Hydroelectric Generating Facilities in Vermont

National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation

In 1992, The Louis Berger Group, Inc.(then known as Louis Berger and Associates) prepared a Multiple Property Documentation Form for hydroelectric power generating facilities in the State of Vermont. A Multiple Property Documentation Form (NPS 10-900-b) provides contexts and analytical frameworks for evaluating a property under the National Register of Historic Places criteria. In an MPDF, themes, trends, and patterns of history shared by the properties are organized into historic contexts, and the property types that represent those historic contexts are defined.

Vermont's waterways have been utilized for mechanical power since the earliest settlement by people of European descent. Sawmills and gristmills were the first of the state's water-powered industries. Introduction of Merino sheep from Portugal in the early nineteenth century helped foster development of woolen mills, which used water in the manufacturing process as well as to power machinery. Other major water-powered industries during the nineteenth century were cotton mills, carding mills, and producers of machine tools, scales, paper, and pulp. In this continuum, hydroelectric developments can be viewed as possibly the last in a series of uses of hydraulic systems on Vermont's rivers and streams.

The availability of electricity, like development of the automobile, wrought profound changes in life and work in the Green Mountain State prior to World War II. Electric railways and interurban lines augmented existing transportation systems, with major cities such as Burlington and Rutland, and to a lesser extent between communities and to parks and resorts. In the home, electric refrigerators brought an end to unreliable and often messy 'iceboxes, and electric washing machines and irons lifted some of the burden from laundry chores. For dairy farms, electrically-operated milking, pasteurization and refrigeration equipment were crucial to increased and more efficient production and to meeting increasingly stringent requirements imposed by public health officials on the production and sale of milk. Electric power also freed industry from the need to locate at a water power site, or to bear the costs of building, maintaining, and importing coal for steam power plants. Furthermore, manufacturing machinery was liberated from the line shafts and belting which had heretofore dictated the spatial arrangement of equipment and processes.

The availability of water power for production of electricity was seen by both state agencies and local communities as a real opportunity to increase Vermont's industrial base by advertising the 'great natural advantage' of this renewable resource. The overwhelming importance of hydropower in the state's electric power industry is reflected in the fact that as late as 1940, fully 90 percent of Vermont's needs were met by stations operating solely on water power. Since then, however, the state's energy and capacity needs have surpassed those available from developable hydroelectric resources, leading to extensive purchase of power from sources outside Vermont and to development of large-capacity fossil-fueled and nuclear generation. As of 1984, there were 52 sites in Vermont actively used for hydroelectric power generation, with a few additional small plants having been placed in operation since then.

This historical study of the hydroelectric power industry in Vermont was undertaken through a contract between Stetson-Harza, of Concord, New Hampshire, and the Cultural Resource Group of Louis Berger and Associates, Inc., of Waltham, Massachusetts. The study was prepared at the request of the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation (SHPO) and jointly funded by Central Vermont Public Service Company, Citizens Utilities Company, Green Mountain Power Company, and New England Power Service Company.