The Trout River Crossing Is Closed Southbound Until 2028

The Trout River port of entry, where Quebec's Route 138 becomes NY 30 about 11 road miles north of Malone, stopped taking traffic into the United States on June 1, 2026. The General Services Administration is renovating its 1931 inspection station and adding a new wing under a $32.9 million construction contract, with substantial completion targeted for May 20, 2028. The crossing is 21 road miles from the cabins. This post covers what is being built and why, the two old customs buildings at the line, what the closure means for the people who live here and for guests, and what to watch until it reopens.

What closed on June 1

U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced the closure on May 5, 2026, in a notice for its Buffalo region, and it took effect on Monday, June 1. It covers traffic heading south into the United States. The General Services Administration, the federal agency that builds and manages the land ports, closed the southbound side so its contractor can work without interruption and finish on schedule.

Traffic heading north into Canada still crosses at Trout River. The Canada Border Services Agency has no construction planned on its side, and in May its spokesperson, Karine Martel, told the Plattsburgh Press-Republican, "The road leading to Canada will remain accessible." The Canadian office, at 980 Route 138 in Elgin, keeps the hours it has had since January 2025: 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., seven days a week.

For everyone driving south, CBP's notice named five other ports. Fort Covington, about 14 miles west, and Mooers and Champlain, about 39 and 50 miles east, stay open around the clock. Chateaugay, about 14 miles east, and Churubusco, about 23 miles east, keep daytime hours. Commercial trucks may cross only at Champlain and Chateaugay. The hours at every crossing near the cabins, in both directions, are in crossing the border.

The contract and the money

The GSA awarded the general construction contract on April 21, 2026, for $32,866,400, and issued the notice to proceed on Friday, May 1. The contractor is Murnane Building Contractors, a third-generation New York construction firm with offices in Clifton Park, Plattsburgh, Whitesboro and Syracuse.

The contract is not the whole bill. A GSA spokesperson, Paul Hughes, told the Press-Republican in May that the total cost of the project is $39.4 million. The agency's project page had first shown a budget range of $25 million to $35 million; it now shows $35 million to $45 million. Hughes said the project was not over budget: the first range described the expected construction contract, and the new one adds costs such as design.

The money comes from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed in November 2021, which gave the GSA $3.4 billion to build and modernize land ports on the northern and southern borders, 26 of them in all. When the design was approved in April 2024, the GSA said the project would also draw on up to $11 million of Inflation Reduction Act funding for its sustainability features.

A small share is set aside for art. The GSA reserves one-half of one percent of the estimated construction cost of each new federal building to commission artwork, and in March 2024 it chose Adam Cvijanovic to make the art for the new ports at Trout River and Rouses Point. He is known for large wall paintings, each made for a particular site, on themes of American history, culture and landscape.

What is being built

The GSA is keeping and renovating the historic station, 7,748 square feet, and adding a new wing of 9,917 square feet, for about 17,000 square feet in all. The finished port will have two inbound inspection lanes under a canopy, one primary booth for cars and one for commercial trucks, and an outbound canopy 100 feet long and 25 feet wide. A new outbuilding will hold the fire suppression system, a water storage tank and an emergency generator, and a new lot on the west side adds about 15 parking spaces.

The port needs more land to fit it all. The existing parcel is a 1.75-acre rectangle on the northwest corner of NY 30 and the Trout River-Westville Road, overlooking the river. The plans take in about 2 acres of vacant land to the west for parking, snow storage and stormwater. East of the station, the new inspection lanes, lighting and utilities reach into the NY 30 right of way, and the government is to buy four parcels along the highway, about 1.5 acres in all, and demolish the structures on them.

Why the old station could not stay as it was

The building is too small for the staff and work areas CBP needs, it does not meet current federal security and infrastructure requirements, and it does not meet the accessibility standards of the federal Architectural Barriers Act. Winter adds a practical problem. Ice and snow slide off the slate roof, so in the winter months the parking spaces beside the building cannot be used without risk to cars and people.

