Early Years & Settlement | Cabot Historical Society

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It has been said that a person could live in Cabot for seventy-five years, and belong to four different counties, without ever leaving home. The town has been part of Cumberland, Orange, and Caledonia counties in turn, and — since 1855 — Washington County. Its beginnings lie in the years just after the Revolution, when Vermont was still an independent republic and the north country was raw wilderness.

First Settlers, First Officers

Benjamin Webster — an uncle of Daniel Webster — made the first clearing in 1783 (his family's snowbound arrival is told under Facts & Fables). Most of the original lot owners, however, never lived here; they were speculators who subdivided and resold. Those who stayed built their first settlement on the high, open land of Cabot Plain. The first town meeting was held there on February 4, 1788, and Cabot elected its first full slate of officers in 1793.

Cabot began very much as an army town: when it was first organized, six of the seven men elected to town office had held Continental Army commissions — the lone exception, a private, was made highway surveyor. Major Lyman Hitchcock himself served as Cabot's first town clerk in 1788, its first Justice of the Peace in 1790, and a delegate to Vermont's 1793 constitutional convention. In 1789, Thomas Lyford and his son built an up-and-down sawmill on the Winooski River alongside what is now Main Street.

The original source pages

These summaries draw on the Society's earlier archive. Each page below is reproduced in full, with its original photographs, maps, and documents.

The Society's collection holds much more on the founding years — the full 1781 charter, the 1790 census, the list of original lot owners, and a town timeline including the "Year Without a Summer" of 1816. To explore these records or research an early family, please contact the Society.

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