The First Shelters
When James Taylor cut the first section of trail from the top of Mount Mansfield to Nebraska Notch, he started at the Mount Mansfield Summit Hotel. Meanwhile in southern Vermont, the US Forest Service laying the trail along old logging roads that passed by old lumber camps, private cabins, inns, and hiker-friendly farms. Pre-dating the trail itself, these well-known rest stops where marked in the first edition of the “Long Trail Guidebook”, published in 1917.
Hotels and farmers helped plug the gaps between camps. Some locals gained great reputations for their hospitality. Mrs. Frank Beane of Beane’s Farm was featured in the early guidebook as a good place to get a home-cooked meal, stock up on maple sugar, and rent a room for the night. The Brush Home in Bolton was also a hiker favorite. Not only did Mrs. Brush feed and house many a hungry hiker but ferried them across the Winooski River in her rowboat.
The conditions of these sites varied greatly. Hikers could find themselves seeking shelter in Patch Camp, an inhabitable hovel on the side of Whiteface Mountain one night, and then several days later, dinning in the Bread Loaf Inn, a fancy hotel owned by Joseph Battell, Vermont’s richest citizen.
The GMC set about repairing some the worst, replacing roofs, installing stoves, adding bunks, and supplying cooking utensils. Near Griffith, a former lumber camp, bunks were added to an old charcoal kiln and christened “Kiln Camp.”
Herbert Wheaton Congdon and men at the Battell Lodge, 1914
This hodgepodge collection of inns, farms, abandoned buildings, hunting camps and private cabins proved adequate for early LT hikers, but as time passed, the trail lengthened, and the hikers increased, the problems became obvious. Private camps like Noyes Pond where often closed when occupied by the owners. Also, there was no formal system for maintaining these shelters. After Joseph Battell opened his lodge to hikers, it took only a few years before looters, vandals and excessive use reduced it to ruins. Finally, hiker friendly farms couldn’t be relied upon forever. After the death of her husband, Mrs. Beane opened a store in town and closed the Beane Farm to hikers. If the Long Trail were to have reliable shelters, there would have to be a formal system to build, manage, and maintain them.
The Start of Shelter System
The first official GMC shelters were a gift from Emily Proctor, the daughter of Redfield Proctor, Vermont’s 37 th Governor. A resident of Proctor Vermont, she worked at the family business, the Vermont Marble Company, but she was also a dedicated social reformer. She used her money and social status to promote women’s suffrage, public education, libraries, immigrants’ rights, and the creation of public spaces like the Long Trail.
In 1913, Emily donated the funds for three log lean-tos: Birch Glen Camp, Bread Loaf Glen, and a third south of Mount Horrid. This was the kickstart for a what would become a long tradition of shelter construction. Today, the Emily Proctor Shelter, and Emily Proctor Trail are named in her honor.
Birch Lodge from the trail to Beane’s Farm, 1917
Even before the Long Trail was completed in 1930, some GMC members turned their attention to shelter building. As early as 1913, Fred Mould, who owned a granite business in Morrisville, began converting an old logging camp into one of the first GMC camps called Shattuck Lodge. Mould supported the GMC north of Mount Mansfield by blazing trails, building shelters, and funding the Long Trail Patrol. The shelters help build include Whiteface Shelter, Sterling Pond Lodge, Barrows Camp, and French Camp.
Quoted as saying ‘I hope to die on the Long Trail’, Fred Mould did just that, passing away at the age of 80, bearing a 40-pound pack, on a hike to Shattuck Lodge. Before he died, Mould would see the responsibility of the trail he built pass to the newly formed Sterling Section, with his son Henry as President.
Shelter, Camp, or Lodge?
In 1928, the GMC took inventory of its holdings and reported in The Long Trail News:
The Club is now maintaining about twenty-six camps. These, with eleven farmhouses and hotels at which meals and lodging may be obtained, provide comfortable accommodations at intervals of from three to seven miles, except in five instances where the distance between camps is about eleven miles. The camps are for the most part of the open front type, equipped with bough beds, stoves and cooking utensils, with accommodations for from four to sixteen hikers. Four of the camps are of a more permanent construction and are closed in. Caretakers are in charge of these. The Long Trail Lodge, located at Sherburne Pass near Rutland, is much the largest and most pretentious in design and equipment. This Lodge can comfortably accommodate about thirty people and is unique among the mountain homes of the mountaineering clubs of this country. Regular meals are served during four months of the summer, the bedrooms are very comfortable, and throughout the entire construction, a most pleasing attractive forest atmosphere has been preserved.
Barrows Camp
Enclosed, open-sided, square, round, built from logs, lumber, stones, and metal, these twenty-six sites lacked not just design standards, but naming conventions as well. The terms “camp”, “lodge”, and “shelter” were applied capriciously. A camp one year could be called a lodge the next. Confusion and consternation grew until 1934, when the Committee on Requirements for Long Trail Buildings issued its official decree:
A shelter is a rough, open face building of the Adirondack type, of dimensions as stated, to accommodate 6 people at most. It has no stove or other equipment but has an open fireplace in front for cooking and heat. The shelter is recommended for an overflow near much used camps and lodges also where the terrain is unusually rough and the distance between two of the present stations seems long, and to accommodate those who want to sleep in closer contact with the out-of-doors.
A camp is larger than a shelter and more pretentious. It is of the closed-open type with windows and has wooden shutters by adjusting which it can be used either closed or open. It should have a stove, table, benches, and a wooden floor.