The energy plan

The new port is designed to run entirely on electricity, heated and cooled by ground-source heat pumps, with solar panels on site expected to supply about a quarter of its power. The GSA is aiming for LEED Gold and SITES certification and plans to keep about 330 tons of demolition waste out of the landfill. The 2024 design concept aimed for 53 percent less energy use than a standard building; the final environmental assessment, in December 2025, sets the target at 30 percent below the ASHRAE 90.1-2019 energy standard. The design came from Davis Brody Bond and Spacesmith, a New York joint venture that won the nearly $2 million architecture and engineering contract on August 11, 2022.

The schedule so far

The project has been in the works since 2020, and several of its dates have moved. These are the steps on the public record.

The environmental assessment planned for the port to close for 20 to 24 months, with traffic sent to Fort Covington and Chateaugay and CBP officers reassigned to those two ports to handle it. The span from June 1, 2026, to May 20, 2028, is just under 24 months, inside that range.

A border station built for Prohibition

The U.S. station at Trout River is one of seven surviving border inspection stations built along New York's border with Canada between 1931 and 1934, and it went up in 1931 and 1932. Stations like it are tied to four events in American history: Prohibition, from 1919 to 1933; the Elliot-Fernald public buildings act of 1926; the Depression that followed; and the automobile, which Henry Ford's assembly line had made affordable. The stations were meant to control the casual smuggling of alcohol, which usually crossed the border in cars, and building them was also a way to give work to the many people who were out of work locally.

The station was designed in the office of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury, James A. Wetmore, while Andrew W. Mellon was secretary of the Treasury and Louis A. Simon ran the office's architectural section. It is a Georgian Revival building at the scale of a house, laid out for both customs and immigration work. The two-story main block is wood framed, with a gambrel roof and walls faced in English bond brick. A one-story, four-bay garage wing with a hipped roof stands on each side, the roofs are green and purple slate, and a flat canopy covers three bays at the front, which faces northeast onto NY 30. The GSA counts it among the best-preserved border stations in New York, inside and out.

The station is on the National Register of Historic Places. The National Park Service listed it in September 2014, as part of a group listing of U.S. border inspection stations, and the stations at Fort Covington, Mooers and two at Rouses Point were nominated with it. Because of that listing, the GSA had to consult New York's historic preservation office on the design. When the GSA sent its finished drawings in June 2025, the office replied in July that it could not yet agree that the work would have no adverse effect on the historic building, and it asked for changes to the design. After a meeting in August and a letter answering its questions in September, it agreed on October 2, 2025, that the work would have no adverse effect on the station.

Before the station there was a hotel

The port stands where a hotel stood for more than half a century. Patrick H. Lahey built it in 1876, and Ed Dolan ran it from 1884 to about 1930. The hotel and the buildings around it were torn down in 1932 to make way for the port. Before the rebuild, archaeologists surveyed the ground with radar and dug test units, and they found building foundations, what may have been a well, and household artifacts of the kind a hotel leaves behind. So much had been disturbed by the 1932 demolition, the port's construction and later buried utilities that the state preservation office agreed in August 2024 that the hotel site was not eligible for the National Register and that no more digging was needed.

The crossing's history goes back further than the hotel. In May 1870, two days after a Fenian force was beaten at Eccles Hill to the east, another group of Fenians crossed into Quebec at Trout River. The 50th Canadian Battalion, the Montreal Volunteer Artillery and the British 69th Regiment drove them back across the border, and there were no Canadian casualties. For more of the area's past, see the Malone history museum guide.

The Canadian building across the road

The Canadian customs and immigration building at Trout River dates from 1932, built to designs from the architectural division of Canada's Department of Public Works under its chief architect, Thomas W. Fuller. It is a small Tudor Revival building, a story and a half, with a prominent gabled roof, dormers, stucco walls set off by dark half-timbering, and leaded glass windows. Canada recognized it as a federal heritage building on March 21, 1991, and it is the larger of the two Tudor Revival customs buildings of its kind still standing.

