Bolton is a mountainous, irregularly shaped township in the extreme eastern part of Chittenden County, Vermont, bounded on the north by Underhill, on the east by the Washington County towns of Waterbury and Duxbury, on the south by Huntington, and on the west by Richmond and Jericho. The 1886 History of Chittenden County described it as a place of "high hills and rocky ravines, mountains and gorges." Part of Camel’s Hump (4,088 feet), one of the highest and most distinctive peaks of the Green Mountains, lies within Bolton’s borders. So do Bolton Mountain, Bone Mountain, Stimson’s Mountain, and Robin’s Mountain — together giving the town more than twenty peaks over 2,000 feet. Bolton has long been known as "the land of boulders and bears."
The dominant hydrographic feature of the town is the Winooski River, which flows in a westerly arc through the southern part of the township, carving a passage through the mountain range that separates the Champlain Valley from the central Vermont highlands. The old turnpike from Burlington to Montpelier — later Route 2 — followed the north bank of the river through Bolton, and the Central Vermont Railroad kept pace with it on the same alignment, with a station at Bolton that served as the town’s commercial hub through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Bolton Village, where Brush’s Farm was situated, lay along this river corridor. The village was never large — the railroad station, the Bolton Hotel (which had operated since at least the 1840s), a scattering of farm properties along the river bottom — but it occupied the natural crossroads between the east–west movement of the turnpike and railroad and the north–south corridor of the mountains. That geographic position, modest as it was commercially, made it the logical entry point for Long Trail hikers crossing between Camel’s Hump and the mountains to the north.
The Long Trail Through Bolton and the Winooski Problem
The Long Trail enters Bolton from the south on its descent from Camel’s Hump, following the rocky spine of Bamforth Ridge — a route that Will S. Monroe, the retired Rutgers classics professor who devoted himself to rebuilding and relocating the trail through the central Green Mountains between 1916 and 1926, shaped into one of the most scenic and demanding stretches of the entire trail. The resulting thirty miles from Middlebury Gap to the Winooski River, subsequently dubbed the "Monroe Skyline Trail," gained immediate renown as a showcase of Green Mountain ridge-walking.
But at the Winooski River, the ridge-walking stopped. The river, running east to west across the trail’s north–south axis, presented a natural barrier that the earliest trail builders never resolved with permanent infrastructure. The problem was recognized early: the Vermont Legislature appropriated $500 in 1913 specifically "for the purpose of building a foot bridge across the Winooski River in the Town of Bolton … to connect the ‘Long Trail,’ leading from Mount Mansfield to Camel’s Hump." That appropriation — laughably insufficient even then — produced no bridge. Hikers reaching the Winooski had no choice but to cross by other means, and for decades the solution was human: a local family with a rowboat and a willingness to make the trip for a quarter.
The Brush Farm and the Rowboat Ferry
Mrs. C. S. Brush and her farm appear in every known edition of the Long Trail Guide Book from the first (1917, p. 5) through the fourth (1922, p. 15). The guide’s 1921 third edition described the farm as located in Bolton Village, where it provided "good room and board." Mrs. Brush additionally offered to ferry hikers across the Winooski River in her rowboat — a service that was inseparable from the farm’s function as a trail facility and that made the Brush Farm unlike any other hospitality stop in the early Long Trail’s support network.
The ferry fare was twenty-five cents. For a hiker descending from Camel’s Hump who needed to continue north toward Bolton Mountain and eventually Mount Mansfield, the rowboat was the only practical option short of a three-and-a-half-mile road walk downriver to the highway bridge at Jonesville. Mrs. Brush’s service bridged not just the river but the gap between the trail’s southern and northern sections at a point where geography made continuity otherwise impossible.
An iconic photograph in the Green Mountain Club’s archives shows Mrs. Brush at the oars of a small rowboat, crossing the Winooski with a hiker aboard. It is one of the few surviving images of a private trail-support operator from the Long Trail’s earliest era, and it captures the informal, practical character of the farm’s service: not a building or a bridge but a woman in a boat, solving a problem that state government and the club itself had not yet solved.
The farm itself offered the more conventional hospitality that the era’s guide book listings signified — a room, a meal prepared in the family kitchen, shelter from the weather. In the early 1920s, before the Green Mountain Club’s Long Trail Patrol had begun its systematic construction of backcountry shelters, the stretch of the trail through Bolton had nothing purpose-built. The Brush Farm served as the functional base camp for the Winooski corridor, the place where a hiker coming off Camel’s Hump could eat, sleep, and arrange passage north.
Bolton’s Other Trail Hospitality
The Brush Farm was not the only informal hospitality operation serving Long Trail hikers in the Bolton area during the early 1920s. In the eastern part of the town, near Joiner Brook, Etta Huntley operated a boarding house that also served hikers headed over Bolton Mountain toward Stowe or south toward Camel’s Hump. The Huntley boarding house was among the "well-known rest stops" noted in the first edition of the Long Trail Guide Book in 1917. Etta ran the establishment after the death of her husband, Alton "Alta" Huntley, in 1923, until October 1925, when she closed the house and moved to California.
The coexistence of the Brush Farm and the Huntley boarding house reflects the density of informal trail support in Bolton during this period — a small, lightly populated mountain town with multiple households engaged in hosting hikers because the trail passed through and the need was evident. What distinguished the Brush Farm was its position at the river crossing, the service that made it structurally necessary rather than merely convenient.
Duration, Successor Facilities, and the Long Trail After the Ferry
Brush’s Farm appears in the Long Trail Guide Book through at least 1922. After that edition, the farm drops from the record. Whether Mrs. Brush ceased operations or simply ceased being listed is not documented in available sources. The farm’s disappearance from the guide may have coincided with the completion of Bolton Lodge in 1928 — a purpose-built shelter erected by the GMC’s Burlington Section on Edward S. Bryant’s land on Bolton Mountain, about five miles above the Winooski Valley. Bolton Lodge was the first GMC structure on this section of the trail, built of stone and stucco "to discourage porcupines" in the style of a Welsh cottage, with bunks for twelve and views of Camel’s Hump. Its construction represented the same transition — from private farm hospitality to GMC-built infrastructure — that was occurring across the trail system in the late 1920s.
The Winooski ferry, however, did not end when Brush’s Farm left the guide book. Archival records and later accounts indicate that local families continued to row hikers across the river for decades after the Brush era — the May family of Duxbury is documented providing the service, for a toll of twenty-five cents (eventually raised to fifty cents) — until the ferry service finally ended in the 1960s. Without the ferry, hikers were forced to walk the road to Jonesville, wade the river (dangerous), or cross on a railroad trestle (illegal and more dangerous still). The GMC attempted multiple route changes over the following decades to eliminate the problem, but no permanent solution emerged until 2015, when a 224-foot pedestrian suspension bridge — the longest bridge on the Long Trail — was opened across the Winooski east of Jonesville, completing a crossing that had been formally contemplated since 1913.
Sources
- Long Trail Guide Book 1921 (1921). Green Mountain Club. 15.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1921 (1921). Green Mountain Club. 15.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1921 (1921). Green Mountain Club. 15.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1921 (1921). Green Mountain Club. 16.
- Long Trail News 2000 (2000). Green Mountain Club. 14.
- Long Trail News 2000 (2000). Green Mountain Club. 14.
- Long Trail News 2022 (2022). Green Mountain Club. 16.
- Green Mouintain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 1 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1917. Pp. 5.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 2 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1920. Pp. 15.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 4 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1922. Pp. 15.
- Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999. Pp. 143.
