main Street, still hosts performances in a hall that looks barely changed since it opened over a century ago, red velvet seats and all. It’s the kind of small-city downtown where you can walk everything in twenty minutes and still feel like you haven’t seen it all — I certainly didn’t, and I’d go back just for the falls again.

Sailboats moored at Basin Harbor on Lake Champlain near Vergennes, Vermont

Getting There

Burlington International Airport is about thirty-five minutes north, making Vergennes one of the more accessible small Vermont cities. From Boston, plan on roughly three and a half hours north via I-89 and Route 7. A car is essential for reaching Basin Harbor and the surrounding countryside, though the compact downtown itself is entirely walkable once you’ve parked.