In a 1949 speech in the tiny town of Lyndonville, Vermont, senator George Aiken stated, “You know, this is such beautiful country up here. It ought to be called the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.”
Aiken was referring to the counties of Orleans, Essex, and Caledonia, situated between Canada to the north, the Green Mountains to the west, and the Connecticut River to the east. Glaciers of the Pleistocene epoch, which retreated about 14,000 years ago, left behind the rolling landscape of craggy granite peaks, sloping valleys, and fathomless lakes.
The 2,027-square-mile region has several distinctions: French oceanographer Jacque Costeau’s first dive site (Harvey’s Lake, depth: 144 feet); the home of the renowned counter-cultural touring company the Bread and Puppet Theater (Glover, population: 157); the location of perennial “Best Brewery in the World” winner Hill Farmstead (Greensboro Bend, population: 265); and the landscape of Kingdom Trails, one of the premier mountain biking destinations in the world (Burke, population: 1,636).
“The Kingdom,” as it is known locally, has a population of…
