By the time the Green Mountain Club arrived at Glastenbury Mountain in the late 1920s to build a shelter, the town that bore the mountain’s name had nearly ceased to exist. Glastenbury had been chartered in 1761 — the same era that saw New Hampshire’s Benning Wentworth hand out town grants across what would become Vermont — but the land repelled settlers almost as fast as they arrived. The soil was thin, the winters long, and the slopes unsuitable for the kind of farming that sustained neighboring Sunderland and Shaftsbury. Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, families came and went with unusual frequency even for frontier Vermont, rarely staying long enough to establish the roots that turned other hill towns into permanent communities.
What finally gave Glastenbury an economy was not farming but timber. Business interests in Bennington, recognizing the value of the vast stands of mature trees on the mountain, built a railroad up the slopes in 1872 — an improbable engineering achievement, with some sections climbing 250 feet per mile along the Bolles Brook drainage. The logging and charcoal operations that followed briefly transformed Glastenbury into a working town of several hundred people. Two sawmills ran simultaneously. Dozens of kilns converted timber to charcoal for iron furnaces in Shaftsbury and across the border in Troy, New York.
It did not last. By the late 1880s the mountain had been stripped of virtually all its mature trees, and with the timber went the economy. The railroad ceased operation in 1889. A brief attempt in 1894 to revive it as an electric passenger trolley and mountain resort — South Glastenbury as tourist attraction — ended when a winter freshet washed out the tracks in 1899. The population fell through the early twentieth century. By 1937 only seven residents remained, few enough for the Vermont legislature to take the unusual step of unincorporating the town. Glastenbury’s affairs passed to a state-appointed supervisor. The forest began to reclaim the logged-off slopes.
What remained on the mountain in the 1920s, besides the slowly recovering second-growth woods, was a fire observation tower and the fire warden assigned to staff it. The tower gave anyone who climbed it — and by the 1920s, hikers were beginning to do exactly that — a panoramic view across the southern Green Mountains and deep into Massachusetts and New York. To the east, the Harriman Reservoir at Whitingham and the Somerset Reservoir caught the light. To the south, the summit bulk of Mount Greylock in Massachusetts, the highest peak in that state, rose above the intervening ridges. Southwest, the farmland and villages of the Pownal valley spread below. It was, as the first hikers to the summit noted, an exceptional viewpoint.
The Long Trail reached Glastenbury Mountain in the mid-1920s, as the Green Mountain Club extended its ridgeline footpath through the southern mountains. The summit at 3,748 feet became one of the notable way points on the trail’s passage through Bennington County, and the Bennington Section of the GMC — the local chapter responsible for this stretch of trail — recognized that a section as remote as this one required an overnight shelter. The nearest road access was a long approach; hikers caught above tree line as darkness fell or weather closed in needed somewhere to go. The question was what to build, and how to build something that would last.
The Builders and Their Material
The Bennington Section’s answer to the shelter problem on Glastenbury Mountain was, by the standards of the Long Trail, unprecedented. Instead of the frame or log construction that made up virtually every other shelter in the GMC system, the section chose to build in metal — a thirteen-foot-square cabin made entirely of copper alloy steel, designed to withstand the weather of a southern Vermont summit without the rot and decay that eventually claimed every wooden structure left unheated through a Vermont winter.
The camp was built in 1929 and reported in the Long Trail News of August that year. The building party was a mixed crew from Bennington and the academic community just across the state line in Williamstown, Massachusetts — a connection that reflected the long involvement of Williams College with the hiking culture of the southern Green Mountains. John N. Leonard, A. J. Holden Jr., and Dr. L. H. Ross came up from Bennington. Professor Carl S. Hoar of Williams College and John B. Clark of the Williamstown High School joined them from the south. W. W. Holbrook, the fire warden stationed at the Glastenbury tower, completed the party — bringing to the project not only his labor but his intimate knowledge of the mountain’s terrain and his experience overwintering there through previous seasons.
The choice of copper alloy steel was a considered one. Ordinary steel rusts; left exposed to moisture and freeze-thaw cycles in the Vermont mountains, an unprotected steel structure would deteriorate nearly as fast as uncoated wood. Copper alloy steels, which had been in commercial use since the early decades of the century, were formulated to resist corrosion by forming a stable oxidized patina on their surface rather than the unstable rust that consumed ordinary iron. On a mountaintop with no road access for materials, where repairs required hand-carrying supplies up a long trail, building something that would resist the climate without constant maintenance was a practical imperative. The Bennington Section chose a material that was more expensive and unusual than timber but would prove more durable than either.
