Sell Your Land in Jericho Center, Vermont

Jericho Center is the quieter, older half of the town of Jericho — a cluster of white clapboard houses, a brick meetinghouse, and a village green set back from the Route 15 corridor where most of the town's commercial activity happens. If you know Jericho at all, you probably know Jericho Corners or the strip of stores near the Route 15/Browns River bridge. Jericho Center is different: it's the historic core, largely intact as a National Register district, surrounded by rolling farmland and forested hillsides that climb east toward Bolton and Underhill and, beyond them, the shoulders of Mount Mansfield. It is Chittenden County, technically, which surprises people — this is the county of Burlington and South Burlington, the most developed part of the state — but out here the land still behaves like the rest of rural Vermont.

The land itself tells a settlement story that repeats across the Vermont hill country. Jericho was chartered in the 1760s and settled in earnest after the Revolution, with families clearing hillside pasture for sheep and later dairy. Jericho Center grew as the civic and religious center of those hill farms — the common, the church, the old cemetery. Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley, the farmer-photographer who spent decades documenting snow crystals, worked this same landscape a short distance away, evidence of how tied daily life here was to weather, terrain, and the rhythms of a working farm. When sheep gave way to dairy, and dairy consolidated through the twentieth century, a lot of the steeper, thinner-soiled pasture around Jericho Center stopped being grazed. Brush moved in, then pine, then hardwood. Much of what looks like solid woodland today on the hills above the village was open pasture within living memory of someone's grandparents.

That history is exactly why so much land around Jericho Center sits idle now. I hear the same stories repeatedly: a family inherited forty or eighty acres from a grandparent who ran cows on it, and the grandchildren live in Burlington, or Boston, or somewhere else entirely, and nobody has a use for a back hillside lot with no house and no real access. Or someone bought a wooded parcel decades ago as a camp lot or a retirement idea that never happened. Or a Current Use parcel has been sitting enrolled for the tax break, and the owner is realizing the obligations — the management plan, the risk of a Land Use Change Tax bill if it's ever developed — outweigh whatever benefit they thought they'd get. In every case, the land isn't doing anything for anyone.

What you actually find on the ground around Jericho Center is a real mix. There's timberland on the hillsides toward Bolton Notch and the Underhill line, mixed hardwood with maple stands that could support a small sugarbush. There's former pasture, now grown up in white pine and brush, on the gentler slopes closer to the village. There are camp-style lots tucked along the Browns River and its tributary brooks, bought generations ago for a cabin that was never built. And there are back lots — parcels off Cilley Hill Road, Nashville Road, or one of the town's Class 4 roads, with deeded access but no maintained road to the parcel line, which means no snowplow, no easy winter access, and a real mud-season question every spring about whether you can even drive to it.

Selling that kind of land through a typical real estate listing is harder here than most people expect, even this close to Burlington's job market. Agents make their living on houses — that's where the buyer volume and the financing is. Vacant land, especially land enrolled in Current Use, land with Act 250 questions attached to any future subdivision, or land on a Class 4 road with no guaranteed access, scares off a lot of casual buyers and makes bank financing difficult. Meanwhile the seller keeps paying the town's grand list tax bill every year, keeps carrying whatever risk comes with holding the parcel, and often doesn't know what the listers' assessed value actually reflects versus what the land could sell for. A property can sit on the market a long time in a town this rural, racking up carrying costs while nothing happens.

The setting has real pull, even so. Mount Mansfield State Forest and Underhill State Park are a short drive east, the Browns River offers fishing and quiet water closer to the village, and Burlington and the IBM/UVM employment base in Essex and South Burlington are twenty-some minutes away — close enough that Jericho Center land holds interest for people who want rural quiet without giving up the county's economy entirely. That combination is part of what keeps this corner of Chittenden County distinct from the more purely working-forest towns of the Northeast Kingdom, even though the parcels themselves — sugarbush, reverting pasture, ledgy hillside woodland — look much the same.