Emily Proctor Shelter

In the summer of 1960, the Long Trail Patrol — the Green Mountain Club’s paid professional trail crew, founded in 1931 by Roy Buchanan to maintain the trail and its facilities — arrived in the Bread Loaf area under the leadership of crew chief Harris Abbott. The old Bread Loaf Shelter was torn down. Using logs cut from the surrounding forest under a permit from the United States Forest Service, Abbott’s crew built a new Adirondack-type open shelter on the same footprint. It was the style of construction familiar throughout the Long Trail system: a three-sided log structure with a sloping roof, open face toward the trail, sleeping platform raised off the ground, fitted with wire bunks for six to eight persons. A brook twenty feet to the south provided water.

The club named the new shelter the Emily Proctor Shelter. As the Long Trail News reported at the time, it was so called "in honor of Miss Emily Proctor for whom a shelter had been named very early in GMC history." Emily Proctor had died in 1948, leaving an estate of approximately $500,000 divided among family, friends, and the institutions she had supported throughout her life. She had not lived to see this second structure carry her name, but the naming was a deliberate act of institutional memory: the Green Mountain Club knew what Emily Proctor had done for the trail in its founding years, and chose to keep that name on the mountain.

The new shelter appeared in the Long Trail Guide Book’s 16th edition (1960) on page 3, and was listed again in the 17th edition (1963) on page 42. The 19th edition (1968) noted the wire bunks. Within a decade the shelter had become a reliable waypoint on the forty-seven-mile wilderness section between Mad River Glen near Granville and the Middlebury College Bread Loaf campus road.

The Breadloaf Wilderness

The shelter’s landscape changed legally as well as physically over the following decades. In 1984, Congress passed the Vermont Wilderness Act, which designated eight wilderness areas within the Green Mountain National Forest. Among them was the area surrounding the Emily Proctor Shelter, designated the Breadloaf Wilderness — a name honoring both the mountain and the literary association that had made the area famous. Expanded by the New England Wilderness Act of 2006, the Breadloaf Wilderness grew to 24,986 acres, making it the largest wilderness area in Vermont. The Long Trail traverses approximately 17.3 miles through its interior.

The designation was a mark of protection and a practical constraint simultaneously. Under the Wilderness Act, no motorized vehicles or power tools may be used within a designated wilderness area. For the Green Mountain Club, this meant that any future work at the Emily Proctor Shelter — repairs, restorations, supply deliveries — would have to be accomplished entirely on foot, by hand, over rough and often wet terrain. Helicopters, trucks, and chainsaws were not available. The wilderness designation would shape every subsequent chapter of the shelter’s maintenance history.

Rebuilding and Renewal

In 1983, the shelter was rebuilt. The original 1960 structure, after more than twenty years of hard use by Long Trail through-hikers and section hikers, had deteriorated enough to require full reconstruction. The rebuilt shelter retained the Adirondack open-face character of the original. Later guide book editions revised the capacity slightly downward to five persons — a number that reflects the more conservative estimates of comfortable overnight occupancy that the club adopted as trail use intensified.

The Emily Proctor Trail, a side trail connecting the shelter to U.S. Forest Service Road 201, provides the primary access route. The trail’s name honors the same patron as the shelter, giving Emily Proctor a modest but durable double presence in the cartography of this corner of Vermont.

In 2021, the Green Mountain Club undertook its most significant work at the shelter in decades. In a record field season made possible in part by COVID-19 delays from the prior year, the club’s professional crews "fully restored" the Emily Proctor Shelter and built a new, universally accessible moldering privy to replace the old pit privy at the site. The restoration required substantial material: lumber, roof shingles, and heavy structural timbers had to be carried entirely on foot into the wilderness, since power tools and vehicles are prohibited under the Wilderness Act. Among those who made it possible were volunteers from the Middlebury Congregational Church Youth Group, who carried timbers weighing up to eight hundred pounds along the narrow and rugged trail to the shelter site. Members of the Vermont Air and Army National Guard also participated in the volunteer carry-in. The work was directed by Keegan Tierney, the club’s Director of Field Programs, and coordinated with U.S. Forest Service staff including Seth Coffey and Philip Macaskill. The new moldering privy — one of seven built along the Long Trail system that season — uses a slow-composting design that is more sanitary and more sustainable than the pit privies it replaced.

The Shelter Today

The Emily Proctor Shelter stands at 44.0015°N, 72.9321°W, in the Breadloaf Wilderness of the Green Mountain National Forest. Water is available from a brook twenty feet to the south along the Long Trail. The Emily Proctor Trail provides access from USFS Road 201 to the west. The shelter is the principal overnight facility in the long wilderness stretch between Lincoln Gap to the north and Brandon Gap to the south — one of the more remote passages on Vermont’s Long Trail.

The name on the shelter belongs to a woman who lived in the valley below these ridges, who organized tuberculosis clinics and dental programs and immigrant libraries, and who in 1913 or 1914 gave the Green Mountain Club five hundred dollars and asked them to build three lean-tos so that other people could spend the night in the mountains she admired. More than a century later, hikers still sleep in one of them.

Sources