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Cabot sits in northeast Washington County, Vermont — a township six miles square, bounded by Walden, West Danville, Peacham, Marshfield, and Woodbury, about twenty-one miles northeast of Montpelier. Some of what follows is fact, drawn from old documents and records; some is fable, handed down and retold over generations. Both are worth keeping.
How Cabot Began
Cabot was granted on November 6, 1780, and chartered on August 17, 1781, to Jesse Leavenworth and sixty-five associates. It was surveyed and lotted in 1786 under James Whitelaw, the Vermont Republic's Deputy Surveyor General, who laid the town out in seventy-two lots across six divisions. The town takes its name from Sophia Cabot, sister of one of the surveyors — a story told in full under Naming Cabot.
Benjamin Webster, the first settler, arrived in 1783. The first election of town officers was held on Cabot Plain on February 4, 1788, and Cabot chose its first full slate of officers in 1793. Most original lot owners never lived here; they were speculators who subdivided and resold. The settlers who stayed built a town on the high, open land of the Plains before the villages later grew up along the river.
The First Settler
From Vermont Historical Magazine, History of Cabot, by John M. Fisher, 1881.
Benjamin Webster — an uncle of the renowned Daniel Webster — came to Cabot in 1783 and made the first clearing in the forest along the Hazen Road, where he built the first log cabin. He returned for his family that March, himself driving the cow while Mrs. Webster traveled on snowshoes and the hired man drew their few goods on a hand-sled. Among the goods was a wash-tub, and in the tub rode their two-year-old daughter. The snow lay four feet deep, drifted a foot and a half into the cabin, and had to be shoveled out before the family could enter to a bare-ground floor. While her husband was away for provisions, Mrs. Webster tapped the trees and made forty pounds of sugar; it was said she could chop as well as any man.
Judith Lyford's Bear
In the settlement's early years, two log cabins stood on West Hill — the Lyfords' and their neighbor Blanchard's — facing each other across a swamp, with a narrow footpath between. Bears were common; the men often hunted them, and fresh tracks appeared around the barns most mornings.
One August afternoon, walking home along the path, Judith Lyford came within arm's length of a bear cub, and glimpsed the mother and a second cub through the brush. Most people would have run. Instead, obeying "a kind of defiant impulse," she snatched up the cub by its hind legs and ran, swinging the squealing, scratching animal into her stout tow apron. She heard the mother crashing through the bushes behind her, gaining with every leap, but would not give up her prize. She reached the house, darted through the open door, flung the cub into a corner, swung the plank door shut, and dropped the bar into its socket — an instant before the enraged bear threw her weight against it. The door held. David, coming from the barn, ran to the rear window where Judith passed him the always-loaded gun; a single shot at the front corner laid the bear dead. Judith lived many years afterward, raising a large family and often retelling her "droll but dangerous adventure."
The Shooting of General Gordon
From Vermont Historical Magazine, History of Cabot, by John M. Fisher, 1881 — with a note on the facts.
Attached to General Hazen's army was a squad called Whitcomb's Rangers, among them Thomas Lyford. Sent north as spies, Whitcomb and Lyford concealed themselves as a British and Indian scouting party approached, led by General Gordon. Whitcomb took careful aim; Gordon fell forward across his horse's neck, and the frightened animal carried him back to camp, where he soon died. Hidden beneath a log in a washed-out hollow, Whitcomb watched pursuers run whooping overhead but was never found; the dismayed enemy retreated to Canada, ending what was expected to be a battle on Cabot's Plain.
The tale is more folklore than fact. A granite marker in Cabot commemorates the event, but the shooting of Brigadier General Patrick Gordon actually took place near Fort Chambly in Quebec in July 1776 — and Whitcomb's Rangers were not formed until after it. It remains one of Cabot's best-loved stories all the same.
General Hazen's Mess Kettle
Among the Society's more unusual artifacts is a mess kettle said to have belonged to General Moses Hazen, whose Revolutionary-era military road runs through the town's history. It is one of many objects in our museum that connect Cabot to the founding years of the nation.
The Yellow House: Cabot's Smugglers' Tavern
Condensed from a manuscript by Archie W. Stone (1878–1946), in the Society's collection.
Cabot Plain — a high, rolling tract crowning the watershed between the Onion and Passumpsic rivers — was where the town's first families made their clearings, and for twenty-five years it was the business, political, and social center of Cabot. As traffic grew along the Hazen Road, taverns rose to serve the travelers and freight teamsters. When there was a prospect that Cabot might become the shire town of the new Caledonia County, two Beardsleys cleared a site on the Plain and built the first frame house in town — a forty-foot-square, two-story tavern that for thirty years was known as the Yellow House. Its timber-raising, well supplied with barrels of first-proof rum, became a legend along the road; old men claimed that for them the raising "lasted two days."
In its heyday some sixty or more heavy teams passed over the Plain each day, and a tavern like the Yellow House might shelter fifteen or twenty teamsters and eighty horses and oxen on a winter night. During the War of 1812 the house became headquarters for a famous gang of smugglers who ran potato whiskey and cattle north to the British armies in Canada, storing their oak barrels in the cellar until it was safe to cross the border. A nearby pond was long called Smugglers' Pond, after a customs officer said to have been tossed into its muddy depths. When the freighting days ended, the old tavern stood empty until it was torn down for its timbers in 1855. Today a grass-grown hollow, scattered foundation stones, and a granite slab carved "Smugglers' House" mark the spot in a Cabot Plain pasture.
These accounts are drawn from historical records, old manuscripts, and stories handed down; some details cannot be proven, and authors have sometimes added their own notes. To read more, research a family, or share a story of your own, please contact the Society.