Essex Junction Vermont History & Facts

Essex Junction is a city in Chittenden County, Vermont, United States. As of the 2020 U.S. census, the population was 10,590. It was incorporated as a village on November 15, 1892. Essex Junction became Vermont’s 10th city on July 1, 2022.

Amtrak, the national passenger rail system, provides daily service via its station in Essex Junction, one of two rail stations in Chittenden County and the state of Vermont's busiest Amtrak station. It was also the nearest Amtrak station to Burlington until the Ethan Allen Express was extended to serve the city directly on July 29, 2022. The Vermonter train runs daily from the Franklin County seat of St. Albans to Union Station in Washington, D.C. It was formerly called the Montrealer; its terminus being at Central Station in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

The City of Essex Junction is part of the Essex Westford Unified Union School District. Operating K-12 schools including Essex High School.

Essex Junction is home to GlobalFoundries' Burlington Design Center and 200 mm wafer fabrication plant. GlobalFoundries is the largest private employer in the state of Vermont, with approximately 3,000 employees.

The village history was affected in a major way by the presence of IBM (now GlobalFoundries), which chose Essex Junction as the site for its facility in 1958.

In 1958, IBM leased a 40,000 square feet (3,700 m2) facility in the southeast part of the village for its new Data Processing Division. By the end of the year, there were 500 workers. In 1969, the plant expanded to 820,000 square feet (7.6 ha).

In 1982, employment reached an all-time high of 8,000. In 2007, the town listers dropped the value of the plant from a high of $147.5 million to $104 million. The plant's workforce was a little over 5,000 in 2011. As a GlobalFoundries operation since July 2015, the plant retains about 3,000 employees.

Essex Junction is located southwest of Essex and is bordered on the south by the Winooski River. The city is 6 miles (10 km) east of downtown Burlington via Vermont Route 15. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 4.7 square miles (12.3 km2), of which 4.6 square miles (11.8 km2) is land and 0.2 square miles (0.5 km2), or 3.72%, is water.

Famous Peoples From Essex Junction Vermont

Guy Winfred Bailey

(May 7, 1876 – October 22, 1940) was an American politician and educator. He served as Secretary of State of Vermont and president of the University of Vermont.

Guy Winfred Bailey was born in Hardwick, Vermont, on May 7, 1876. He was raised and educated in Essex Junction, where his father owned and operated the Bailey Granite Monument Company.

Bailey graduated from Burlington High School in 1896, and the University of Vermont in 1900. While at UVM, Bailey joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. He studied law at the Burlington office of Rufus E. Brown & Russell W. Taft, and was admitted to the bar in 1904. A Republican, he served as village president of Essex Junction from 1901 to 1904, and a member of the Vermont House of Representatives in 1904 and 1906.

In 1908, Bailey was elected secretary of state. He was reelected four times, and served from October 1908 until resigning in August 1917. From 1912 to 1914, he served again as Essex Junction's village president. Bailey had been a trustee of the University of Vermont since 1914, and left the secretary of state's position to become UVM's comptroller. In August 1919, Bailey was appointed acting president of the university. In June 1920 he became president, and he held this position until his death.

The study of eugenics flourished in Vermont during the first half of the twentieth century, and the Eugenics Survey of Vermont became the first privately funded research project at UVM. Bailey served on the Survey's Advisory Committee, and aided the effort by negotiating for and administering the sponsors' funding.

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