The 1929 Long Trail News described the finished camp in detail: thirteen feet square, with four bunks arranged inside, a stove, a table, and cooking utensils. The spring that served the camp was within a hundred yards of the structure, accessible even in dry weather. The Long Trail Guide Book’s 10th edition (1935) recorded the camp’s settled specifications — bunks for seven, a stove, excellent water twenty yards to the east — and identified it as one of the most weathertight shelters on the southern Long Trail. The designation "all-weather" set it apart from the open Adirondack-style lean-tos and even from the log Buchanan Camp designs of the Long Trail Patrol: this was a fully enclosed metal structure, more akin to the fire warden’s cabin up at the tower than to any conventional trail shelter.
The View from the Summit
The camp’s position near the Glastenbury summit gave it one of the most varied panoramas available from a Long Trail shelter in the southern mountains. The August 1929 Long Trail News recorded the prospect in two directions.
Toward the east and north, the view took in the bodies of water at what the report called "Whitingham and Somerset dams" — the Harriman Reservoir at Whitingham, impounded in 1924 when the New England Power Company dammed the Deerfield River, and the Somerset Reservoir, which had backed up against the mountain’s northeastern drainage. These reservoirs were still relatively new when the camp was built, and their appearance in the landscape was a significant feature of a viewpoint that had existed before them. The sight of open water glittering in a valley floor visible from a mountain summit has always been a particular pleasure of Vermont hiking, and the Harriman and Somerset reservoirs provided that pleasure from Glastenbury for the entire time the camp stood.
From the opposite face of the mountain, the view opened southward into Massachusetts. The town of Pownal, in the southwestern corner of Vermont, lay below, and beyond it the summit mass of Mount Greylock — at 3,491 feet the highest point in Massachusetts — dominated the horizon. The Long Trail runs to the Vermont-Massachusetts line just south of Glastenbury, and hikers on the trail could see, from the camp’s vantage point, essentially the entire remaining length of Vermont’s southern mountains in one direction and the beginning of the Massachusetts ranges in another. It was a view that situated the hiker precisely in the geography of the southern Appalachians — a reminder of how far they had walked, and how far remained.
The Fire Warden’s World
W. W. Holbrook, who participated in building the steel camp, was part of a state system of fire observation that had placed wardens on Vermont’s prominent summits throughout the early twentieth century. The observation tower on Glastenbury’s summit — a separate structure from the camp — was the warden’s working post during the fire season. The forestry department’s cabin at the summit, also separate from the steel camp, was where Holbrook and his successors lived and kept their equipment.
The presence of the fire warden created a particular community on the mountain. During the seasons when Holbrook was at his post, the summit had a human presence that most of the northern Long Trail’s wild stretches lacked. Hikers arriving at Glastenbury Mountain were not alone on the ridgeline; they could find information about conditions, make conversation with someone whose knowledge of this particular mountain was detailed and current, and take some comfort in the proximity of a maintained building. The building party’s inclusion of the fire warden was not merely practical — it reflected the close relationship between the Green Mountain Club’s trail-building operations and the state’s forestry infrastructure in these years. Many fire wardens doubled as trail maintainers, their regular summit presence making them the most reliable monitors of shelter conditions in locations where formal GMC work parties could only reach occasionally.
The forestry cabin at the summit had its own complicated relationship with Long Trail hikers. The 1928 Long Trail Guide Book (7th edition) listed it as locked and available only with special permission from the State Forestry Department. By 1956 it had been opened — the 15th edition guide noted that the watchman’s cabin was left open by the Vermont Timberland Owners Association for the convenience of hikers, with the request that they keep it in good order. By the 1963 17th edition, it was described straightforwardly as a hiker shelter with bunk space for six and a water supply in the clearing 0.2 miles south. These two structures — the steel camp below the summit and the forestry cabin at it — thus served hikers in overlapping and complementary ways through much of the twentieth century, each belonging to a different institutional context but available to the same stream of people walking north or south along the Long Trail.
Three Decades of Service
The steel camp appeared in successive editions of the Long Trail Guide Book through the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1960s. The 13th edition (1947) listed it on page 16, still active after nearly twenty years of service. The 13th edition was published in the immediate postwar period, and the Long Trail News of 1943 — produced during the war years, when the GMC was maintaining the trail with reduced volunteer capacity and receiving letters from members then in military service — carried accounts from soldiers recalling their prewar hiking on the Long Trail. The steel camp at Glastenbury Mountain appeared in those recollections, its distinctive construction and exceptional viewpoint evidently making it one of the shelters that stayed in hikers’ memories long after they had left Vermont for other theaters. A metal box on a mountaintop, improbably comfortable in bad weather, looking south toward Greylock and east toward the glittering reservoirs: it was the kind of place that fixed itself in the mind.
