Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Bellows Falls, VT

Bellows Falls is one of two incorporated villages in the town of Rockingham in Windham County, Vermont, it was incorporated in 1909, and the 2020 census counted 2,747 residents in its 1.4 square miles bounded on the east by the Connecticut River.

According to the 2020 Census Demographic and Housing Characteristics profile, Bellows Falls had 1,288 households in 2020, with a median age of 43.8 years.

The community was settled in 1753 by colonists of English descent who called it Great Falls, and the settlers later renamed it for Colonel Benjamin Bellows, a landowner, while keeping the name Great Falls for the waterfall, a translation of the Abenaki name Kitchee pontegu.

In 1785 Colonel Enoch Hale built the first bridge over the Connecticut River, and it remained the only bridge across the river until another was built in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1796, while today the Vilas Bridge and the New Arch Bridge, also called the Church Street Bridge, link Bellows Falls to New Hampshire.

The Bellows Falls Canal, one of the first canals built in the United States, was dug by a British-owned company from 1791 to 1802 with 9 locks that lifted shipping 52 feet around the gorge, and it was later enlarged in 1874 and 1927 to 1928 to power turbines that generate electricity, with a fish ladder that lets salmon continue upstream.

Entrepreneurs built the first paper mill in Windham County in Bellows Falls in 1802, and two railroads converged there in 1849, helping it develop into a major mill town with a woolen textile mill by 1859 and factories producing furniture, marble, sashes and blinds, iron castings, carriages, cabinetware, rifles, harness, shoe pegs and organs.

The years of industry created wealth in the village, and substantial Victorian houses and mercantile buildings were constructed, so Bellows Falls today attracts visitors through heritage tourism based on its historic Victorian architecture.

The Bellows Falls Neighborhood Historic District is a roughly 42-acre residential area south of downtown with one of the largest concentrations of well-preserved 19th-century residences in southern Vermont, and more than 90 percent of its buildings were built before 1950.

The Miss Bellows Falls Diner, built in 1941 by the Worcester Lunch Car Company as number 771, is the only known intact example of a Worcester barrel-roofed diner in Vermont, arrived in Bellows Falls on May 14, 1944, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

Bellows Falls is home to the Bellows Falls Petroglyph Site and to the Green Mountain Railroad, including Bellows Falls station, and it hosts the annual Roots on the River Festival and the No Film Film Festival.