Roundtop Shelter
Taft Lodge
A lodge is a larger and more luxurious building. It is most useful in those parts of the Trail that are popular and easily accessible by motor. It should accommodate at least 16 persons and should be equipped with stove, table, benches, cooking utensils, dishes, etc., often with a fireplace, plenty of windows, and in some cases screened.
Tenting Areas are a fourth and less ambiguous site designation. Easy to build, easy to remove, they are just that: areas for tents. Tenting areas come and go as needed. Few last long enough to be counted in the canon of the Long Trail shelter system. The three permanent tenting areas directly on the Long Trail are Twin Brooks, Little Rock Pond, and Griffith Lake. They provide reliable water sources, privies, fire-rings and raised tent platforms to hikers.
The Adirondack Shelter
In 1937 Appalachian Trail Conference Chairman Myron Avery announced the completion of the Appalachian Trail from Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. This marks the point where the ATC turned its attention from trail blazing to trail maintenance and building the part of Benton MacKaye’s plan that envisioned a series of “Shelter Camps” along the trail.
These shelters were easily constructed from nearby stones, and peeled hardwood logs. The American Chestnut was the preferred tree due to its durability and abundance. That changed after the chestnut blight decimated the species. the Adirondack style is characterized by a long, steeply sloping roof. A fire-ring could be placed at the entrance to direct heat and light into the shelter. An empty interior minimized maintenance, and the lack of privacy discouraged vandalism, squatting, and other bad behaviors. Today, the best example of an Adirondack Shelter is the Emily Proctor Shelter near Bread Loaf Mountain.
Emily Proctor Shelter
The Common Wood Frame
Eventually the peeled logs of the Adirondack Shelters were replaced shelters with wooden frames. They borrowed the simplicity of the Adirondack, but the use of commercially available lumber meant the pieces could be pre-cut and partially assembled before being ported to the site. This early form of prefab construction helped control costs and sped up construction. These shelters didn’t require horses to haul logs to the construction site, they could be ported in on the backs of young volunteers.
Adopted by the US Forest Service, these cookie-cutter shelters quickly dominated the AT and the southern LT running through the Green Mountain National Forest.
Inu at Cloudland Shelter, 2023
Buchanan Camps
When conservationist, author, and AT-hall-of-famer Ed Garvey passed through Vermont on his thru hike in the early 1970’s, he described the GMC as one of the ‘buildingest” organizations in the entire AT system. That well-deserved description is the result of efforts that started 40 years earlier when the Long Trail Patrol was formed.
In 1930, when Fred Mould was retiring from years of trail and shelter building, Roy Buchanan, his brother, and son Chet were scouting the last section of the Long Trail. From Jay Peak to the Quebec border, these ten missing miles irritated Buchanan, because as he put it, he was “tired of reading about a trail which went almost from Massachusetts to Canada”.
Soon after completing the Long Trail, Buchanan founded the Long Trail Patrol, the first paid trail crew. GMC President Mortimer R. Proctor donated a truck to help with patrol. It is adorned with painted arrows, labelled “Long Trail Patrol No. 1”, and was equipped with a mattress, so that it can be used as a bedroom at night.
A soft spoken UVM professor, Buchanan stood at 5’2”. His Louis Puffer described him as having his legs worn down from hiking. Not shy about enlisting his sons to help on work trips, he was known for carrying the 2-year-old son, Andy, in a basket strapped to his back. For thirty years, Roy Buchanan headed the Long Trail Patrol, tackling the biggest trail projects and constructing 37 trail shelters.
Roy Buchanan in the 1st Long Trail Patrol Truck
Corridor monitor Ben Gabos at Parker Camp, a classic Buchanan Shelter
Buchanan camps are distinct from other LT shelters. All share a common DNA: easily constructed, small, four-sided shacks containing with two sets of bunks with a table between them. The lower bunks are extended and serve as benches for the table. The most distinctive feature is the wooden window shutter that can be lowered and locked to serve as a table on the outside. With a design borrowed from old lumber camps, these iconic constructions are the epitome of the “old Vermont camp”. While most have disappeared, a few Buchanan Camps still exist. Hazen’s Notch, Tillotson, and Jay Camp are among the best examples and still sport the classic wooden window-table.
Post and Beam
Stratton Pond Shelter 1999
Post and Beam is an old construction style typically associated with barns. This style gained popularity in Vermont in the 1990’s as a style of home construction. A typical Post and Beam consists of a timber frame joined by mortise and tenon joints, fastened by wooden pegs. The frame rests upon cement piers and wood planks are added to create walls and floors. The technique produces a rustic effect with open spaces that easily supports the porches and lofts.
Veteran shelter builders Laurel and Erik Tobiason were the first to build a true post and beam shelter in 1999 at Stratton Pond. The large porch, open interior and reverse loft proved an instant hit with both and through hikers. Buoyed by their success, the Tobiasons went on to build more post and beam shelters: Churchill Scott in 2002 and Bromley in 2003.
Two years after the completion of the shelter at Stratton Pond, farmer and thru-hiker, Tom Abbott walked into the GMC headquarters looking to donate a shelter he had built from white pines he had cut on his New Hampshire farm. A post and beam lean-to, that shelter would replace the old Laura Woodward Shelter. Abbott went on to build the Lost Pond shelter in 2002 and the Rolston’s Rest shelter in 2005. Abbott died on his farm, one week after the completion of Rolston’s Rest.
Of the 14 Long Trail shelters built since Stratton Pond, 11 have used post and beam construction. In 2023 three new shelters were built: Stratton View, Seth Warner, and Sunrise. All were post and beam.
