People & Trades | Cabot Historical Society

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Cabot has always been a town of farmers and tradespeople — millwrights and sugar-makers, storekeepers and creamery hands — and, now and then, a citizen whose gifts carried the town's name far beyond the hills. These are a few of the people and trades that made Cabot.

Mills, Shops & Trades

Industry in Cabot followed its water and its woods. The town's first sawmill and grist mill were built on the Winooski River in 1789, alongside what is now Main Street, and mills of every kind followed as the village grew. Down in "the hollow" beside the river stood the Cabot Carriage Company, where a young Charles Willey learned to paint sleighs before founding the New York firm that later helped to fund building Willey Memorial Hall. Over the years the town supported an array of trades — early distilleries, blacksmiths and joiners, storekeepers and newspapers, logging operations around Joe's Pond. At Maple Glen Farm, Alonzo Foster invented an improved sap spout (see Land & Local Life).

Families & Neighbors

Much of Cabot's story is really the story of its families — the Osgoods, Fishers, Lyfords, Websters, Fosters, and many more — who farmed the hills, kept the shops, taught the schools, and served the town across generations. The Society's collection includes family histories, genealogies, business records, and the recollections of those who "lived or worked in Cabot," along with the tantalizing "Mystery Slides" — old photographs whose subjects we are still working to identify.

Engraving of Zerah Colburn, the calculating child

Cabot Creamery horse-drawn delivery carriages

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.

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