Historical U.S. Census totals for Franklin County, Vermont

This article shows U.S. Census totals for Franklin County, Vermont, broken down by municipality, from 1900 to 2000.

Contents

• Corporate changes since 1900
• 1900
• 1910
• 1920
• 1930
• 1940
• 1950
• 1960
• 1970
• 1980
• 1990
• 2000
• Villages
• References

Most areas of New England are entirely divided into incorporated municipalities, with no unincorporated territory. In the three northern New England states, however, some unincorporated territory does exist, generally in areas that are very sparsely populated. Franklin County currently follows the typical New England model, and is entirely incorporated. Until the 1960s or 1970s, however, it did contain a small amount of unincorporated territory, as four other counties in Vermont still do today. The unincorporated territory in Franklin County consisted of a tract called Avery’s Gore, along the county’s southern edge. It was eliminated by dividing it between the towns of Montgomery and Belvidere (the latter across the border in neighboring Lamoille County). Prior to its dissolution, Avery's Gore had only reported population in two 20th century censuses.

There are three types of incorporated municipalities in Vermont: towns, cities and villages. As in the other New England states, towns are the basic unit of municipal government. Cities are independent of and equivalent to towns, but differ in their form of government. Villages overlay towns and assume responsibility for some municipal services within their boundaries. Incorporated villages are not found in any of the other New England states, and are less common in Vermont today than they have been in the past. A number of villages have disincorporated over the years, choosing to revert to full town control; most of those that remain are very small.

It is possible for a village to become a city, in which case it becomes a completely separate municipality from its original parent town. Many of Vermont’s current cities are former villages (unlike the other New England states where cities are almost invariably former towns). If a village bearing the same name as its parent town becomes a city, the result is an adjacent town and city that have the same name but are completely separate municipalities. There is one such example in Franklin County. The present-day city of St. Albans has its origins in a village within the town of St. Albans. When the village became a city, however, it ceased to be part of the town, and the town and city are now two distinct municipalities with no overlap or relationship to one another.

The main tables below show municipalities at the town level, differentiating between towns and cities. For any census, adding up the totals for each town-level municipality (as well as Avery’s Gore, for the 1970 and earlier censuses) should yield the county total. A separate section follows with population totals for villages from 1930 to 2000.