Overview
West Castleton survives as ruins within Bomoseen State Park on Vermont's largest lake — walls of the slate company's mill, quarry pits now deep pools, and the cellar holes of the workers' village where Irish immigrant quarrymen and their families lived the industry's hard decades from the 1840s; when better slate and consolidation moved the work, the village emptied, and the park's Slate History Trail now interprets what remains, the workers' labour and losses — quarrying killed and maimed — remembered with respect. Lake Bomoseen supplies the celebrated legend: three quarrymen who rowed to a tavern across the water and never arrived, their empty boat found drifting — and ever since, telling says, a rowboat crosses on moonlit nights with no one at the oars, vanishing mid-lake; shore accounts add lights over the water and voices from the drowned margins. Present West Castleton as immigrant-industry heritage first, the phantom rowboat Vermont's finest lake legend, hedged and moonlit. Park and trail details from state pages.