VERMONT — An estimated 42,000 Vermonters attended last month’s No Kings Day protests, organizers said, making it one of the biggest one-day demonstrations in state history.

Vermonters turned out to demonstrate against President Donald Trump on the same day he hosted a military parade in honor of Flag Day and the military’s 250th anniversary, coinciding with his own 79th birthday. Millions of people attended protests nationwide, and some experts believe that it may have been the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history.

Debbie Peel from 50501 Vermont, the group that organized the protests in the state, provided attendance tallies from local organizers of the more than 50 protests, marches and rallies held around Vermont.

The organizers gathered the figures through a combination of headcounts, drone footage and a crowd estimation algorithm, Peel said.

50501 Vermont sponsored its first protest of just a few hundred people on President’s Day. The effort has grown quickly since then thanks to multi-group coordination, social media, mailing lists, and volunteers working on logistics and planning, according to Peel.

Among the largest of the June 14 protests in 50501 Vermont’s data were in Burlington, with 16,500 people; 5,000 in White River Junction and neighboring Lebanon, New Hampshire; and 3,000 in Brattleboro. The sole pro-Trump gathering, in Montpelier, had about 30 people in attendance.

Does this mean it was the largest single-day protest in Vermont history?

No single source tracks attendance figures, but a review of news archives for other major demonstrations — such as the 2017 Women’s March, the 1970 Earth Day rally and the 1986 Hands Across America fundraiser — failed to turn up any bigger numbers.

Annelise Orleck, a Dartmouth College professor and historian, said the Green Mountain State has a long track record of involvement in social activism. Vermonters have also ventured beyond the state’s borders to attend national protests in New York City and Washington, D.C.

“During the 1982 anti-nuclear marches … I think there were representatives from every single town in Vermont,” she said.

Orleck joined the march in White River Junction and described it as a “remarkably large turnout for such a small town.” She said the feel of the protest was different than others she’s attended or studied.

“What I think is different about this movement, nationally and locally, is that people don’t feel like the Democratic Party in Washington is standing up in opposition to encroaching fascism,” she said. “There’s a sense that people have to put their bodies out there and respond and resist.”

Orleck has direct experience with that risk. In 2024, she was arrested and body slammed to the ground while trying to intervene in a clash between pro-Palestinian student protesters and police. That experience has been forefront in her mind as she’s read recent headlines, like U.S. Senator Alex Padilla’s forcible removal from a Department of Homeland Security press conference.

“What went through my mind when I watched how they forced him to the ground and kneeled on his back is (that) there are too many of us unfortunate Americans who know exactly what that feels like, and exactly how scary that can be when they press your face into the ground and you can’t breathe,” she said.

The Vermont No Kings protests were largely peaceful, although a brief altercation broke out that day when a counter-protester shoved his water bottle into the Montpelier pro-Trump demonstrators’ celebratory cake. Some violence broke out elsewhere in the country: A man drove an SUV through protesters in Virginia and one protester was fatally shot in Utah.

Orleck noted that while younger people seem to be taking the lead in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, the No Kings day demonstration appeared to draw an older crowd.

“I do feel like older people, very viscerally, are recognizing the dangers of encroaching fascism right now,” she said.

The local nature of the protests created a decentralized feel and enabled people to come who could not have afforded a trip to a major city, she said. It also helped to build local power and hope, Orleck said.

“When I was standing in the middle of all those people in White River Junction on the bridge to New Hampshire, I said to someone, ‘This feels like I just drank a really good cup of coffee,’” she said. “That’s what it is. It’s energy. It’s community. It’s humor.”