Town of Craftsbury
The town of Craftsbury, founded in 1781 and located in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, is an outdoor recreation mecca.
Craftsbury has miles of lightly-traveled gravel roads that can be used for walking, running and biking. It’s home to the Craftsbury Outdoor Center (COC) and its world class cross country skiing trail network and summertime mountain bike and running trails. There are numerous other publicly accessible trail opportunities and links to neighboring towns.
The town’s scenic beauty makes it special and a source of deep pride for those who live here. There’s a pastoral patchwork of active agricultural fields and forests, views of distant mountains, winding river valleys and small lakes and ponds with largely undisturbed shorelines. And there are three historic villages that retain their 19th and early 20th century character.
Craftsbury has been welcoming visitors since the early 20th century when New York socialites would spend their summers in East Craftsbury. During the 1950s Sterling College, then a boarding high school, started its outdoors-driven program and in the late 60s the first cross country skiers found their way to the COC.
In the subsequent half century the town’s population has nearly doubled, Sterling College and the COC have added numerous programs and thrived, and agriculture in Craftsbury has evolved from milk production to vegetable, meat, cheese, and other value-added products - all of which are featured in local stores, restaurants, and kitchens.
The town’s rolling topography on a high plateau is ideal for outdoor recreation. This not only means unobstructed views of the Green Mountain ridgeline, but terrain that’s both not mountainous by Vermont standards but far from flat. The town is also in a Vermont “snow pocket,” a factor that was central to the COC’s founding and why it’s sought out now as a winter destination.