Both buildings went up as car traffic across the border grew in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and both are now protected historic buildings on either side of the line; from the American station, the Canadian one is visible to the northeast. The GSA's design for the American side keeps that relationship through the new wing's placement, materials and massing. The Canadian building had its own exterior renovation in 2025, supervised by a heritage conservation specialist as Canadian rules require for designated buildings, and the Canadian port stayed open throughout.

The hours were cut first

The closure followed a cut in hours that drew protests on both sides of the line. On November 18, 2024, CBP announced it would shorten hours at 38 northern ports, and the Canada Border Services Agency announced changes at 35 of its own. From January 6, 2025, Trout River and the Chateaugay crossing, called Herdman on the Canadian side, went from 24 hours a day to 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. in both directions. The Canadian agency said almost all of the affected ports handled an average of two or fewer cars or trucks an hour during the hours being cut, and that travelers had another crossing within 100 kilometers.

The reaction came quickly:

• Elgin's director general, Guylaine Carrière, told The Gleaner, the Chateauguay Valley's community newspaper, "It will have a major impact on a lot of the families here in Elgin." She said the Canadian agency told her a procedure would be set up so first responders could cross at any hour in an emergency.
• Farm families who cross to work fields in New York worried about late nights at harvest. A woman whose husband farms land in Chateaugay and Burke said a detour to Hemmingford or Dundee on a tractor would be "insane."
• State Senator Dan Stec said, "You can't have a part-time border!" Governor Kathy Hochul asked CBP to reverse the decision.
• Jeremy Evans, chief executive of the Franklin County Economic Development Corporation, said the changes would fall hardest on residents and small businesses in rural border communities, and pointed out that they touched two of the county's three crossings along its 30-mile line with Quebec.
• Claude DeBellefeuille, the member of Parliament for Salaberry-Suroît, asked the public safety minister to reconsider and suggested a 10 p.m. closing. Her office collected more than 50 statements from residents, and the councils of Elgin and the town of Huntingdon passed resolutions against the cut.

The Canadian agency answered in January 2025 that the decision stood. DeBellefeuille's party, the Bloc Québécois, had asked the agency for an hour-by-hour count of crossings at Herdman and Trout River, and she said the numbers ran above the two-vehicle-an-hour average. The new hours took effect on schedule, and since then drivers heading south in the evening have had to go around to Fort Covington or to the ports in Clinton County. The June 2026 closure took away the daytime trip as well.

How much traffic used the port

The GSA's numbers for the port vary by document. Its project page gives yearly averages of 146,000 personal vehicles, 2,000 commercial vehicles and 50,000 pedestrians. Its environmental assessment, using counts for two recent years, gives much lower vehicle numbers: 17,481 personal vehicles and 983 commercial trucks in 2022, and 26,995 personal vehicles and 1,198 trucks in 2023. The same document puts the yearly vehicle crossings at Fort Covington at about 38,500 and at Chateaugay at about 31,500.

Using its own counts, the assessment estimated that sending Trout River's traffic to those two ports, half to each, would raise crossings by about 30 percent at Fort Covington and 37 percent at Chateaugay. It expected the effect to last only through construction, and it expected traffic to move more simply through the port once the new lanes open.

What the closure means for people who live here

For people on the Quebec side who work, shop or see a doctor in Malone, the closure turns a short drive into a detour, and the detour depends on the time of day. These road miles, from OpenStreetMap's road network, run to Alice Hyde Medical Center on Park Street in Malone:

From Ormstown, farther north, the picture changes: the Chateaugay route into Malone, about 31 road miles, is a little shorter than the old one through Trout River, about 32, and Fort Covington is about 49. The detour hurts most close to the line, in Elgin and around the hamlet of Trout River.

At the Franklin County Legislature's meeting on May 7, 2026, County Manager Donna J. Kissane called the closure a hardship for the county, on top of losing round-the-clock service at Trout River and Chateaugay. "It's impacting, I believe, the Canadian travelers, who have to be back at the border before 6 p.m., otherwise you have a long way around," she said. "Extended Chateaugay hours would make a big difference for us." Legislator Andrea M. Dumas of Malone said some people who work in the village live just over the line, among them employees of Alice Hyde Medical Center and teachers. "It's 40 minutes around," she said. Alice Hyde, with its 24-hour emergency department, is also the hospital closest to the cabins, about 10.5 road miles away; see health and safety.

