The community known as Jerusalem — formally South Starksboro, but universally called by the biblical name in local usage — sits in the southeastern corner of Starksboro on Baldwin Creek, roughly nine miles northeast of Bristol by the road that descends from the Green Mountain ridgeline into the Champlain Valley lowlands. It is an old community: the 1886 History of Addison County describes it as home to stave mills, a rake factory, grist mills, and saw mills by the mid-nineteenth century. The surrounding farms were among the most remote in Addison County, pressed against the steep western slope of the main Green Mountain ridge and connected to Bristol and the valley towns by roads that followed the creek drainage.
South Starksboro was additionally notable for the density of its Quaker community. The History of Addison County notes that "nearly all the inhabitants of South Starksboro at that time were Friends" — members of the Society of Friends who had settled the village over several generations. Quaker households had a recognized tradition of welcoming travelers and offering hospitality without ostentation, a cultural orientation well suited to the informal lodging economy that Long Trail hikers would later come to rely on.
The Follansbee Family in Starksboro
The Follansbee family was established in Starksboro by the mid-nineteenth century. Genealogical records place David D. Follansbee (born c. 1849 in Starksboro, died 1922) among the town’s farming families, the son of William Follansbee and Anna C. Gove. The Follansbee name does not appear in the 1886 History of Addison County’s survey of prominent Starksboro families, suggesting the family occupied the middling rank of working farm households rather than the leadership positions that attracted biographical notice — exactly the kind of family whose farm might offer quiet, reliable hospitality to travelers without calling attention to itself in the public record.
Edward Follansbee, for whom the farm is named in Long Trail sources, was most likely a family member of the same Starksboro Follansbee line — perhaps a son or nephew of David D. Follansbee, operating the family farm in the years immediately following the Long Trail’s establishment through the region. Without more specific genealogical documentation, the precise relationship cannot be confirmed, but the coincidence of surname, town, and era is strong.
The Farm as Long Trail Service Point
The first edition of the Green Mountain Club’s Long Trail Guide Book, published in 1917, listed the Follansbee Farm as a place where travelers could obtain food and lodging. The phrasing — "food and lodging can usually be obtained" — is characteristic of the early guide book’s listings of informal farm hospitality, as distinct from commercial establishments. The qualifier "usually" reflects the realities of farm life: whether a family could accommodate hikers depended on the season, the family’s own workload, and whether anyone happened to be away. This was not a hotel or inn operating on a schedule but a working farm whose household extended hospitality as a secondary enterprise.
The access route to the farm from the east — and from the Long Trail — ran via a lumber road westward from Glen Ellen, the small community at the base of the mountain corridor now associated with the Sugarbush ski area’s western terrain. For hikers traveling the Long Trail in the years before Glen Ellen Lodge was built in 1933, the route down through the timber country to Jerusalem was the natural exit from the ridgeline toward lodging and a meal. The Follansbee Farm, positioned at or near the junction of the mountain road and the community of Jerusalem, offered the first hospitality available after the descent.
The farm’s role was that of a way station rather than a destination: it caught hikers coming off the mountain who needed food and a bed before continuing their journey, in much the same way that farmhouses along the stage roads of the previous century had served travelers between towns.
Prices and the Farm Economy in 1929
By August 1929, when E.P. Dickinson made his way through the corridor and noted his experience in the guide book, the Follansbee Farm was charging fifty cents for lunch and fifty cents for dinner. These prices place the farm squarely within the rural Vermont farm lodging economy of the late 1920s. In a period when commercial boarding houses in Vermont’s mountain towns might charge a dollar or more for a room and meals, the farm’s fifty-cent meal prices reflected the informality and modesty of the operation — home-cooked food served at the family table, not a restaurant meal. The fact that lunch and dinner were priced identically suggests a standard offering rather than a tiered menu.
Dickinson’s note also implies that the farm was still active in August 1929 and that he considered it reliable enough to report in the guide book — twelve years after the first listing, the Follansbee Farm remained a known and functioning point in the Long Trail’s informal support network.
The End of the Farm Era
The construction of Glen Ellen Lodge in 1933 by the Long Trail Patrol fundamentally changed the support infrastructure for this section of the Long Trail. The new lodge provided purpose-built accommodation on the ridge itself — bunks, stove, and water — making the descent to the Follansbee Farm unnecessary for most hikers. The lodge also marked a broader shift in Long Trail culture: from reliance on the informal hospitality of local farms to the GMC’s own built infrastructure. The farm hospitality model that had sustained trail travel from 1917 onward gave way as the Patrol’s shelter system expanded through the 1930s.
Whether the Follansbee Farm continued to welcome hikers after 1929 is not documented in available sources. The farm does not appear in later editions of the Long Trail Guide Book, and the structure no longer stands.
Sources
- History of Addison County.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1917 (1917). Green Mountain Club. 7.
- Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999. Pp. 145.
