Sell Your Land in Huntington, Vermont

Huntington sits in the southeast corner of Chittenden County, tucked against the western flank of the Green Mountains with Camel's Hump rising directly to its east. It's a rural hill town in the true Vermont sense — no real commercial center to speak of, just a scattering of settlements (Huntington Center, Huntington village, and Jerusalem) strung along the Huntington River valley. Richmond and its I-89 interchange lie a short drive to the north, Hinesburg and Route 116 to the west, and Starksboro and Buel's Gore over the height of land to the south and east. Burlington and the rest of Chittenden County's job base are close enough for a commute, yet Huntington feels like a different world — narrow river-bottom fields giving way almost immediately to steep, forested mountainside. A lot of the town's acreage sits within or borders Camel's Hump State Park and State Forest, which shapes both the landscape and the land market here more than almost anything else.

The town was settled in the late 1700s and built its early economy the way most Green Mountain hill towns did — subsistence and then dairy farming on the valley floor and lower slopes, with sawmills and later some sugaring operations working the steeper timberland above. The Huntington River provided the power for early mills, and the flatter ground along it became the town's best farmland, while the hillsides were logged, grazed, and eventually abandoned as full-time agriculture became less viable through the 20th century. That history is written on the land today: old stone walls running through second-growth forest, cellar holes marking former hill farms, and pasture that's been quietly reverting to brush and young hardwood for decades. Much of what's now considered "vacant land" in Huntington is really former farmland that simply outlived its farm.

Ownership of that land today is a mix familiar to anyone who's worked rural Vermont deeds. There are multi-generation family parcels where the working farm is long gone but the back acreage stayed in the family, often now split among several heirs who live elsewhere and disagree about what to do with it. There are out-of-state owners who bought a camp lot or a piece of hillside decades ago with plans to build that never happened. There are retirees who kept a parcel as an investment or a future homesite and have since settled elsewhere. And there are landowners simply carrying the tax bill on ground near Camel's Hump State Park that they visit rarely, if ever, and would rather convert to cash than keep paying into.

The parcels themselves in Huntington run from small river-valley lots of an acre or two with real road frontage, to larger blocks of twenty, fifty, or more acres running up the mountainside toward the state park boundary. Land closer to the valley floor tends to be a mix of open former pasture and hedgerow, sometimes with wetland or river-corridor buffer along the Huntington River itself, which brings floodplain and setback considerations into play. Land higher up is mostly working woodland — sugar maple, birch, hemlock — often steep, sometimes ledgy, and frequently reached only by a Class 4 road or a deeded right-of-way rather than a maintained town road. A meaningful share of Huntington's larger parcels are enrolled in Current Use (UVA), which keeps the annual tax bill manageable for an owner holding forest or farmland, but which also means a Land Use Change Tax comes due if the land is developed or otherwise removed from the program — a real number a seller needs to understand before assuming a sale price.

Selling raw land like this through a traditional agent is genuinely difficult, and not because Huntington isn't a desirable town — it's the math and the buyer pool. A twelve- or thirty-acre wooded parcel off a Class 4 road, with no view, no water frontage, and a Current Use enrollment to untangle, appeals to a narrow slice of buyers: a neighbor looking to expand, a hunter, or someone specifically hunting for off-grid acreage near Camel's Hump. That's a small list compared to the buyers for a finished house in Richmond or Williston. Listings for bare land in towns like Huntington routinely sit for many months, sometimes longer, and a standard commission on a modest land sale can eat a large share of the proceeds relative to the work and certainty of a direct sale. Meanwhile the seller keeps paying property tax, and possibly a Current Use penalty risk, the whole time the sign is in the ground.

A few specific parts of town carry their own land character worth knowing. Ground along Camel's Hump Road and up toward the state park boundary tends to be steep, wooded, and prized mainly for its proximity to protected land and hiking access rather than for building potential. The Huntington River corridor through the village and Huntington Center has better soils and flatter ground, but also more wetland and floodplain considerations. Back roads like Sherman Hollow Road climb into classic old hill-farm terrain — reverting pasture, stone walls, and long views once the tree cover opens up — where lots are often larger and access is the deciding factor in what the land is actually worth.