In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the trail’s completion and the establishment of the Long Trail Patrol, a permanent maintenance organization, put the question of northern Vermont shelters at the front of the club’s agenda. The Long Trail had been completed in August 1930, when the final miles from Jay Peak to the Canadian line were opened by a crew that included Roy O. Buchanan. With the full trail now walkable from Massachusetts to Quebec, the work of making it habitable for serious hikers could begin in earnest. The section north of Johnson — long, wooded, and sparsely settled — had no overnight shelter. The club needed land, lumber, and a landowner willing to make both available.
Phillip French and the Gift of a Site
The first shelter north of the Lamoille River was made possible by Phillip French of Johnson. French owned land in the area known as West Settlement, a farming community in the hills above the Lamoille Valley on the north side of town, and he offered the Green Mountain Club not only the use of a portion of it for a trail camp but also the lumber needed to build one. The Long Trail News of August 1931 recorded the arrangement in a brief notice that captured both the practicality and the spirit of the gift:
"Through the kindness of Mr. Phillip French of Johnson, who owns this property, a beautiful site has been selected near a fine spring with a view of Whiteface to the south and Bowen and Laraway Mts. to the north. Mr. French also generously furnished lumber for the camp."
The site was well chosen. The spring provided reliable water — it would be noted in Long Trail guides for decades as a dependable source one hundred feet east of the structure. The view described in that 1931 notice was a substantial one: Whiteface rising to the south, a summit that commands the Long Trail corridor between Johnson and the Sterling Range, and Bowen and Laraway Mountains to the north, defining the next reach of trail that a departing hiker would cross. French Camp occupied a position in the middle of this ridgeline sequence, a natural stopping point between the valley and the more demanding terrain ahead.
The naming of the camp followed the GMC’s customary practice of honoring the landowner whose generosity made a shelter possible — a tradition that gave the Long Trail system much of its social texture, tying the trail to the particular farmers, landowners, and community figures whose hospitality had extended it across private land.
The Long Trail Patrol’s First Project, 1931
The camp was built in 1931, and its construction marked a milestone in the history of the Green Mountain Club. Roy O. Buchanan had founded the Long Trail Patrol that same year — the first paid, salaried trail crew in the club’s history, authorized by the board of trustees to tackle the most demanding maintenance and construction projects along the trail. The patrol would eventually build thirty-seven shelters over Buchanan’s three decades of leadership, establishing a distinctive camp style that became iconic on the northern Long Trail. French Camp was the first of them.
What the patrol built at the French site was a frame camp of substantial size: bunks for twelve to fourteen people, making it one of the more capacious shelters on the trail at the time. The 1932 Long Trail Guide Book recorded it as a key waypoint north of Johnson. The 1935 guide described the local road access that gave the camp a degree of convenience unusual in northern Vermont — hikers coming from Johnson could approach via West Settlement rather than relying solely on the trail itself. The 1940 guide continued to carry the camp as a functioning facility, and the 13th edition (1947) listed it on page 59.
The camp’s generous bunk capacity — well above the six or eight typical of many Long Trail lean-tos — reflected both the scale of Phillip French’s lumber donation and the patrol’s ambition for this first project. A closed frame structure with a stove and a spring nearby, French Camp offered the kind of shelter that could accommodate a party of hikers in genuine comfort through the cold and wet weather that northern Vermont reliably delivered.
Six Decades in the Woods
French Camp operated for more than sixty years, long enough to pass through the complete arc of the American hiking culture — from the trail’s post-completion optimism of the early 1930s through the mid-century lean years of the Second World War, the postwar revival, and the surge of backcountry interest in the 1960s and 1970s that brought new pressures and new volunteers to every shelter on the Long Trail.
By the early 1970s, the GMC had established a trail and shelter adopter program that allowed individual members and couples to take personal responsibility for maintaining specific facilities. The program gave shelters a level of attentive care that the club’s professional staff and work parties could not always provide, and it created a personal bond between adopters and their sites that the more impersonal language of "trail maintenance" rarely captured. Millie and Pat Yadanza of Sparkill, New York — a community in the Hudson Valley, well south of Vermont — adopted French Camp as their own through this program, and when a work party from the GMC arrived at the shelter on June 3, 1972, they found the camp in a condition that testified to the Yadanzas’ dedication.
