The road up from North Duxbury station follows Ridley Brook for three and a half miles, rising through hardwood forest into the eastern shadow of Camel’s Hump before it opens onto a high shelf of cleared land at 1,420 feet. The property at the end of that road has been known by several names over the last century and a half: Callahan’s Farm to the early Long Trail hikers who gathered there before their ascents; Couching Lion Farm to the remarkable man who bought it in 1924 and spent the last fourteen years of his life within its picket fence. Whatever the name, the place has been the eastern gateway to Camel’s Hump for more than a hundred years, and its history is inseparable from the history of the mountain itself.
The name “Couching Lion” is a translation — a recovery, really — of what Samuel de Champlain had called the mountain in 1635: Lion Couchant, the resting lion. By the time Will Monroe bought the farm and restored the old French name to the landscape, it had been known as Camel’s Hump for a century. Monroe preferred Champlain’s version, and Couching Lion Farm was his way of insisting on it.
The Callahans
The farm had been in the Callahan family for approximately sixty years when Monroe acquired it — since roughly 1865, through the Civil War and the railroad era, through the logging of the mountain’s eastern flanks and the great fire of 1903 that burned thousands of acres of newly bare hillside. Frank and Jessie Callahan of Duxbury were the proprietors through the early years of the Long Trail, and they understood before almost anyone else what the trail meant for the farms at the mountain’s foot.
By 1920, when the first Long Trail guidebook listed the property as an access point, the Callahans had already equipped the farm for hikers. A telephone in the house connected visitors with the Camel’s Hump Club’s huts on the upper mountain, allowing them to order meals and reserve lodging before they started out. Automobiles were beginning to find their way up the wagon road from North Duxbury, and a field below the farm buildings provided parking space for those who arrived by car rather than by train. The Callahan Trail — the eastern route up Camel’s Hump, built in 1912 and among the first formal hiking trails on the mountain — departed from the farmhouse and climbed through the birch and spruce forest toward the summit cone.
In September 1923, with automobile traffic growing steadily, the Callahans erected a small toll house on the north side of the farmhouse to collect a modest charge from those using cars to access the trail. The Callahan Farm was becoming an institution — a recognized first stage of any serious ascent of Camel’s Hump from the east.
The Scholar Who Found Vermont
Will Seymour Monroe was born in 1863 in Hunlock, Pennsylvania, in the Wyoming Valley coal country, and he spent the first sixty years of his life accumulating one of the more unusual résumés in American academic life. He attended Stanford University and then went to Europe, studying at the universities of Jena, Paris, and Leipzig before returning to take up a professorship of psychology at the Massachusetts Normal School in Westfield in 1896. After 1909 he taught at the New Jersey State Normal School at Montclair — the institution that eventually became Montclair State University — where he remained for the rest of his teaching career.
Monroe’s academic interests ranged far beyond the classroom. He was an authority on the Czech educational reformer John Amos Comenius and on the American school administrator Henry Barnard; his bibliography of education, published in 1897, was a standard reference work for a generation. But he was also a tireless traveler, and the travel books he produced between 1907 and 1914 reveal a man with an exceptional eye for landscape and culture. Turkey and the Turks (1907), In Viking Land (1908), Sicily, the Garden of the Mediterranean (1909), Bohemia and the Cechs (1910), and Bulgaria and Her People (1914) were popular successes, and some were revised and reissued in new editions as The Spell of Norway, The Spell of Sicily, and The Spell of Bohemia in the early 1920s. He had walked with a saddle bag of bread across the Rilo Mountains from Bulgaria to Macedonia; he knew his way across a continent.
Monroe was also a student of Walt Whitman — a personal acquaintance of the poet’s, in fact, and the compiler of a considerable Whitman collection. In retirement he pursued a projected book he called Walt Whitman and His Contemporaries, making research trips to European libraries in search of material. He was, in short, a man who read voraciously, traveled widely, wrote prolifically, and maintained an almost implausible range of intellectual friendships. He had, as he put it with characteristic self-deprecation, “always been afflicted with hobbies.”
His first sustained encounter with Vermont came through the Long Trail and the Green Mountain Club. He had first hiked Camel’s Hump before the war and returned regularly once the Long Trail began taking shape. Beginning in 1916 — the year that the Green Mountain Club briefly considered disbanding — Monroe led the effort to relocate and rebuild the Long Trail from Camel’s Hump southward to what is now Lincoln Gap, the fifty-mile section that would eventually be named the Monroe Skyline in his honor. It was exacting, unglamorous work: clearing lines through dense forest, negotiating rights of way, organizing volunteer crews, and lobbying the Club’s leadership to extend the trail further with each passing season. Monroe found it entirely congenial. He named the high col below Camel’s Hump’s southern face Montclair Glen, after his home in New Jersey. The Theron Dean Shelter on the Skyline was named for his closest friend, Theron S. Dean of Burlington, who would be one of Monroe’s executors at his death.