The shelter was still in service through the early 1960s. Long Trail traverse accounts from 1960 and 1961 include the camp as an overnight stop on full-trail journeys. The GMC’s regular patrol records from these years reflect ongoing maintenance attention — the camp’s steel construction, while durable, still required periodic inspection and upkeep of its stove, its stovepipe, and the spring access that served it. By the 1963 season, the Bennington Section meeting photographed at the shelter — an image preserved in the GMC Burlington archives, dated 1963, showing a group gathered outside the metal building — suggests the camp was still a gathering point for club activity in the region, not merely a backcountry overnight facility.
Removal and Succession
The camp was gone by 1964. The available sources do not specify whether it was removed, demolished, or simply abandoned to the weather’s work, though the durability of its copper alloy steel construction makes the last option less likely than for a wooden shelter. A metal structure does not rot; if it is gone, it was probably taken down. The reasons behind that decision have not been documented in the accessible historical record. What can be noted is the context: by the early 1960s, the Long Trail Patrol under Roy Buchanan had built dozens of shelters across the trail system, and the question of which facilities were worth maintaining and which had served their time was a recurrent one for the GMC. The steel camp was thirty-five years old by 1964, in a location served by both the forestry cabin at the summit and, eventually, the purpose-built Glastenbury Mountain Shelter that was subsequently established 0.3 miles south of the summit.
The observation tower that W. W. Holbrook had staffed continued to stand into subsequent decades and was eventually taken over for maintenance by the Green Mountain Club, which staffed it as an interpretive facility for hikers ascending by the Long Trail from the south.
The steel camp’s three and a half decades of service marked something genuinely unusual in the history of the Long Trail shelter system: a structure built not of logs or lumber but of metal, placed on one of the southern mountains’ most commanding viewpoints, by a party that included a Williams College professor, a Williamstown schoolteacher, three Bennington residents, and the man whose job was to watch the forest from that same summit for signs of fire. For thirty-five years, in all the weather that Glastenbury Mountain could deliver, it worked.
Sources
Long Trail News (August 1929). Green Mountain Club, p. 4. [Construction account; dimensions (13 feet square); copper alloy steel; building party names; views east to Whitingham and Somerset dams; views south to Pownal and Greylock; spring within 100 yards]
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book, 10th ed. Green Mountain Club, 1935, p. 13. ["Closed, all-weather, steel cabin with stove and bunks for 7, built by the Bennington Section in 1929; commands a fine view; excellent water 20 yards east"]
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book, 13th ed. Green Mountain Club, 1947, p. 16.
Long Trail News (1943). Green Mountain Club, p. 6. [Wartime recollections of the Long Trail including Glastenbury Mountain Camp]
Long Trail News (2010). Green Mountain Club, p. 11. [Historical reference to the camp]
GMC Burlington. Long Trail System Shelter History — Glastenbury Mountain Camp. https://gmcburlington.org/glastenbury-mountain-camp/ [Primary source text from LTN Aug. 1929; GB 10th Ed. 1935 description; 1963 photo of Bennington Section meeting at shelter; 1931 camp photo]
GMC Burlington. Long Trail System Shelter History — Glastenbury Mountain Forestry Cabin. https://gmcburlington.org/glastenbury-mt-forestry-cabin/ [Separate summit forestry cabin; GB 7th Ed. 1928 (locked); GB 15th Ed. 1956 (open to hikers); GB 17th Ed. 1963 (bunk space for 6)]
Wikipedia. "Glastenbury Mountain." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastenbury_Mountain [Elevation 3,748 ft; Long Trail / AT passage; observation tower; current shelter 0.3 mi. south of summit]
Wikipedia. "Glastenbury, Vermont." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastenbury,_Vermont [Town history; 1761 charter; logging era 1870s–1880s; trolley railroad; unincorporated 1937; population decline]
Sources
- “Glastenbury Moutain.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastenbury_Mountain.
- “Glastenbury Vermont.” Wikipedia. Accessed July 18, 2026. [Glastenbury, Vermont.](Glastenbury, Vermont.).
- Long Trail News 1929 (1929). Green Mountain Club. 4.
- Long Trail News 1943 (1943). Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Long Trail News 2010 (2010). Green Mountain Club. 11.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 10 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1935. Pp. 13.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 13 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1947. Pp. 16.
