Lake Dunmore History

Lake Dunmore is a 985-acre lake in Addison County, straddling Salisbury and Leicester, running more than three miles north to south and reaching a maximum depth of 105 feet. It sits at the foot of the Moosalamoo high country, fed by Sucker Brook out of the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area and drained by the Leicester River into Otter Creek, and eventually Lake Champlain.

Where the Name Comes From

The lake likely takes its name from John Murray, the 4th Earl of Dunmore, who served as British governor of the Province of New York from 1770 to 1771 — back when the land that would become Vermont was still contested "New Hampshire Grants" territory claimed by New York.

Vermont's First Glassworks

Long before Dunmore was a summer destination, it was an industrial site. Vermont's first glass factory opened on its shore in 1813, near what's now Sunset Lodge, producing window glass and even issuing its own scrip — paper currency in denominations from $1 to $5, now a collector's item. Competition, overexpansion, and a fire closed the original operation in 1817; a second attempt, the Lake Dunmore Glass Company, ran from 1832 to 1842 before the industry moved on for good.

Resort Era

By the early 1900s, Lake Dunmore had reinvented itself as a resort destination, with several large hotels on its shores served by rail lines and steamboat excursions on the lake itself — among them the Mountain Spring Hotel, photographed often enough in its day to survive today in the Library of Congress archives. Waterhouses, a marina and rowboat-building operation founded in 1876 by Loyal N. Waterhouse, outlasted the grand hotels; the original farmhouse still stands on the property, now run by the same family as a campground, marina, and lakeside restaurant.

Two youth camps trace back to this era and are still running: Keewaydin Dunmore, a boys' camp founded in 1910, and Point CounterPoint, a chamber music camp on the western shore founded in 1963. Songadeewin, a girls' camp, joined them in 1999.

Branbury State Park & the High Country

Branbury State Park was established in 1945 on the lake's eastern shore, at the base of Mount Moosalamoo, and today offers a sandy beach, campsites, and direct access to two of the lake's best-known landmarks: Rattlesnake Cliffs, a bare rock face rising above the western shore with sweeping views back across the water, and the Falls of Lana, a staircase of cascades on U.S. Forest Service land just up the trail from the park.

Power from Above

Six hundred feet above Dunmore sits Silver Lake, part of one of Vermont's earliest major hydroelectric projects. A generating station built in 1917 near the lakeshore used a penstock with a 676-foot head — the highest of any hydro plant in the eastern United States at the time.

Looking After It Today

The Lake Dunmore/Fern Lake Association keeps watch over the lake today, and the work is paying off: in 2022, longtime volunteer Mike Korkuc received the Green Mountain Power–Zetterstrom Environmental Award for his role in bringing nesting loons back to the lake.