Abandoned places in Vermont are hidden under the densest forest canopy in the eastern United States, which means you have to work for them. With over 35 documented abandoned locations on the Urbex Maps atlas, Vermont's ruins tell a story of boom-and-bust industry, failed farming settlements, and communities erased by floods, fires, and the slow crush of economic irrelevance. This is a state where entire villages were swallowed by the Green Mountain National Forest after their populations dropped below the threshold for self-governance. Where marble quarries that supplied stone for the New York Public Library now sit flooded and forgotten in the hills. Where granite operations that once employed thousands of immigrant stonecutters left behind dozens of water-filled pits scattered through the woods like blue-green craters. Vermont doesn't advertise its abandoned places. You find them by hiking logging roads, reading old maps, and knowing that behind every stone wall in the forest, there used to be a farm.
Free urbex GPS: how Urbex Maps works
Every spot in this guide has a free GPS pin on the Urbex Maps interactive atlas. No paywall for these 6, no registration wall, just coordinates dropped onto the map with access notes. The atlas works on mobile, which matters when you're hiking a muddy trail in the Green Mountains looking for cellar holes or navigating back roads in Caledonia County to find a burned-out mill village. The full Vermont database has over 35 locations and growing, covering everything from colonial-era ghost towns to 20th-century industrial ruins.
1. Glastenbury Ghost Town
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Glastenbury is Vermont's most famous ghost town and the center of one of New England's most enduring mysteries. The town is located in the Green Mountains of southern Vermont, in a remote area east of Bennington that is now almost entirely covered by forest. It was incorporated in 1834 and peaked at 241 residents during the 1880s logging boom, when charcoal kilns and timber operations stripped the mountain slopes. A narrow-gauge railroad carried wood down the mountain to the valley below. Then came the flood of 1898, which destroyed the railroad and cut off the town's economic lifeline. The population plummeted. By 1937, the state of Vermont took the unusual step of unincorporating Glastenbury, effectively erasing it as a political entity.
But Glastenbury is famous for more than just economic decline. The town sits at the heart of what writer Joseph Citro dubbed the Bennington Triangle, a region where at least five people disappeared under mysterious circumstances between 1945 and 1950. Middie Rivers, a 75-year-old hunting guide, vanished in November 1945 while leading a group of hunters. Paula Welden, an 18-year-old Bennington College student, disappeared on the Long Trail in December 1946 and was never found. Three more people vanished in the following years. None of the cases were ever solved.
Today, Glastenbury Mountain is accessible only by hiking trails, primarily the Long Trail and the West Ridge Trail. The summit, at 3,748 feet, has a fire tower with views of the surrounding wilderness. Along the trails and in the surrounding forest, hikers occasionally find stone foundations, cellar holes, and the remains of charcoal kilns, the only physical evidence that a community once existed here. The forest has reclaimed everything else. The atmosphere is thick with moss, birch trees, and an unsettling quiet that makes the Bennington Triangle stories feel less like folklore and more like a warning. Come prepared for a serious day hike, bring a map, and tell someone where you're going.
2. Somerset Ghost Town
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Somerset shares Glastenbury's fate as one of only a handful of Vermont towns that were unincorporated by the state legislature. Established as a trading center in 1790 in the Deerfield River valley, Somerset never had a large population, but it served as a waypoint for travelers crossing the Green Mountains. The community suffered a series of blows in the early 20th century: devastating floods damaged infrastructure, the logging industry that sustained the economy declined, and the construction of Somerset Dam (completed in 1913 to generate hydroelectric power) altered the landscape permanently. By the 1930 census, only seven people remained. The legislature unincorporated Somerset in 1937, the same year it dissolved Glastenbury.
Today, Somerset exists as an unorganized township deep in the Green Mountain National Forest, accessible by logging roads and hiking trails. The Somerset Reservoir, created by the dam, is a popular destination for fishing and canoeing, but the old town site is elsewhere, scattered through the forest in the form of stone walls, cellar holes, and the occasional foundation. Finding these remnants requires bushwhacking off-trail and reading the landscape for signs of human habitation: a line of stones too straight to be natural, a depression in the forest floor that was once a cellar, a clearing where trees refuse to grow because there's a stone foundation just below the surface.