Bob Hagerman’s field report from that day is precise about what he found:
"Day ideal — sunny and pleasant. Group found French Camp in excellent shape thanks in large measure to Millie and Pat Yadanza of Sparkill, N.Y., who under the GMC Adopt-a-shelter program have had FC as their foster child for the last year or so. Only work here was propping up the slightly tilted outhouse which the Yadanzas apparently built."
The outhouse the Yadanzas had constructed was the work party’s main concern that day — a minor adjustment to a structure that was otherwise sound. The camp itself needed nothing. That the Yadanzas came from Rockland County, New York, to care for a backcountry shelter in the Vermont hills captures something about what the adopt-a-shelter program accomplished: it extended the GMC’s community of stewards far beyond Vermont’s own borders, enlisting people whose connection to the Long Trail was purely that of devoted users.
The 1973 Stove
The October 1973 work trip to French Camp produced one of the more vivid accounts in the shelter’s maintenance record. The aging stove situation — the camp had been getting by with unsuitable equipment — had become a practical problem. Bob Hagerman organized a party that included Brent Teillon and a member named Strobel, and on October 20 they drove to the village of Johnson and stopped at Allen S. Hill’s stove shop to collect a new 25-cushion quilted box stove. Hill had already cleaned the stove and filled its cracks in preparation. With the stove loaded, the group carried everything up to the camp.
Their arrival had an unintended consequence: two hikers who had spent the night and were still in their sleeping bags were roused out by the work party’s entrance. In a shelter without a caretaker, mornings could go this way.
The installation proceeded methodically. The new stove replaced two older ones, including a small cast-iron stove designed to burn coal — entirely wrong for a backcountry wood camp, and long past serviceable condition. The new stove was set on concrete blocks laid on two widths of metal roofing, with a layer of sand placed in the bottom both to protect the floor plate and to improve the draft. With the installation complete, Teillon and Hagerman observed the occasion properly: Teillon laid a fire and Hagerman lit it. "It worked beautifully," Hagerman noted in his report.
Strobel’s contribution that day was the construction of window sashes, and the group also shaped a metal piece to cover two large holes that porcupines had gnawed at the base of the door — a recurrent nuisance at backcountry shelters, where the salt from hikers’ hands and boots attracted persistent gnawing. A few days after the main work party, three employees of the Vermont Department of Forests and Parks returned to the camp with Brent Teillon and completed most of the batten stripping on the exterior. Hagerman’s assessment at the close: "The front of the cabin looks good — despite its 42 years."
Roof Work and Later Years
The maintenance continued. On July 12, 1975, Fred Judd and Lee Haselton applied a coat of tar to the camp’s roof and installed new sections of stovepipe — routine work of the kind that a wooden structure in the Vermont climate requires at regular intervals if it is to remain weathertight. Judd, who appears in other Long Trail News records as a shelter director for the GMC in this period, was a regular presence on the maintenance circuit of northern Vermont camps.
No full account of the camp’s last two decades has surfaced in the accessible record, but it remained in the Long Trail system into the late 1980s. The 24th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1996) records the camp’s final status with a precision that suggests the record was made close to the event: French Camp was in use from 1931 to 1992, at which time it was destroyed. Whether "destroyed" means fire, deliberate demolition, or structural collapse advanced beyond any salvage is not specified in the surviving documentation. The site at West Settlement, with its spring a hundred feet to the east and its view of the mountains on either horizon, remains.
Sources
- "Long Trail News." , no. August (1931).
- Long Trail Guide Book 1932 (1932). Green Mountain Club. 54.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1940 (1940). Green Mountain Club. 58.
- Long Trail Guide Book. 24th Edition ed. Green Mountain Club, 1996.
- Bob Hagerman. 1972.
- Bob Hagerman. 1973.
- Bob Hagerman. 1975.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 13 ed. Green Mountain Club. Pp. 59.
- Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999. Pp. 41.
