Various Native American tribes knew the Otter Creek Valley where Rutland now stands primarily as a place to fish and hunt beaver. The first description of the creek's falls was recorded in the journal of James Cross, a fur trader, in 1730. Otter Creek served as a junction on the military road connecting the Champlain forts to the north with the Connecticut Valley during the French and Indian War, and settlement was not attempted until that hostility ceased. The first grantee of a patent to settle the territory was John Murray of Rutland, Massachusetts, who was responsible for the name of the town. The first actual settler was John Mead, who brought his wife and ten children there in 1770. Mead built a gristmill and sawmill, and Rutland soon became an active frontier community. Fort Rutland was built in 1775, and in 1778 the city became the headquarters for state troops during the American Revolution.
Among the city's early notables was the Reverend Samuel Williams, brilliant scholar, author of the first history of Vermont, and founder in 1794 of the Rutland Herald, Vermont's oldest continuously published newspaper. Between 1800 and 1880 Rutland's population grew from 2,124 to 12,149 people, surpassing for the first and only time the population of Burlington, the largest community in the state. This explosive growth is attributed to the arrival in 1849 of the railroad and the resulting boom in the marble industry, which had been operating on a small scale since the early nineteenth century. Colonel Redfield Proctor is credited with transforming the marble business into one of the country's greatest industries, bringing prosperity to Rutland and power to Proctor. In 1886 Proctor succeeded in convincing the state legislature that two new townships should be created from the original town. The new townships of Proctor and West Rutland, largely owned or controlled by the Proctor family, contained some of the richest marble deposits in the world; thus did Rutland lose its title as Marble City (in 1993 a long chapter in the city's history sadly came to a close when the Vermont Marble company closed its quarry operations in Proctor).
The city continued to prosper, however, largely due to the Howe Scales company, which moved there in 1877. The opening up of the ski industry in the 1930s added considerably to Rutland's prosperity, as did the decision in the 1960s of General Electric Corporation to build two defense contract plants in the area. City leaders have been engaged since the 1960s in the renovation of the downtown core, and the modern city exists as a retail trading and industrial center as well as the gateway to two famous ski resorts. Rutland's tree-lined streets and Victorian mansions add to the charm of this vigorous small community.
A small, progressive community with the cultural and recreational attractions of a much larger city, Rutland is the kind of city many of today's younger professional and high-technology workers seem drawn to. For that reason the city's economic picture remains bright.
Historical Information: Rutland Historical Society, 96 Center Street, Rutland, VT 05701; telephone (802)775-2006