Isle La Motte is an island town in Grand Isle County, of the Islands & Farms region. The town consists primarily of an island in Lake Champlain and Fort Sainte Anne was the first European settlement in what is now Vermont. The island is named after the leader of the expedition, Captain La Motte.
Isle La Motte is home to Saint Anne's Shrine, a fort and a chapel built in 1666 to protect Montreal from attacks by the Iroquois. Just before the turn of the 20th Century the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington acquired the site and constructed a new shrine to Saint Anne, which today is the single most popular reason to visit the island.
The island is known for its quarries of gray or black fossiliferous limestone from the Late Cambrian and Ordovician Chazy Formation, the oldest known coral reef on Earth. The limestone is so dark in appearance that it was originally marketed in the 18th and 19th century as Black Marble.
