The Green Mountain Club was only three years into building what would become the Long Trail when it received one of the most consequential early gifts in its history. In 1913 — the same year the Club pushed more than fifty miles of new trail south from Camel’s Hump toward Killington Peak — Miss Emily Dutton Proctor of Proctor, Vermont, contributed $500 to fund the construction of three log lean-to shelters. The shelters went up at Birch Glen, in Breadloaf Glen, and south of Mount Horrid; and with them, the Long Trail gained something it had not yet possessed in any systematic way: dedicated overnight lodging built expressly for hikers.
Emily Dutton Proctor (1869–1948) was the daughter of Redfield Proctor, founder of the Vermont Marble Company, Vermont’s 37th governor, and a United States Senator. Born into considerable wealth, she had spent her early decades traveling between Proctor, Washington, Boston, and Europe in the company of her father’s political world, but by the early twentieth century she had redirected her energies entirely toward philanthropy. By the time she made her gift to the Green Mountain Club, she was already supporting Dr. Charles Caverly’s campaign against tuberculosis, financing a proposed sanatorium in Pittsford, and organizing health and literacy programs for the immigrant marble workers of her hometown. The GMC shelters were one thread in a much larger pattern: she would go on to donate $25,000 to polio research in 1914, fund dental clinics for rural children, endow foreign-language book collections for immigrant families, and — in the early 1920s — contribute the funds to build the Long Trail Lodge in Sherburne Pass. A 1949 remembrance in the Rutland Herald would call her "the most generous donor Vermont has ever had." The Proctor family were, by one historian’s account, "the GMC’s wealthiest patrons" in the trail’s early years.
The Lodge at Breadloaf Glen
The shelter that bore her name in Breadloaf Glen was probably among the first official Long Trail shelters built specifically to accommodate hikers — a distinction that set it apart from the improvised lumber camp buildings and farm outbuildings that otherwise served as way stations in the trail’s earliest years. The structure was a log lean-to, simple in design, fitted with a stove, cooking utensils, and pole bunks for twelve to fifteen persons.
Its setting, however, was anything but simple. Walter Collins O’Kane, writing in his 1926 guide Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains, described the approach: the trail "zigzags down steeply, makes a long circuit to the north and then to the southeast into the valley of the New Haven River, where it reaches Emily Proctor Lodge, a Club shelter beautifully situated in a deep glen near the foot of a rocky cascade." The 1928 guidebook confirmed it: the lodge sat "at a waterfall in a deep gorge on the headwaters of the New Haven River." A photograph from 1918, preserved in the GMC Burlington Section’s historical records, shows the lean-to in its wooded glen — rugged, low-slung, and entirely at home in the hemlock shade of that enclosed valley.
Access to the lodge required a modest detour from the main trail. The shelter lay in Breadloaf Glen approximately eight-tenths of a mile from the Long Trail, reached by a side path that diverged from the approach trail out of South Lincoln and followed Mr. Johnson’s lumber road into the glen. It was a short enough walk to encourage visits from hikers making their way along the ridge above, but enough of a descent — the trail dropped steeply before circling north and east into the gorge — that the lodge felt genuinely removed from the mountain route overhead.
Stranded by a Trail Relocation
As the Long Trail system matured through the 1920s, its routing was refined. The descent into Breadloaf Glen that had given the first Emily Proctor Lodge its reason for existing — a dramatic switchback into the gorge of the New Haven — was eventually eliminated when the Long Trail was relocated to a line that no longer dipped into the valley. The change left the lodge off the main trail entirely.
The Club addressed this directly in the Long Trail News of June 1928: "We are informed that although the Long Trail has been re-located so that it does not now descend into the gorge where the Emily Proctor Lodge is located, there is no intention of abandoning this lodge or making it inaccessible. The lodge will be kept in repair by the Lake Pleiad Section and the trail leading to it will be kept clear, so those wishing to visit this picturesque spot can do so by making the detour." The commitment reflected genuine affection for the site: Breadloaf Glen was not an incidental stopping point but a place of genuine beauty, and the Club was not yet ready to let it slip into disuse simply because the trunk route had moved on.
In 1929, the Middlebury Section reported that branch trails leading to the lodge would be put in good condition and the lodge itself repaired — evidence that maintenance continued, and that hikers still made the detour to the waterfall gorge. Guidebooks through the early 1930s continued to list the shelter.
Twenty-Six Years in the Glen
The first Emily Proctor Lodge served hikers for approximately twenty-six years, a respectable span for a structure of its era and construction. A second Emily Proctor Lodge was built in the spring of 1938, also in Breadloaf Glen, intended to replace the original. The new lodge’s first season was cut short dramatically: that October, the catastrophic New England Hurricane of 1938 struck Vermont with devastating force. The road to South Lincoln was obliterated, a massive mudslide stripped the glen’s mossy cliffs to bare rock, and the flood waters that backed up behind the debris dam lifted the new lodge from its foundation and deposited it in a new location. The structure survived, was repaired, and continued in limited use — but its story belongs to a later chapter.
The first lodge, its quarter-century of service already behind it, ceased to be used by 1939. The gorge of the New Haven, with its cascade and its hemlock shade, remained — as O’Kane had found it — beautiful. The shelter built to serve that beauty simply passed away.
Sources
- The Crumb, 1921. 4.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1924 (1924). Green Mountain Club. 30.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1928 (1928). Green Mountain Club. 30.
- "Long Trail News." , no. June (1928).
- Long Trail News 1929 (1929). Green Mountain Club. 1.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1930 (1930). Green Mountain Club. 25.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1932 (1932). Green Mountain Club. 37.
- Walter Collins O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. The Riverside Press , 1926. Pp. 431.
- Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999. Pp. 17.
