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Early
History |
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8500 - 7000 B.C. - Glacial activity creates Champlain Sea; Paleo-Indians explore and hunt in Vermont

7000 - 1000 B.C. - Archaic Period; Native Americans move seasonally around Vermont to live, hunt, gather, and fish

1000 B.C. - 1600 A.D. - Woodland Period; Native Americans establish villages and develop trade networks, and ceramic and bow and arrow technology

1535 - French explorer Jacques Cartier is first European to see what is now Vermont
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1600s |
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1609 - Samuel de Champlain discovers Lake Champlain

1666 - Fort Ste. Anne constructed on Isle LaMotte, site of first white settlement and first Catholic Mass

1690 - Small British fort built at Chimney
Point

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1700s |
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1724 - British build Fort Dummer at Dummerston

1731 - French build fort and begin settlement, under
Seigneur Gilles Hocquart, at Chimney
Point

1749 - Gov. Benning Wentworth makes first New Hampshire grant-for town of Bennington

1759 - French abandon settlement at Chimney
Point

1760 - Crown Point Military Road, from Springfield, VT
to Chimney Point, VT, completed
east-west across Vermont

1761 - Gov. Wentworth resumes New Hampshire Grants

1770 - Green Mountain Boys organized to protect New Hampshire Grants

1774 - The Scottish-American Land Company brings Scottish settlers to Ryegate & Barnet

1775 - Ethan Allen captures Fort Ticonderoga

1776 - Construction of American fort, Mount
Independence in Orwell

1777 - Vermont declares itself a republic in Windsoradopts
1st constitution with universal male suffrage, public schools,
abolishing slavery; battles of Hubbardton
& Bennington

1779 - Bayley-Hazen Military Road blazed from Peacham to Lowell; VT establishes property rights for women

1780 - Last major Indian raid, led by the British, in Royalton

1783 - Hyde Log Cabin constructed
in Grand Isle

1785 - Eureka Schoolhouse constructed
in Springfield; first marble quarry opened in Dorset;

1787 - Castleton, Vermont's first college, established and chartered by the VT General Assembly;

1791 - Vermont becomes 14th state; University of Vermont chartered; Thomas Jefferson and James Madison visit Vermont; 85,341 people in Vermont
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1800s |
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1801 - Brigham Young born in Whitingham, later led the Mormons from Illinois to Utah & founded Salt Lake City; George Perkins Marsh, America's first conservationist, born in Woodstock

1805 - Montpelier chosen as capital; Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, born in Royalton

1810 - Justin Smith Morrill
of Strafford born; 217,895 people in Vermont

1823 - Alexander Twilight first African American to earn college degree in US at Middlebury

1826 - Martin Henry Freeman, born in Rutland, becomes, in 1856, first black college president in the U.S.; Horace Greeley of West Haven begins first newspaper apprenticeship at Northern Spectator in Poultney

1829 - Chester Alan Arthur
born in Fairfield

1837 - John Deere patents steel plow; Thomas Davenport patents first electric motor

1855 - First Republican governor elected; Republicans control that office until 1962

1859 - John Dewey, philosopher and pioneer in modern education born in Burlington; present State House constructed

1864 - St. Albans Raid, northern most Civil War 1865 - State Agricultural College set up at the University of Vermont as a Land Grant College

1872 - Calvin Coolidge
born on the Fourth of July in Plymouth Notch

1881 - Chester A. Arthur of
Fairfield becomes U.S. President

1891 - Bennington Battle Monument
completed in Old Bennington

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1900s |
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1900 - 343,641 people in Vermont

1918 - Women vote in town elections

1919 - Poet Robert Frost moves to Vermont

1920 - Vermont Cooperative Creameries, Inc., organized; 352,428 people in Vermont

1921 - Women's Suffrage adopted

1922 - Grandstand constructed at UVM's ballpark, Centennial Field (one of the oldest still in use)

1923 - Calvin Coolidge
of Plymouth becomes U.S. President; gasoline tax adopted; airplanes
regulated

1930 - Cattle in state outnumber people; 359,611 people in Vermont

1950 - Marlboro Music Festival established; 377,747 people
in Vermont; Pearl Buck moves to Winhall, VT

1953 - S.S. Ticonderoga makes last steamboat trip on Lake Champlain

1954 - Consuelo Northrup Bailey elected first woman lieutenant governor in U.S.

1962 - First Democratic governor in over 100 years elected

1964 - Victory, Granby, & Jamaica last towns in VT to receive electricity

1968 - Billboards banned

2000 - 608,827 people in Vermont

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