Travelers who drive north on Interstate 89 heading into St. Albans may notice a large white sphere peeking through the trees atop a hill just east of the highway. The geodesic dome is too large to be a cellphone tower and about 1,400 miles too far north to have any connection to Disney’s Epcot. Longtime residents of St. Albans say it’s been there for decades, and it’s neither a weather station nor a space observatory. So WTF is it?
Short answer: It’s Vermont’s most visible remnant of the Cold War era, one that’s still in use today, albeit for mostly civilian purposes.
The orb on the hill, described in a 1994 letter archived in the Saint Albans Museum as “God’s own golf ball teed up,” is a radome, or radar dome, used for tracking aircraft. It’s the last remaining radome of five that once stood on Bellevue Hill, about two and a half miles southeast of St. Albans. All were part of a radar defense complex operated by the U.S. Air Force from 1951 to 1979. Its primary mission was to detect potential inbound Soviet bombers invading the continental United States by flying over the Arctic Circle.
At 1,310 feet, Bellevue Hill offers unobstructed panoramic views of the Champlain Valley, the Adirondacks and even Montréal on clear days. As far back as 1870, it hosted a lookout tower that was open to the public. But it wasn’t until the end of World War II that Bellevue Hill became a site of electronic surveillance.
In 1949, the Air Force purchased 180 acres of parkland from the State of Vermont, 35 of which were developed into a base to house airmen at the facility. Records archived at the Saint Albans Museum indicate that construction of the “Bellevue Hill Federal Project,” as it was called, began on May 8, 1950. According to museum records, not one local newspaper reported on the sale of the land or the commencement of construction — an inconceivable omission by today’s standards.
Completed and fully operational by July 1951, the Saint Albans Air Force Station was home to the 764th Radar Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron. At its peak in the mid-1950s, about 400 airmen and another 20 to 25 civilians lived and worked on Bellevue Hill. At one point, the base had a military payroll of about $1 million and a civilian payroll of $380,000.
The base itself included barracks, a dining hall, a recreational facility and a noncommissioned officer club. Drive up the potholed Bellevue Carriage Road, and you can still make out the crumbling concrete remnants of some of the buildings.
The Air Force station was one of more than 200 long-range radar stations throughout North America that provided security from nuclear sneak attacks. At any given time, 20 to 30 people sat at radarscopes in St. Albans around the clock, watching for incoming bogeys. Should an aircraft enter the radar’s 250-mile radius without identifying itself, the Air Force could immediately scramble jets to intercept it.
Louise Haynes, a St. Albans native who now volunteers at the Saint Albans Museum, remembers a lot of young women from her high school dating airmen who were stationed on Bellevue Hill. She says her parents even rented apartments to some of the personnel once they were ready to move off base and settle in town.
Beginning in the 1970s, as civilian air traffic in New England increased, the Federal Aviation Administration began using the radomes, too. By the late ’70s, however, the Air Force determined that the domes’ technology was obsolete for defense purposes.
In February 1978, it announced that the St. Albans base would close the following year. An article in the St. Albans Messenger at the time indicated that when the base was finally decommissioned, on June 29, 1979, fewer than 100 airmen were stationed there, and the financial loss to Franklin County totaled about $2 million.
In 1981, the Air Force auctioned off most of the Bellevue Hill property for $200,000. Although there was talk in the mid-1990s of the FAA demolishing the last radome, ultimately it was kept in service and upgraded. Visitors to Bellevue Hill can still get within about 200 yards of the dome, which is now cordoned off with a security fence.
Ron Bazman, air traffic manager at Burlington International Airport, says the radome is still used by the Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center in Nashua, N.H., as a long-range antenna for tracking high-altitude aircraft. Because it turns at a much slower rate than the radar at BTV, it’s not very useful for Burlington’s arriving and departing flights.
Why aren’t more Vermonters aware of the role that St. Albans once played in Cold War national defense? As Putney resident Richard Ewald wrote in a November 1994 letter to the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, “The Cold War period in Vermont is currently neglected as too recent to seem ‘historical.’ Yet it is so long ago as to be nearly forgotten.”
To prevent such historical amnesia, a nonprofit based in Bellefontaine, Ohio, is currently building the National Air Defense Radar Museum to commemorate the men and women who served in facilities like the one in St. Albans. Writes Gene McManus, a volunteer with the museum’s association who served as an Air Force radar maintenance technician from 1956 to 1969, “To this day, little is known of this mission outside of the rapidly dwindling population of those airmen who served on these sites. Our mission, while not completely classified, was nonetheless little known and less understood by the general population, even [by] our own parents or spouses.”
McManus hopes the radar museum will open in the summer of 2018.
This article appears in May 10-16, 2017.
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Vermont and upstate New York actually have an interesting Cold War history. In addition to the St Albans radar installation, there was a significant radar base in the mountains near East Haven, part of the distant early warning radar network. And Plattsburgh Air Force Base was a major B-47, B-52, and F-111 bomber base, contributing to Operation Chrome Dome (which kept bombers perpetually circling in the Arctic, ready to bomb the Soviet Union in the event of a nuclear exchange). It was one of Plattsburgh’s B-52s that was lost in the infamous “broken arrow” incident near Thule Air Base in Greenland during a Chrome Dome mission. Perhaps most interestingly, Vermont and upstate New York have the only nuclear missile silos built east of the Mississippi, 12 of them in a ring around Plattsburgh AFB.
Along RT104 there is a an abanone house in the field. It is totally feneed in and overgrown with rather large power poles. Is this related to the air base in some way?
It seems to be directly under the dome on the hill.
My father worked there for the Air Force when I was a kid.
The house on 104 was never part of the base, as it never came down that far. All the land was above where I89 is now. The NWRDC land butted up to it, and our trails ran along the chain link perimeter fence on the south end of the base. Mom and Dad rented apts to many stationed there thru Dad’s death in 1975, and I managed the apts starting in 1969. Went to school with kids from the base from 1962-1974.One of those stationed there became like family renting from us, and is still a dear friend today.
I hope the fix the road. It’s almost impassable! Seems as though there has been no maintenance since it was decommissioned.
I like how they say to go check it out but fail to mention the road and lands leading to it are private property with. I trespassing signs on it. The FAA has an easement to go to the dome but they are the only ones. Stay out!
It’s mind control, our mind and body’s emit Alfa type frequencys , using microwave technology , they can lock on to us because the energy everyone emits is different , they are just now breaking the coad that ables them to read our minds or thoughts. But they have been able to send signals out for a very long time. There’s a reason they are set up in a trifecta . This is a technology that they basically stole from Tesla. And they have been experimenting with it for as long as most of us have been alive.
A good friend of mine was an airman at this radar site in 1961-1962. Trained as an electronic technician at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi, he often regaled us with stories of his duty at the Dome.
For 8-hour shifts, he sat at a large CRT screen watching for blips (Soviet aircraft) coming south through the Arctic Circle. He took the job seriously for about a month before realizing it was a fool’s mission. That’s when the fun began. He and his buddies soon discovered a way to patch into AT&T telephone lines from the USAF secure communications network. He estimated he spent 2-3 hours a day talking to girl friends and fellow airmen at other Domes. He and a computer savvy buddy at a Dome site in New York used their monitors and telephones to daily play an early version of online chess.
To this day whenever I see the white dome on the horizon, I am reminded not just of the Cold War, but also of the ingenuity of young men and women who used their native intelligence and wits to pass the time away.