The trip north is unchanged. From Malone, NY 30 still runs straight to the line, and Huntingdon is about 22 road miles away through Trout River whenever the Canadian office is open, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

What it means for guests

For guests driving down from Montreal, the closure matters less in daylight than you might expect. The old road through Trout River was about 78 road miles from downtown to the cabins. The Chateaugay route is about 75, so from 6 a.m. into the late afternoon there is a crossing as short as the old one. Churubusco, about 84 road miles, works until 4 p.m. After that, it is Fort Covington, about 93 road miles, Mooers, about 99, or Champlain, about 101, and evening arrivals have had to go that way since January 2025. How to choose among them by the hour you leave, with the drive timed out, is in Montreal to the cabins, and the route from the city is on the drive from Montreal page.

From the area around Huntingdon, the trip to the cabins grows from about 32 road miles through Trout River to about 35 through Chateaugay, or about 49 through Fort Covington at night.

Going home, Trout River still works northbound. The port is 21 road miles from the cabins, the closest crossing to them, so a Sunday departure that reaches the line before 6 p.m. can use it; to Montreal it is about 78 road miles, against about 75 through Herdman. A day in Montreal works the same way: go up through Trout River in the morning and come back through Chateaugay before 6 p.m., or through Fort Covington or Champlain later; the Montreal day trip guide has the plan. For the documents, the dog form and the food rules at the booth, see crossing the border.

What to watch for

The dates have moved before. In May 2024 a GSA fact sheet expected the construction contract to be awarded in April 2025; it was awarded in April 2026. In April 2024 the agency expected the new port to be working by spring 2027; the current target for substantial completion is May 20, 2028. Treat that date as a target until CBP announces a reopening.

• No reopening date yet. In October 2026, neither CBP nor the GSA had published a date for southbound traffic to resume. The only date on record is the GSA's target for substantial completion.
• A stale CBP page. CBP's own page for the Trout River port, last changed in December 2025, still lists hours of 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and says nothing about the closure. Do not read it as a sign the port is open southbound.
• Chateaugay's hours. Franklin County's manager has said longer hours at Chateaugay would make a big difference while Trout River is closed. In October 2026, CBP's listing still showed 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• The Canadian side. Northbound service depends on the Canada Border Services Agency's office at Trout River, open 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. If those hours change, the trip home changes with them.
• The GSA project page. It was last updated on July 31, 2026, and it carries the project's timeline and status. Its section for local updates was still empty in October 2026.

When to check again

Check the hours before every trip that crosses the border, on CBP's page for the port you plan to use and on the Canadian agency's page for the trip home; the crossing guide is kept current with both. CBP sends bulletins like the one that announced this closure through a free email subscription service. For the project itself, look at the GSA's Trout River page each spring, and again in the spring of 2028 as the target date approaches. The final environmental assessment, with the plans, the traffic counts and the history of the site, is on the GSA's website, and a paper copy is at the Wead Library, 64 Elm Street in Malone.

Until the port reopens southbound, plan arrivals at the cabins around the open crossings. The getting to the cabins guide covers the last miles, and the cabins page has each one's booking link.

Questions

Sources

Facts on this page were checked against these sources in October 2026. Hours, fees and schedules change; confirm before you go.

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2. U.S. General Services Administration gsa.gov/system/files/1Trout%20River%20LPOE_FINAL_EA%20and%20FONSI_Dec%
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4. U.S. General Services Administration gsa.gov/about-gsa/newsroom/former-gsa-regional-news-archive/region-2-n
5. U.S. General Services Administration gsa.gov/about-gsa/newsroom/former-gsa-regional-news-archive/region-2-n
6. U.S. General Services Administration gsa.gov/about-gsa/newsroom/news-releases/gsa-completes-six-sustainable
7. U.S. General Services Administration gsa.gov/system/files/_Trout%20River%20LPOE%20External%20Fact%20Sheet.%
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