The mountain pass now known as Hazen’s Notch was already a place with a story when the Green Mountain Club arrived in the 1920s. Its name comes from Brigadier General Moses Hazen, who in 1779 commanded the final push to build the Bayley-Hazen Military Road — a route intended to open a path for a Continental Army invasion of Canada during the Revolutionary War. Hazen’s men worked through the summer of that year, extending the road north from Newbury through the hill towns of Cabot, Walden, Hardwick, Greensboro, Craftsbury, Albany, and Lowell, until they reached the narrow gap between Sugarloaf Mountain and Haystack Mountain in what is now Westfield, Orleans County. There, rumors of a British force coming south to stop them caused construction to be abandoned. The road ended in the notch. A stone tablet placed at the height of land by the Orleans County Historical Society in 1903 marks the spot: "Terminus of the Hazen Road, 1779."
The elevation at the height of land is just under 1,800 feet — modest by Green Mountain standards — but the terrain on either side rises sharply, with cliffs running along Sugarloaf to the north and the flanks of Haystack to the south. The notch drains east into the Missisquoi River watershed and west into Wade Brook, which joins the Trout River below. The road through it — now Vermont Route 58 — remained the only crossing of this part of the mountains, threading the same gap that Hazen’s soldiers had pushed through a century and a half earlier.
The Long Trail reached Hazen’s Notch in the late 1920s, as the Green Mountain Club extended its footpath toward the Canadian border. The final section of the Long Trail — from Jay Peak to the Quebec line — was not completed until 1930. In the years just before that completion, the Hazen’s Notch area was among the last and most remote stretches of the trail corridor, far from the more populated sections to the south. Building a shelter here required local knowledge, local labor, and patrons willing to invest in a facility that would serve a thin stream of hikers in a corner of Vermont that most of the state’s residents had never visited.
Fred H. Tucker and Mortimer Proctor
The camp that would become the first overnight shelter in Hazen’s Notch bore the name of Fred H. Tucker of Boston, a longtime member of the Green Mountain Club and one of the trail’s committed early supporters. Tucker was a regular presence in the Vermont mountains during the 1920s and 1930s — a photograph from 1920 shows him and a party on the summit of Mount Abraham in the central Greens — and his financial support helped the club build and maintain shelters at multiple points along the Long Trail. His name would eventually appear on two successive shelters near Killington: Tucker Lodge, built by the Long Trail Patrol in 1938, and the later Tucker-Johnson Shelter (1969), named jointly for Tucker and Otto Johnson of Proctor, who bequeathed $1,000 for its construction. In the northern mountains, however, his name was attached to the first camp in the notch nearly a decade before those Killington shelters existed.
Mortimer Proctor, the other principal donor to the Tucker Camp, represented the third generation of the Proctor family’s engagement with the Green Mountain Club. His grandfather Redfield Proctor had founded the Vermont Marble Company and served as Vermont’s 37th governor; his aunt Emily Dutton Proctor had funded the first three official GMC lean-tos in 1913–14; his mother and he had given the Long Trail Lodge at Sherburne Pass to the club in 1923. Mortimer himself served as GMC president on multiple occasions and would later become Vermont’s 66th governor (1945–1947). His involvement in the Tucker Camp was part of a pattern of Proctor family investment that had helped shape the Long Trail from its earliest years.
Building the Camp, 1928–1929
The Tucker Camp was built in 1928, and the Long Trail News of October 1929 reported its completion. The driving force behind the construction was Clayton J. Fuller of Montgomery, the nearest town of any size to the notch, and the project drew meaningfully on local community support. Residents of Montgomery contributed $50 toward the camp’s costs — a community investment in a hiking facility that would bring outsiders through their mountain gap. Fred Tucker and Mortimer Proctor contributed the balance.
The finished camp was fully enclosed — a design that set it apart from the open Adirondack-style lean-tos that made up much of the Long Trail shelter system at the time. The Long Trail News described it as "an entirely closed cabin, with shutters on two sides," situated five minutes’ walk south of the main road through the notch. Its design borrowed from the functional logic of Vermont’s old lumber camps: a small, weather-tight structure with wooden shutters that could be opened and propped out to serve as exterior tables, combining shelter and utility in a single compact building. The Long Trail Guide Book of 1930 (8th edition) listed the camp as a closed facility with a stove, water, and bunks for eight to ten persons. By the time of the 1935 guide, capacity was given as six with room for additional shelter — a measure, perhaps, of the structure’s aging rather than any intentional change.