Couching Lion Farm
Monroe retired from teaching in 1925, and the previous summer he had purchased from Frank and Jessie Callahan their “home-place and all buildings thereon and land connected therewith situated near the foot of Camel’s Hump” — 102 acres at 1,420 feet, arguably the highest-elevation homestead in the state of Vermont — for the sum of $1,150, with the Callahans reserving rights to crops and hay. On April 1, 1925, he moved in and renamed the place Couching Lion Farm.
It was an unlikely household for a man of Monroe’s literary reputation. He did not own a car; supplies had to be carried the three and a half miles from North Duxbury station on foot or delivered by horse-drawn wagon. Mail was picked up a mile down the road. Water for the house flowed through a system of wooden spouts into a wooden tub. But what Monroe found when he arrived was, by his own account and that of his visitors, something close to paradise.
Stella Miller Neal, visiting in 1932, described her arrival with barely suppressed astonishment: “We had expected the mountain and probably some manner of forlorn farmhouse. We were, however, totally unprepared for the low-hung house almost submerged in shrubbery and flowers, with its walls almost covered with vines. The house fitted its surroundings so completely.” Gravel paths wound through a large circular yard enclosed by a picket fence; a tall lamppost stood at the center; a summer house, a barn, and a spring-fed pond completed the picture.
Inside, books were everywhere, including the kitchen. Monroe had sold his professional library of 5,500 volumes to New York University upon his retirement, but he had brought 2,000 volumes of general literature with him — “to which,” he wrote to a friend, “I am making large additions, and here I have since lived, as crusty old Doctor Johnson, of Boswell fame, once said of himself, ‘in poverty, idleness, and the pride of literature!'” He read modern fiction and poetry, literary history and criticism, and he had, he said, “a bully time of it all.”
Host and Neighbor
During summer and fall Monroe had little time for reading. Up to twenty cars a day filled the parking lot below the farmhouse, their occupants bound for the summit by the Callahan Trail. As the trail departed from Monroe’s doorstep, he was constantly interrupted by strangers — to whom he invariably offered water before they started out, and the use of his telephone if they needed it.
Many New York Section members made free use of their northern “club house,” which could sleep eight to ten people, with additional bunk space in the converted barn that served as a summer annex. The Couching Lion Farm guestbooks — now preserved in the Vermont Historical Society library — record a multitude of visitors over Monroe’s fourteen years at the farm. The most frequent were Judge Clarence P. Cowles of Burlington and his family, and Theron S. Dean, who kept a separate notebook for his visits and jotted down library references he wanted to pursue following his conversations with Monroe. Over several nine-month periods, the number of guests ranged between 149 and 216 — Monroe kept careful count.
The draw was as much Monroe himself as the mountain. One visitor recorded that Monroe “never made a slip of speech.” Another wrote that his “photographic mind retained an amazing quantity of information. For that reason, and because he liked people, he was a rare conversationalist. An evening with him was like exploring the literary and scientific and historical treasures of the ages.” He relished company and good food; one of his specialties was Brunswick stew. When Judge and Mrs. Cowles brought him real rye bread from Burlington, his thank-you letter included a reminiscence about carrying round loaves in his saddlebags across the mountains from Bulgaria to Macedonia, adding that it “keeps excellently.”
After the catastrophic Vermont flood of 1927, Monroe sought out affected neighbors — including the Callahans, from whom he had bought the farm — to offer assistance. His sister Katherine, who lived with him at Couching Lion Farm, set about making sheets “as fast as she can.” Blankets were gathered from Long Trail lodges. For Christmas that year Monroe had his Burlington grocer send gift boxes to eight local families.
Hobbies and Gardens
Monroe acknowledged freely that he had “always been afflicted with hobbies,” and at Couching Lion Farm these multiplied freely. He was a devoted gardener, cultivating wildflowers alongside common garden varieties — sunflowers, pansies, petunias, verbenas. He maintained a California garden and an Alpine garden with plants grown from imported seeds. Roses were a particular passion; one late summer he made ten quarts of Turkish rose petal jam. He was also a systematic planter of trees: Scotch and red pine, Norway and white spruce, European larch. Some of the timber from these plantings was later cut and taken to Mount Mansfield for the reconstruction of Butler Lodge; the state would use the rest for a ranger cabin decades after Monroe’s death.
He was a student of ferns — a rich subject on the eastern slopes of Camel’s Hump — and an attentive birder. But dogs were the consuming passion of his later years. He kept four or five large working breeds at a time: Collies, Shetlands, Saint Bernards, Newfoundlands, Great Pyrenees. He became a licensed authority on working breeds, judged dog shows across the country, served as president of the Great Pyrenees Club of America, and was made honorary president of its British equivalent. The noble sheepdog Richard of Anahassit slept year-round with Monroe on the enclosed porch.
None of the dogs, however, could take the place of Scottie the Collie.
Scottie
Scottie was the child and constant companion Monroe never had, and his death, on October 29, 1929, came within hours of one of Monroe’s most productive days of Whitman research at the British Museum in London. That morning, while Monroe was making notes in the reading room, Scottie had barked a friendly greeting at the mail carrier, sat in the sun by the flagpole for a while, taken a nap on the professor’s couch, and then, suddenly, at noon, was dead — of what Monroe’s friends called, with only a little sentimentality, a broken heart.
