The offer might have expired, but once upon a time, Brandon was home to views and beaches of the mighty Lake Vermont. In this post, I’ll look at how that happened. But first, you might wonder just exactly where the lakeshore fell and how your home might have looked. The map below shows the lake in blue. Park Street would have been under 50 feet of ice water. Hawk Hill and the ridge behind the American Legion were islands, and Mount Pleasant and the Neshobe Golf Club were scenic vistas extending out into a blue-green lake.

In my last post, I described how the Wisconsin Ice Age got really interesting as the mile-thick ice covering Brandon melted between 13,500 and 13,000 years ago, resulting in the Hogback and the Frozen Well near Corona Street. But how did half the town get to be at the bottom of a lake for several centuries?

For starters, unlike today’s snowfall, which is generally deeper on the mountains, glaciers flow like pudding, filling valleys more deeply than mountains. As glacial ice south of Brandon melted, glaciers north of Brandon formed a dam across the Champlain Valley from the Green Mountains to the Adirondacks. Post-glacial Vermont had no vegetation to slow the rain and snowmelt. Melting ice and rainfall runoff flowed north up an almost unrecognizable Otter Creek in a raging torrent.  That is, until Otter Creek met a wall of ice: the dam created by the not-yet-melted glacier to the north. The image below shows the same process as glaciers melt in current day Argentina and three lakes form, blocked by the ice in valleys at the top of the photo.

The southern half of the Champlain Valley filled up well beyond the 100-foot elevation that marks the current lake, up to roughly 500 feet above sea level in this area. At that depth, Lake Vermont was able to create beaches in Brandon and flood most of western Rutland County before spilling over a dam of debris near the town of Coveville on the Hudson River in New York and flowing south to the ocean near today’s Manhattan. The lakeshore in Brandon lasted for roughly 200 years, from 13,400 years ago until 13,200 years ago. Next time, I’ll look at what happened to the lake and how it affected today’s farms, forests, and swamps.