Barton

Situated at the southern end of Crystal Lake in Orleans County, Barton has served as a commercial center for the surrounding Northeast Kingdom towns since the early 1800s. The town was chartered in 1781, and its village grew up around the water power provided by the Barton River and the Clyde River, which join near the village center.

Crystal Lake is the town's most prominent natural feature -- a deep, clear glacial lake that has drawn summer visitors for over a century. The lake experienced a dramatic event in 1810 when a group of settlers attempted to drain a bog to create farmland, inadvertently causing a catastrophic flood that temporarily emptied Long Pond (now Lake Glover) and sent a wall of water through the Barton River valley. The event reshaped the local landscape and remains part of the town's oral history.

Barton today has about 2,980 residents and serves as a service center with grocery stores, a hospital, and local businesses that the smaller surrounding towns rely on. The town operates under the selectboard system with an annual town meeting, where the concerns of a regional hub -- infrastructure, public safety, economic development -- get debated alongside the more traditional questions of road maintenance and school budgets.