A seven-mile island in Lake Champlain is older than almost anything alive on this planet

It’s also Vermont’s first settlement

Isle La Motte is seven miles long, two miles wide, and sits in the northwest corner of Lake Champlain. About 500 people live here year-round.

French soldiers built the first European settlement in what is now Vermont on this island back in 1666. But the real draw goes back much further than that, roughly 450 to 480 million years.

Beneath the grass and bedrock, an ancient fossil reef holds some of the oldest complex life on the planet, and you can walk right over it.

French soldiers and black marble quarries

Samuel de Champlain landed here on July 9, 1609, and the lake eventually took his name. Fifty-seven years later, Captain Pierre La Motte built Fort Sainte Anne on the island to hold off the Iroquois.

About 300 French soldiers garrisoned the fort, which included a chapel dedicated to Saint Anne. The island’s limestone quarries started operating that same year and grew through the 1800s.

Workers cut a dark stone marketed as “black marble,” and it ended up in the U.S. Capitol, the National Gallery of Art, and Radio City Music Hall.

A tropical reef that drifted north for millions of years

The Chazy Fossil Reef formed in a shallow tropical sea near the equator, back when the land that would become North America sat in the Southern Hemisphere close to where Zimbabwe is today.

Over hundreds of millions of years, tectonic plates carried the reef north to Vermont. The original reef stretched about 1,000 miles from Newfoundland to Tennessee, but only a few pieces survive.

Isle La Motte holds the best and most complete fossil record of any section left.

Walk south to north and travel through time

The rock layers on Isle La Motte tilt, so when you walk from south to north, you move through fossils from oldest to youngest.

The stone holds bryozoa, stromatoporoids, gastropods, cephalopods, trilobites, and some of the earliest reef-building corals.

These animals lived in the ocean long before fish even existed, making this a snapshot of some of Earth’s earliest complex ecosystems. You can spot them in exposed bedrock and in the walls of old quarry cuts.

The entire Chazy Fossil Reef earned National Natural Landmark status in 2009.

Vermont’s oldest quarry is now a fossil preserve

The 20-acre Fisk Quarry Preserve sits on the site of Vermont’s oldest quarry, first mined in 1666 for lime mortar to build Fort Sainte Anne.

Quarrying continued through the 1800s and into the early 1900s, producing the dark limestone that went into landmarks across the country.

The Isle La Motte Preservation Trust took over the quarry in 1998 and opened it to the public. You can see stromatoporoid fossils, big white dome shapes, embedded in the old quarry walls.

Wetlands filled the abandoned cuts after quarrying stopped, and now birds, amphibians, and other wildlife call it home.

Hike past fossil beds at Goodsell Ridge

Goodsell Ridge Preserve covers 83 acres of former farm fields with exposed fossil beds and hiking trails running through them.

Seven marked discovery areas along the trails point out different fossil types, from trilobites to cephalopods to gastropods.

A renovated dairy barn serves as the Conservation Barn, where you can check out fossil displays, interpretive exhibits, and a short video about the reef.

A 4,600-foot trail lined with illustrated panels walks you through 4.6 billion years of Earth’s history.

Both preserves are free and open from dawn to dusk, year-round.

A lakeside shrine on the site of Vermont’s first Mass

Saint Anne’s Shrine sits on 32 lakefront acres along the island’s west shore, right on the spot where Fort Sainte Anne once stood. Vermont’s first Catholic Mass took place here in 1666.

The grounds hold a chapel, an outdoor pavilion for services, grottos dedicated to saints, statues, and reflection gardens.

A sandy beach on the property lets you swim and look west across Lake Champlain to the Adirondack Mountains. Thousands of pilgrims and visitors from the United States and Canada come here every year.

Dark limestone walls tell 350 years of history

Several buildings on Isle La Motte are built entirely from local fossil-laden limestone, and the dark stone gives them a look you won’t find anywhere else.

The Isle La Motte Public Library is made of the same rock that was once shipped to famous landmarks. So is the Isle La Motte Methodist Church.

The South Stone School House, built around 1843, sits on the National Register of Historic Places. A Scottish immigrant mason named James Ritchie built at least seven of the island’s surviving stone structures.

Step inside an 1850s blacksmith shop

The Isle La Motte Historical Society operates out of the old South Stone School House, which served as a district school until the 1930s.

The three-building campus also holds an 1850s blacksmith shop, one of the most intact historic blacksmith shops in New England.

A third building, the Frances Ford Slab-Log Cabin, hosts rotating exhibits on French Canadian settlers and island history. Look closely at the schoolhouse walls, and you’ll see fossils embedded in the limestone.

The campus opens on Saturdays in July and August, staffed by knowledgeable volunteer guides.

Bike 10 flat miles past fossils and farmland

Isle La Motte is mostly flat with almost no car traffic, which makes it perfect for a casual bike ride. The Legacy of Ancient Stone loop covers about 10 miles and takes you past every major site on the island.

You start at Saint Anne’s Shrine on the west shore and ride past the fossil preserves, Fisk Farm, and the Historical Society.

Lake Champlain appears on both sides of the island as you go, the Adirondacks to the west and the Green Mountains to the east. The roads wind past camp communities, farmland, and stretches of shoreline.

Paddle, swim, and watch for birds on the lake

The island’s spot in Lake Champlain puts you right on the water for kayaking, paddleboarding, swimming, and fishing. The beach at Saint Anne’s Shrine is a favorite place to cool off before or after exploring the grounds.

The west shore faces the Adirondack Mountains, and the sunsets over the lake from that side are worth sticking around for.

Birding is strong around the island, especially near the wetlands and along the causeway that connects Isle La Motte to the mainland.

A lighthouse on the island’s northwest corner, now a private home, is still visible from the water.

No stoplights, no crowds, just an open road and a lake

Isle La Motte has no stoplights, no chain stores, and no crowds.

A bridge from Alburgh connects it to the mainland, built in 1882 after the town incorporated specifically to fund the project.

From here, you can explore the rest of the Champlain Islands chain, including North Hero, Grand Isle, and South Hero. Local farms and orchards like Hall’s Orchard carry on agricultural roots that go back to the mid-1800s.

If you want to slow down, unplug, and set your own pace, this island feels like a quieter version of Vermont that most people never find.

Explore Isle La Motte’s fossil preserves in Vermont

You can reach Isle La Motte by driving about an hour north of Burlington through the Champlain Islands or crossing the bridge from Alburgh.

The Fisk Quarry Preserve sits at 4088 West Shore Road, and the Goodsell Ridge Preserve is at 239 Quarry Road, both free and open dawn to dusk all year.

Saint Anne’s Shrine, at 92 St. Anne’s Road, opens its grounds mid-May through mid-October, with free admission. The Historical Society campus opens Saturdays in July and August from 1 to 4 p.m.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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