Newbury, VT

Newbury is a town in Orange County, Vermont, United States. The population was 2,216 at the 2010 census. Newbury includes the villages of Newbury, Center Newbury, West Newbury, South Newbury, Boltonville, Peach Four Corners, and Wells River. The town maintains a public website that is updated regularly.

Located at the Great Oxbow of the Connecticut River, with vast tracts of beautiful and fertile intervale, the area was a favorite of the Indians. Rivers teemed with salmon and brooks with trout. Prior to European settlement, the Newbury area was the location of a village called Cowass or Cowassuck of the Pennacook tribe. Cowass in Abenaki is "Coo-ash-auke," meaning "place of pine trees," and was a general name these people gave to the upper Connecticut River Valley and Lakes region. It was first settled by English colonists in 1762 by Samuel Sleeper and family. One of the New Hampshire grants, Newbury was chartered by Governor Benning Wentworth on March 18, 1763 to General Jacob Bayley and 74 others, some from Newbury, Massachusetts.

The town served as the southern terminus of the Bayley Hazen Military Road, begun by Bayley in 1760 and then continued until 1779 by Colonel Moses Hazen. Meanwhile, pioneer farmers had to carry their grain 60 miles (97 kilometers) by canoe to Charlestown, New Hampshire to get it ground into flour. By 1859, when the population was 2,984, Newbury had two gristmills, in addition to a paper mill and steam mill to manufacture mackerel kits. The principal industry, however, along the alluvial meadows was raising beef cattle and sheep, and the production of wool and dairy goods. The Connecticut & Passumpsic Rivers Railroad opened on November 6, 1848, to the village of Wells River. It developed as an adjunct of the railway town across the Connecticut River at Woodsville, the once bustling village within Haverhill, New Hampshire.

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