On the Waterbury RFD near the railroad station at North Duxbury, Mrs. Lena Freeman operated what the early Long Trail guidebooks called a "good quiet hotel" — a useful combination of adjectives that distinguished her establishment from the rougher roadhouses and crowded commercial hotels of a busier era. The hotel was modest in scale but well suited to the needs of hikers arriving by train, who could disembark at North Duxbury station, carry their packs across the Winooski on the railroad bridge, and make their way into Duxbury toward Camel’s Hump.
The Freeman Hotel appeared in the Long Trail guidebooks from 1920 through 1924, occupying a place in the trail’s network of private accommodations that the Green Mountain Club encouraged and listed alongside its own shelters and camps. In those years the Club maintained relatively few built shelters along the trail’s southern and central reaches, and the hiker’s infrastructure depended heavily on just such arrangements: farm households and small hotels willing to take in muddy, hungry travelers in exchange for a modest fee. The Freeman Hotel was one of these establishments — neither built nor maintained by the Club, but recognized as part of the system that made the trail workable for anyone traveling it as a multi-day journey. The Freeman Hotel does not appear in the guidebooks after 1924.
Sources
- Long Trail Guide Book 1920 (1920). Green Mountain Club. 15.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1921 (1921). Green Mountain Club. 16.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1922 (1922). Green Mountain Club. 16.
- Long Trail Guide Book. 4th Edition ed. Green Mountain Club, 1922.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1924 (1924). Green Mountain Club. 19.
- Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999. Pp. 145.