The camp’s closed design was particularly well suited to the Hazen’s Notch location. At nearly 1,800 feet in northern Vermont, the notch was subject to hard winters and raw weather even in summer. An open lean-to would have provided limited protection. A fully enclosed cabin with a stove offered genuine refuge. The five-minute walk from the road — half a mile into the trees — kept it separated from casual passersby while remaining accessible enough for hikers arriving on foot.
A Name and a Rename, 1935–1937
By 1935 the camp appeared in the Long Trail Guide as a standard waypoint on the northern section of the trail: "a closed framed camp with a stove, water, and bunks for six, with shelter for more." The Long Trail News of 1935 took note of it as a going facility. It was known to hikers by the name of its principal patron — Fred Tucker’s camp in Hazen’s Notch — and it occupied the only shelter site in that stretch of the trail corridor.
In April 1937, the Green Mountain Club announced a change. The Long Trail News reported: "The former Fred Tucker camp in Hazen’s Notch will remain where it is and will hereafter be known as the Hazen’s Notch Camp." The 11th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1937) reflected the new name. The reasons for the renaming were not stated in the announcement, but the logic of place names may have played a role: as the Long Trail became better established and more widely used, a name that identified the shelter by its location rather than its patron made it easier for hikers unfamiliar with the club’s internal history to find and understand the system. The name change was administrative, not structural — the camp itself remained in place, still on its wooded shelf half a mile south of Route 58.
Decline and Abandonment, 1941–1947
The Second World War disrupted the maintenance rhythms of the Long Trail system as it disrupted everything else. The Long Trail Patrol’s operations were curtailed during the war years, and many of the club’s regular volunteers were elsewhere. Remote shelters in the northern mountains — difficult to reach, lightly used, and far from the club’s centers of activity in Montpelier and Burlington — were the first to suffer. A 1945 Long Trail News article titled "Post War on the Long Trail" noted that the former Tucker Camp was "said to be down." Whether this meant structurally collapsed, largely dismantled, or simply in a state of advanced disrepair was not specified, but the report was grim enough that the shelter’s future as a functioning facility appeared doubtful.
The 13th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1947) confirmed the picture. The camp was listed as "now partly ruined," serving only as "emergency shelter for 3 or 4" with water available nearby. The guide noted the club’s intention to build a new camp "about 1 mile north of the old one." The Tucker Camp had functioned as the notch’s primary shelter for fewer than two decades. Its closure was in part the ordinary entropy of a backcountry wooden structure in a demanding climate, but it was also a reflection of the war’s drain on the club’s maintenance capacity.
The Successor and Aftermath
The Green Mountain Club made good on its plans. In 1948, Roy Buchanan’s Long Trail Patrol built a new Hazen’s Notch Camp roughly a mile north of the Tucker Camp site, on Wade Brook. The new structure was a classic Buchanan Camp: a small, fully enclosed, four-sided cabin with two sets of bunks flanking a central table, the lower bunks extended to serve as benches, and wooden shutters on hinged frames that could be opened outward to function as exterior tables — a design Buchanan adapted from the old Vermont logging camps, the same functional tradition that had informed the Tucker Camp twenty years earlier. The new camp had bunks for eight. It would serve Long Trail hikers for nearly fifty years.
The site of the original Tucker Camp, meanwhile, had not been entirely forgotten. The August 1971 Long Trail News (p. 5) reported that more than sixty campers and counselors, with the help of the Green Mountain Club, had "completely cleaned up" the area around the old camp that summer, removing trash that had accumulated over several years. By 1971 the shelter itself was gone, but the cleared site near the road had apparently become an informal gathering spot — and a magnet for the kind of debris that accumulates wherever people gather in the woods without formal facilities. The cleanup brought the site to a cleaner state than it had occupied in years, though no new shelter was built there.
Sources
- “Bayley Hazen Military Road.” Wikipedia. Accessed July 18, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayley_Hazen_Military_Road.
- Long Trail News 1929 (1929). Green Mountain Club. 4.
- Long Trail News 1929 (1929). Green Mountain Club. 2.
- Long Trail News 1935 (1935). Green Mountain Club. 1.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1935 (1935). Green Mountain Club. 57.
- Long Trail News 1971 (1971). Green Mountain Club. 5.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 13 ed. Green Mountain Club. Pp. 33.
- Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999. Pp. 128.
