Lake Memphremagog History

Lake Memphremagog is Vermont's most international lake — a long, glacially carved body of water that begins at Newport, Vermont and runs north for roughly 31 miles into Magog, Québec, with about three-quarters of its surface sitting across the border. At its deepest point, off Jewett Point on the Canadian side, it drops 351 feet, making it the third-deepest lake in Vermont. Roughly twenty islands are scattered across it, the largest of them, Province Island, literally straddling the international line.

Before the Border

Long before there was a border to straddle, the lake was Abenaki territory and a working canoe route — its name comes from the Abenaki Mamlawbagak (or Memrahabegek, depending on the source), meaning something close to "a long and large sheet of water" or "great expanse of water." The Magog River, flowing out of the lake's north end, connected paddlers to Lake Magog, the St. Francis River, and eventually the St. Lawrence — a highway of water long before there were roads.

One of the lake's earliest recorded visitors arrived as a prisoner. In 1752, a young John Stark — later a well-known general in the Revolutionary War — was captured by the Abenaki and brought down the lake near where Newport now stands. He was ransomed the following year. He returned in 1759 under very different circumstances, retreating past the lake's east shore with Rogers' Rangers after their raid on the Abenaki village of Saint-Francis.

Duncansboro Becomes Newport

European settlement came late and grew slowly. The first settlement on the Vermont shore, named Duncansboro, was founded in 1793; by 1800 it held about fifty people in eleven families. The town was renamed Newport in 1816, and it stayed a town — not a city — until 1918, when Newport village merged with West Derby and part of Salem. The city seal still carries the likeness of a paddlewheel steamer, The Lady of the Lake, a nod to the era that put Memphremagog on the map.

The Steamboat & Grand Hotel Era

By the mid-1800s, Memphremagog was a fashionable destination for travelers from both sides of the border. Two grand hotels anchored the boom: the Memphremagog House in Newport, and the Mountain House at the foot of Owl's Head on the Québec side — both known across North America in their day. Rail lines from Montreal and New England fed a steady stream of guests to both ends of the lake, and a fleet of steamboats carried them the rest of the way: the Mountain Maid ran from 1850 to 1870, the Newport-based Lady of the Lake from 1867 to 1917, and the Anthemis — built in 1909 to carry 300 passengers — into the 1940s. Vermont added three lighthouses along its shore in 1879 (Maxfield Point, Newport Wharf, and Whipple Point); Québec eventually built seven more. None of Vermont's originals still stand.

The grand hotels are long gone, but the lake never stopped drawing visitors — summer cottages simply took their place through the 20th century.

Landmarks Worth Knowing

Owl's Head Mountain, with its ski resort, is still the lake's most recognizable sightline from the Vermont shore. Mount Orford rises to the west with a resort of its own, and the Benedictine monks of St-Benoît-du-Lac Abbey have watched over the western shore for generations. Local tradition also points to Skinner's Cave as a onetime smuggler's hideout, and a rare surviving covered bridge still crosses Fitch Bay's Narrows on the Québec side.

Wartime and Conservation

In June 1942, a single-engine Royal Canadian Air Force training plane crashed into the lake, killing its pilot, Roy N. Pate. Nearly seventy years later, in 2010, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service accepted a bequest of 420 undeveloped acres on Eagle Point — land that will stay wild rather than developed, on a lake that's been drawing people to its shore for centuries.

Memphremagog has one more story worth knowing — the legend of Memphre, the serpent said to live in its depths since long before anyone kept written records.