A small crew from Don Weston Excavating, a Williston company, made a historic find last week in downtown Burlington.
While digging at the intersection of Church and Maple streets as part of a citywide water line replacement project, the crew broke through the top of a small, mysterious tunnel that runs east to west, six feet below Maple Street.
The underground passage is two feet wide and about two and a half feet tall, and had water trickling through it, workers said. It is solidly built, lined with large stones bound by mortar.
The Department of Public Works believes it’s an old stormwater runoff line that routed water to Lake Champlain in the horse-and-buggy days, not too long after the city was incorporated. A crew found a similar structure a few blocks closer to the lake earlier this year, DPW water resources engineer Martin Lee said.
But DPW’s databases, maps and written records, which contain decades’ worth of information, contain no record of the structure. It could easily be more than 100 years old, Lee said: Water infrastructure in the older parts of Burlington dates back to the 1890s.
Though it’s not up to modern construction standards, the tunnel inspired respect from people who do this kind of work for a living.
“The stonework is pretty cool, and it was very deep,” Lee said. “However they built, it would have been pretty impressive.”
DPW is happy to leave this bit of city history as it was. Lee said his department is loath to disturb it, not knowing where it goes or whether workers would somehow alter the flow of water, doing more harm than good.
Last Friday morning, a crew paved over the newly installed water line, once again encasing the long-lost tunnel, which perhaps will be rediscovered in another century or so, when Burlington’s pipes again need an upgrade.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Tunnel Vision”
This article appears in Sep 5-11, 2018.
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Very cool! Thanks for sharing.
That is pretty cool! I dig it. 😉
The “Burlington Weekly Sentinel” reported the following on April 19, 1867: “In the Board of Aldermen, last Monday on motion of Alderman Taft, the street commissioners were directed to use the stone on the surface of the market lot, in building the culvert under the extension of Maple Street.”
This *might* be the same structure described in the article above.
It might be the tunnels that were used to move the slaves up through Vermont to Canada.
There was also hidden rooms in the basement of what used to be the Womens YMCA.
The buildings along St. Paul Street next to City Hall Park are connected on the lower level – the tunnel door is still visible at 1 Lawson Lane. The Ghostwalk pointed that out on the tour I took a few years ago.
Edit: This Seven Days story features this:
Between 1790 and 1820, (Gideon) King controlled most of the lakes trade, with ownership of at least 40 percent of the ships on the water. Thomas Jeffersons Embargo Act of 1807 put a major cramp in his style, but King didnt stop trading with our neighbors to the north. He just took it underground literally. According to legend, he built a network of tunnels that extended from the lake to major distribution points in the city.
There are many tunnels under burlington. Manhattan pizza has a tunnel and a mystery door that noone has opened. Necters also has many tunnels in their basement. So the tunnel they found is not a water run off. Its a tunnel for transport of illegal booze and was once used for moving slaves. Dpw really needs to do their homework before making a statement …