Monroe’s friends in the Green Mountain Club debated anxiously how to break the news to him. J. A. Allis sent a telegram to Judge Cowles: “BELIEVE MOST DANGEROUS MONROE LEARN NEWS BY LETTER. FRIEND WILL SEE HIM ON ARRIVAL.” Their concern was fully justified. When the secretary of the London office of Allis’s bank delivered the message to Monroe at the Authors’ Club, “he broke down and sobbed unrestrainedly.” He continued to the Continent as planned — he was not a man who canceled plans — but he was ill and depressed throughout, and in March 1930 he was writing from London to Cowles: “It is quite useless for my friends to upbraid me with sentimentality and to urge me to ‘brace up.’ No one but myself can know the intensity of my grief.”
The anniversary of Scottie’s death was noted in the Couching Lion Farm guestbook for the rest of Monroe’s life. “Our flag at half mast and our heart full of sorrow,” reads one entry. “One year ago today, at noon, the beloved Scottie reached Journey’s End.” When Katherine Monroe died, she was, according to her own wish, buried next to “the sainted Scottie.”
Journey’s End
Monroe died on January 29, 1939, at Mary Fletcher Hospital in Burlington, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage at home five days before. He was seventy-five years old. That February, Theron Dean made a pilgrimage to Couching Lion Farm in the moonlight, recording in the guestbook: “Deep snow. Clear Sunday 2-5-39. Alton Stowell prepared his fine meals. Dogs — Sheltie, Hector, Basque & Alpine well. Sheltie seemed especially lonesome.”
Monroe was buried in the little family cemetery at Couching Lion Farm on May 28, 1939. The Reverend Percy Chandler Ladd of the College Street Congregational Church in Burlington officiated. Judge Cowles read from two Walt Whitman poems that Monroe had chosen himself: “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” and “Song of the Open Road.” In a tribute on behalf of the New York Section of the Green Mountain Club, Laura Woodward Abbott remembered her old friend as “a mighty monarch of the forest.”
The Bequest
Monroe’s last will and testament disposed of Couching Lion Farm with characteristic specificity and generosity. He left it in trust,
to be forever kept, used and maintained as and for a bird sanctuary, game refuge, wild flower, fern, shrub and tree preserve and public park. It is my desire that all lovers of nature be welcome to enjoy the same but more especially that needy (active or retired) teachers and librarians and students of nature be given first opportunity to occupy the house and summer annex. It is also my desire that the property be used for public winter sports. It is also my purpose that the Farm be used as a public approach to Couching Lion, with suitable parking space, picnic grounds, trails across the property, etc.
The executors of the estate were his three closest Green Mountain Club friends — Allis, Cowles, and Dean — who were authorized to convey the property to the State of Vermont if they judged that would best serve Monroe’s intentions. They agonized over the decision through 1939 and 1940, weighing the cost of operating the farm as a year-round not-for-profit institution and comparing it against figures from the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Cold River Camp in Maine. In the end they decided to turn Couching Lion Farm over to the state. By July 1940, Governor George D. Aiken had authorized its acceptance.
Monroe’s vision of a sanctuary for needy teachers and librarians proved impossible to fund. The state accepted the farm but could not sustain it as the residential retreat Monroe had imagined, and over the following decades the farmhouse fell into disrepair. In the early 1970s it was removed due to its poor condition. In 1973 the State of Vermont built a ranger cabin at the trailhead using spruce trees that Monroe had planted in his gardens — a modest replacement for the low-hung house submerged in vines and flowers that Stella Miller Neal had found so startling forty years before. Monroe, his sister Katherine, and several of his beloved dogs lie in the cemetery beside the parking area, marked by a headstone whose inscription — “Teacher, Author, Trail Builder, and Companion and Lover of Dogs” — gives the order in which Monroe himself would have placed those four things. Every hiker who starts up the Monroe Trail today walks past the grave.
Sources
- Long Trail Guide Book 1920 (1920). Green Mountain Club. 15.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1924 (1924). Green Mountain Club. 19.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1924 (1924). Green Mountain Club. 20.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1924 (1924). Green Mountain Club. 24.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1932 (1932). Green Mountain Club. 42.
- Long Trail News 2001 (2001). Green Mountain Club. 18.
- Bazilchuk, Nora. “Monroe and Dean Trails.” Camel’s Hump State Park.. Accessed July 17, 2026. https://www.nasw.org/users/nbazilchuk/Articles/Camel.htm.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 17 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1963. Pp. 47.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 23 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1985. Pp. 67.
- Nuquist, Reidun D, “Couching Lion Farm..” Long Trail News 2010, no. Fall (2001).
- Walter Collins O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. The Riverside Press , 1926. Pp. 229.
- Walter Collins O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. The Riverside Press , 1926. Pp. 249.
- Walter Collins O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. The Riverside Press , 1926. Pp. 243.
- Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999. Pp. 144.
