Huntington Gorge / Deaths at the Huntington Gorge

By 1802, John Preston had built a grist mill at Richmond’s best water-power site in Huntington Gorge. The mill operated continuously for a century, last of all by the Robinson family, and in 1903 the Richmond Light and Power Co. converted it to generate the village’s first electricity. Other 19th-century mills here included cider, wool carding and cloth dressing, woodturning, and underclothing. Between 1950 and 1994, eighteen people drowned here, most of them swimmers caught by treacherous and deceptive currents that pulled them over the falls or sucked them down to the bottom of pools.

Richmond, Vermont · United States