The experience of searching for Somerset is quintessential Vermont ghost-towning. There's no visitor center, no signs, no parking lot. You park where the road allows, walk into the woods with a GPS and a historical map, and try to match the present-day forest to the layout of a town that hasn't existed in nearly a century. The forest is beautiful, thick with hardwoods and conifers, crossed by streams and carpeted in ferns. But it's also disorienting, and the awareness that you're walking through a place where people once lived adds a layer of unease to an otherwise peaceful hike.
3. Greenbank's Hollow
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Greenbank's Hollow was a thriving mill village in the town of Danville, in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, and it was destroyed in a single night. The village centered around a five-story woolen mill built on Joes Brook, which provided the water power to drive the machinery. The mill employed 45 workers, a significant number for a small Vermont community, and the village around it included a general store, homes, a covered bridge, and the social infrastructure of a functioning 19th-century settlement. Then, on December 14, 1885, a fire broke out. By the time it was over, the mill, the store, several homes, and the covered bridge were all gone. The village was effectively wiped out.
The mill was never rebuilt. Without its primary employer, Greenbank's Hollow had no reason to exist, and the remaining residents gradually drifted away to Danville village or other towns. The forest moved in. Today, the site is accessible by a dirt road and a short walk, and what you'll find is a collection of stone foundations, stone walls, and the remnants of the mill's water power system: the raceway that channeled water from the brook to the mill wheel, the stone-lined tailrace that carried it away, and the foundation walls of the mill itself.
The site is popular with local historians and Vermont ghost town enthusiasts because it's accessible, well-documented, and atmospheric. The brook still flows through the ruins, providing the soundtrack that the mill workers would have heard every day. The stone walls are covered in moss. Trees grow from the foundations. A few interpretive efforts have been made, including a historical marker near the road, but the site itself is unimproved and feels genuinely abandoned rather than curated. It's a 10-minute drive from Danville, a pretty Northeast Kingdom village that's worth visiting in its own right for its general store and green.
4. Ricker Basin
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Ricker Basin is an abandoned farming community on the slopes of Ricker Mountain in Waterbury, hidden in the woods above the Winooski River valley. About 50 families settled here starting in 1816, clearing forest to create hill farms in a pattern common across early Vermont: move uphill, cut trees, plant crops, build a stone-foundation house, and try to make a living from thin, rocky soil on a steep slope. For a generation or two, it worked. The community had a school, a sawmill, and enough families to form a neighborhood. Then the soil gave out.
Hill farming in Vermont was always marginal. The growing season is short, the winters are brutal, and the soil on mountain slopes is shallow and easily eroded once the trees are removed. By the late 19th century, many of Vermont's upland farms were failing as western states opened up and offered deeper soil, flatter terrain, and longer growing seasons. The floods of 1927 and 1934 delivered the final blow to Ricker Basin, washing out roads and destroying what remained of the already declining agricultural infrastructure. By the mid-20th century, the basin was empty.
Today, you reach Ricker Basin by hiking a trail maintained by the town of Waterbury. The path follows an old road up the mountain, and along the way you pass stone cellar holes, stone walls that once bordered farm fields (now deep forest), and the remnants of the sawmill. The cellar holes are the most evocative features: rectangular depressions lined with carefully fitted stonework, some still several feet deep, marking the spots where families lived for decades. In spring, you can sometimes spot lilac bushes blooming near the cellar holes, planted by homemakers 200 years ago and still flowering in the absence of anyone to appreciate them. The hike is moderate, about 3 miles round trip, and the forest is beautiful in all seasons.
5. Norcross-West Marble Quarry (Dorset)
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The Dorset Marble Quarry holds the distinction of being the oldest commercial marble quarry in the United States. It opened in 1785, just two years after the end of the Revolutionary War, and operated for nearly 150 years before cheaper marble sources elsewhere made it uneconomical. During its active years, this quarry supplied stone for some of America's most prominent buildings, including the New York Public Library and the Brown University Library. The marble extracted from these hills was prized for its quality and whiteness, and it helped establish Vermont's reputation as the marble capital of the eastern United States.
