More on Vermont's Lotting Plans
The original land grants in the towns

Lotting Plans are the original "subdivision maps" for the towns. Typically made in the earliest days of the town's existence, often before any settlers, these maps divided up the township into smaller parcels of a few hundred acres each, so the lots could be sold or given to private individuals. A typical late 1700s lotting plan divides a town into a checkerboard of  rectangular lots, each numbered by "lot and range". These maps are important today because the old lot lines are often land boundaries today, and many documents, such as deeds and highway layouts, refer to the old lots.

Most of the original lotting plans were town maps - not made by the state. Where they exist, it is often in town halls, sometimes in such unusual forms as ink-on-sheepskin. There is no known inventory of all of these original lotting plans, but a very useful resource is a listing made of the copies at the Department of Forest and Parks. That agency, starting in the mid 1900s, had a program of copying every map that they could, and, in most cases, recording the source. These maps form the core of the Vermont State Archives's collection of lotting plans.  The list below is provided as an aid to those doing research into the original lots.

Cautionary Note:   Lotting plans have been widely copied and re-copied over the years. Many of the Forest and Parks plans (and thus the Vermont Archives plans) are second and third generation copies.  In other words, they are copies of copies. And, the Forests and Parks copyists often changed the map's scales and added features to their copies, so these maps should be used with care.  This is not to take away from the enormous value of the work of that agency, but is to caution the user to realize that they are not looking at original documents.

 Click Here to learn about the "Crafts" plans of the Northeast Vermont towns

A Listing of all the Vermont Lotting Plans acquired by the
Vermont Department of Forests and Parks.
This appears to be the most complete listing available for these early maps.  Most (perhaps all) of the Forests and Parks
maps are copies. This listing is organized by County (counties are numbered from 1-14.)