Bob Blanchard’s New Book, 'Lost Burlington,' Chronicles the Queen City’s Forgotten Places 

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• File: Eva Sollberger | Courtesy
• Bob Blanchard | Lost Burlington, Vermont by Bob Blanchard, the History Press. 128 pages. $23.99.

Burlington is known as a city with historic charm. The iconic Richardson building at Church and Pearl streets, built in 1895, catches the eye with ornate turrets and R-branded balconies. Colorful Victorian homes line South Union and South Winooski avenues. And the University of Vermont boasts dozens of structures dating as far back as the mid-19th century.

But like most American towns, especially those in the Northeast and other early-settled areas, Burlington is haunted by architectural ghosts. Through painstaking research and by digging into historic collections and volumes, citizen historian Bob Blanchard catalogs the Queen City's many forgotten places in his new book, Lost Burlington, Vermont, to be released on Monday, April 17.

"These lost structures were irreplaceable, the products of an era when public buildings were highly ornamental ... This loss has greatly altered the look of the downtown area of Burlington," Blanchard, 72, writes in its introduction.

The book is part of a series published by the History Press, each entry a retrospective of vanished gems in places including Memphis, Tenn., and Myrtle Beach, S.C. There are also categorical entries, such as Lost Ski Areas of the Northern Adirondacks.

The roots of Blanchard's book trace back to a popular Facebook group called Burlington Area History, which the retired U.S. Customs Service worker created in September 2019. In the online community, people (Blanchard especially) share pictures, recollections and research of bygone Burlington, focusing particularly on changes to city buildings and infrastructure.

Blanchard, who studied history in college but did not pursue it as a career, initially hoped to attract a few hundred people to the group, but it had garnered over 3,000 followers when Seven Days wrote about it in February 2020. Burlington Area History now has nearly 23,000 members, and more than 12,000 images have been uploaded.

With such a robust online following, why did Blanchard turn the forum into a book?

"I don't have a lot of faith in the permanence of the internet," he said in a recent video chat. He also sees the book as a way to present his findings in a polished, accessible way.

"I've got all this stuff dangling around in my brain," he continued.

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• Courtesy Of Library Of Congress
• A trolley car on Church Street in the early 1900s

Burlington Area History is a collection of stream-of-consciousness posts, organized chronologically by upload date. While Blanchard's missives are often the longest, most detailed and best researched, he's not the only one posting, which occasionally waters down the content. Lost Burlington, Vermont turns the Facebook group into an ordered and coordinated walk through Burlington's architectural graveyard.

Blanchard found sources by combing through UVM's Special Collections Library and, quite extensively, the Internet Archive. Scouring digitized copies of old journals, business-related publications and books on topics such as the history of the American lumber industry helped Blanchard find records of buildings that no longer stand. Some were demolished, and many, like 20 or so mentioned in the book, burned.

"There was a lot of open flame back in the old days," Blanchard lamented.

After a brief introduction that marks Lake Champlain as the focal point for downtown Burlington, Blanchard homes in on the waterfront district, which sprouted up after the 1823 opening of the Champlain Canal, allowing new trade routes via the Hudson River. Hardly the picturesque attraction it is today, Burlington's waterfront was an unpleasant mass of factories, mills and train tracks for most of the 19th century and into the 20th. Though an eyesore, the industrial zone was the reason Burlington had so much wealth, which "was pretty extraordinary for a city of Burlington's size" at the time, Blanchard said. That capital was why the city had so many beautiful buildings.

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• Courtesy Of UVM Special Collections
• The Burlington waterfront in the late 1800s

The author covers practically every type of structure one could think of, sometimes going as far back as the 18th century. He dives into ritzy properties such as the Overlake, a 56-acre estate and mansion that once stood at the south end of South Prospect Street. Its owner, railroad magnate colonel Legrand B. Cannon, built it as a summer home in 1858. By 1925, the mansion was torn down and the property was broken into housing lots now known as the Overlake Park neighborhood.

Blanchard delves into schools, churches, charitable institutions, hotels and social clubs. There's even a section about sanitariums, such as the Lakeview Sanitarium, which stood on North Avenue near the still-standing but long-shuttered St. Joseph's Orphanage. Originally a private estate, the mid-19th-century home was converted into an institution in 1881, only to be torn down nearly 100 years later.

Blanchard pointed out that before the 1963 demolition of New York City's original Pennsylvania Station — and subsequent public backlash to the "act of civic vandalism," as he calls it in the book's conclusion — historic preservation wasn't really a thing. That explains why so many buildings, in Burlington and elsewhere, were allowed to languish and were eventually lost.

A local anecdote: In 1964, one year after Penn Station was razed but before the trend of historic preservation caught on around the country, demolition of a stately building that once stood across Pearl Street from the Richardson building — and became the parking lot that still exists there today — was met with "not a whimper of opposition," Blanchard writes.

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• Courtesy Of Bob Blanchard
• The Lakeview Sanitarium

"There was barely a mention of it in the local paper," he said. "There was no mention of what a gorgeous building it was, how historic it was — anything."

Though the book is kind of a downer, given that it showcases so much loss, Blanchard ends on a more hopeful chapter full of "near misses." He explains how several prominent buildings, such as Edmunds Middle School and the Fletcher Free Library, were nearly demolished.

The former faced criticism that its "foundation was solid but that the rest ... 'was tired,'" though the plan to raze it quickly fell apart for unspecified reasons. And the latter, built in 1902 on the improperly filled Burlington Ravine (another vestige of the old Burlington), saw structural damage by the 1970s. In 1973, the library was closed and its collection moved to another location. Local citizens rallied to save the Fletcher Free from demolition and had it added to the National Register of Historic Places. After receiving federal funding, the building reopened in 1981.

Though writing the book might seem like a pinnacle, Blanchard plans to keep moderating the Facebook group — and unearthing more local history.

"It's gotten way beyond anything I've ever dreamed of," he said.