The quarry closed in the 1920s when competition from marble quarries in Georgia and overseas drove prices below what Vermont operators could match. What was left behind was a massive rectangular pit carved into the hillside, with sheer marble walls dropping straight down to water that has filled the quarry to a depth of roughly 60 feet. The water is strikingly clear and takes on a turquoise-blue color from the mineral content of the marble, creating a swimming hole that has become one of southern Vermont's worst-kept secrets.
The quarry is open to the public as a recreational swimming area, though there are no lifeguards and swimming is at your own risk. Visitors jump from the marble ledges into the deep water, sun themselves on flat marble slabs, and explore the surrounding woods where additional quarry pits and abandoned infrastructure can be found. The contrast between the industrial history and the recreational present is appealing: this place was carved by hard labor over the course of generations, and now it serves as a place where people come to float on a summer afternoon. The quarry is off Route 30 in Dorset, with a short walk from a small parking area.
6. Barre Town Forest Granite Quarries
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Barre is the granite capital of the world, and the proof is scattered through its town forest in the form of over 25 abandoned quarries, some flooded to depths of hundreds of feet, their granite walls dropping straight into water so dark it looks black. During the late 1800s, the Barre area was home to roughly 70 active granite quarries and employed 3,500 workers, many of them Italian, Scottish, and Spanish immigrants who brought their stonecutting skills across the Atlantic. The granite extracted here was shipped across the country for use in monuments, government buildings, and gravestones. Barre granite, a fine-grained blue-gray stone, was considered the best in America for detailed carving.
As the industry consolidated in the 20th century, dozens of smaller quarries were abandoned in favor of a few large, mechanized operations. The workers left. The pumps were turned off. The quarries filled with groundwater. The forest grew back around them. Today, the Barre Town Forest contains one of the highest concentrations of abandoned industrial sites in New England: water-filled quarry pits, rusted derrick machinery, grout piles (mountains of discarded granite chips), abandoned cutting sheds, and the stone foundations of processing buildings.
The town forest is crisscrossed with trails, and walking through it feels like exploring an open-air museum of 19th-century industrial technology. Some quarries are fenced. Others are not. The water in the flooded pits is dangerously cold and deep, and the granite walls are sheer, so falling in can be fatal. Respect the hazards and stay on marked trails. The Rock of Ages quarry, still active, offers public tours and a visitor center just outside the town forest, providing context for the abandoned quarries in the woods. Barre's downtown is also worth a visit: the granite curbs, granite buildings, and Hope Cemetery (with its elaborately carved granite headstones made by the quarry workers themselves) make the connection between the abandoned forest quarries and the living town impossible to miss.
Beyond the List
Vermont's abandoned places require patience and a willingness to get off the highway. The Green Mountains swallowed entire communities over the past two centuries, and the forest shows no signs of giving them back. Beyond these six, the Urbex Maps atlas has over 35 locations across Vermont, from abandoned CCC camps in the national forest to shuttered ski areas that couldn't compete with Killington and Stowe. The state's combination of difficult terrain, harsh winters, and thin soils meant that every settlement was a bet against nature, and nature won more often than not. The GPS coordinates are free on the Urbex Maps interactive atlas. Pull on your boots, grab a headlamp, and go find what Vermont buried under the trees.
Explore more abandoned places in the United States
- ●Abandoned Places in New Hampshire: 6 Iconic Urbex Spots
- ●Abandoned Places in Maine: 6 Iconic Urbex Spots
- ●Abandoned Places in Massachusetts: 8 Iconic Urbex Spots
- ●Abandoned Places in New York: 10 Iconic Urbex Spots
- ●Abandoned Places USA: 50 States, 50 Iconic Urbex Spots
- ●Ghost Towns USA: 20 Iconic Places Where Time Stopped
Explore More Abandoned Places Nearby
Looking for more abandoned locations? Check out these neighboring states:
- ●Abandoned Places in New Hampshire
- ●Abandoned Places in Maine
- ●Abandoned Places in Massachusetts
- ●Abandoned Places in New York
Or explore our complete guide: Abandoned Places USA: 50 Iconic Spots, One Per State.
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