As Clarence P. Cowles of Burlington and Craig O. Burt of Stowe were scouting the first sections of the Long trail south from the Summit House on Mount Mansfield towards Bolton they followed old logging roads toward the summit of Mount Admiral Clarke, one of Bolton Mountain’s outlying peaks they discovered the remains of old lumber camps. In the words of Dr. Lewis Paris, who later set down the history of those pioneering years: "Two miles down the trail an abandoned lumber camp known as Camp No. 4 offers shelter, and two miles below this are found the mill and buildings of a lumber company now closed."
Th When Cowles and Burt returned in June and July of 1911 to continue scouting the trail over the shoulder of Mount Clark to the summits of Mayo and Bolton, and down through the forested ridges to the Winooski River, they recognized the old building’s value. As Laura and Guy Waterman later described in Forest & Crag (1989), the scouts "took over one of its buildings as a shelter, calling it Dunsmoor Lodge — the first of what was to become a system of shelters along the entire length of the trail."
A Gift to the Section
The lodge that had begun as an opportunistic appropriation of an abandoned lumber camp took on a more formal character in the years that followed. The shelter appears as "Camp No. 4" in the first edition of the Green Mountain Club’s guidebook in 1917, reflecting its rough origins. By 1918 or 1919, however — the record is slightly uncertain — a proper lodge had been built at or near the site, apparently through the efforts of the newly organized Lake Pleiad Section, which provided bunks and a stove.
Whatever its precise construction history, the lodge was formally made a gift to the Burlington Section in 1919 by Mr. and Mrs. Ralph W. Dunsmoor, active members of the Section, and it was their name that the shelter would carry. The Burlington Free Press reported on July 11, 1919 that "Mr. and Mrs. Ralph W. Dunsmoor of the Burlington Section of the Green Mountain Club have recently built a new lodge on Bolton Mountain as their gift to the Club. It is on the Long Trail, 6-1/4 miles north of the Bolton Village and commands a beautiful view of valley and mountains."
The lodge was situated a few minutes’ walk beyond the site of the old lumber camp, at a point approximately 5⅔ miles north of Bolton Village and 1.2 miles from the summit of Bolton Mountain. The 1920 guidebook described it as "an open camp with stove, simple cooking utensils and bunks, permanent water being found in two brooks within 150 yards." It offered sleeping space for twelve. Walter Collins O’Kane, writing in his 1926 guide Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains, noted both the shelter’s modest hospitality and its setting: the lodge sat with "a beautiful view to the south toward Camel’s Hump," the great rounded summit across the valley of the Winooski. Below the lodge, the path followed an old logging road down the valley of Joiner Brook toward the river.
One longtime member, referred to in Burlington Section records only as "He-Who-Remembers (R.B.)," recalled a distinctive architectural curiosity: the lodge possessed a front section that could be lifted up to form a roof over a patio arrangement — an ingenious feature, and one that set Dunsmoor Lodge apart from the more conventional lean-tos and open camps being built elsewhere on the trail system.
Trouble and Decline
The lodge’s situation had begun to deteriorate by the early 1920s. The land around Dunsmoor Lodge remained active timber country, and the shelter’s presence was increasingly unwelcome. By 1923, Mr. Bryant, the State Forester, was advising the Burlington Section to relocate the lodge or remove it from the area altogether: it had become a fire hazard to his lumbering operations, he argued, and its continued presence put both the building and the surrounding timber at risk.
The Section did not act immediately, but the trajectory was set. The supplement to the sixth edition of the Long Trail Guidebook (1927) offered a sobering assessment: "Lodge is in poor condition but affords shelter. Owing to objection on the part of the owner of the land, it will not be repaired. At some later date a new lodge will be located nearer Bolton." The landowner’s opposition had made maintenance impossible; Dunsmoor Lodge was effectively condemned by circumstance if not by formal decision.
E. P. Dickinson, writing in the seventh edition guidebook of 1928, confirmed that the camp had fallen into poor condition, and noted that a replacement — the new Bolton Lodge, then under construction — would supersede it entirely.
The Replacement: Bolton Lodge
In 1928, the Burlington Section completed what would become one of the most admired shelters on the northern Long Trail. Built under the supervision of Dr. E. G. Twitchell and Ernest E. Smith on what was called the Old Coe Brass Company property, some 3½ miles from Bolton station and approximately two miles south of Dunsmoor Lodge, the new Bolton Lodge was designed in deliberate contrast to the roughness of its predecessor. Its builders modeled it after the cottages of Wales and Ireland: four feet of cobblestone at the base, white stucco above, a four-sided roof with round corners. It was a closed lodge — weathertight in a way that no converted lumber camp could be — and was considered one of the finest structures on the entire trail. From its site in an old clearing, it offered its own fine outlook toward Camel’s Hump.
Dunsmoor Lodge lingered on in diminished form for a few more years. It was probably not used after 1932.
Sources
- Burlington Section Records. 1910. Green Mountain Club Burlington Section.
- Burlington Section Records. 1910. Green Mountain Club Burlington Section.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1922 (1922). Green Mountain Club. 15.
- Long Trail Guide Book (Supplement). 6th Edition ed. Green Mountain Club, 1927.
- Long Trail Guide Book (Supplement). 6th Edition ed. Green Mountain Club, 1927.
- Long Trail Guide Book (Supplement). 6th Edition ed. Green Mountain Club, 1927.
- Long Trail News 1928 (1928). Green Mountain Club. 2.
- "Long Trail News." , no. February (1975).
- Laura and Guy Waterman. Forest & Crag. 1989.
- Walter Collins O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. The Riverside Press , 1926. Pp. 279.
- Walter Collins O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. The Riverside Press , 1926. Pp. 415.
- Walter O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. 1926.
- Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999. Pp. 37.
