Governor Clement Shelter is one of the most distinctive structures on the Long Trail: a stone hut built in 1929 in an open field in Shrewsbury, Vermont, on the site of the old Herb Haley Farm, funded by the family of newspaper publisher William H. Field as a memorial to his late father-in-law, the former governor of Vermont. Nearly a century old, the shelter has outlasted the farm that once neighbored it, the companion camp that briefly stood beside it, two complete roof replacements, a period of serious misuse that brought it to the edge of decommissioning, and a difficult multi-year recovery involving the cooperation of five organizations and a locked gate. It continues to serve Long Trail and Appalachian Trail hikers today, maintained by the Killington Section of the Green Mountain Club.
Percival W. Clement and William H. Field
Percival Wood Clement (July 7, 1846 – January 9, 1927) was one of the most consequential figures in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Vermont. Born in Rutland, he was educated at Rutland High School, St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and Trinity College in Hartford. He returned to Rutland to work in the family marble business, Clement and Sons Marble, and became a partner in 1871. From there his interests multiplied: he became president of the Clement National Bank (founded by his father in 1883), held extensive railroad investments, developed real estate in cities across the country, and in 1882 took over as owner-publisher of the Rutland Herald.
His political career unfolded over decades. Clement served in the Vermont House of Representatives from 1892 to 1894, as mayor of Rutland in 1897–98 and again in 1911–12, and in the Vermont Senate from 1900 to 1902. He ran for governor in 1902 and again in 1906 — the latter time as a Democrat, an unusual crossing for a Republican — and lost both times in contests entangled with the influence of the Proctor family, prominent rivals in Vermont’s marble industry. He ran a third time in 1918 and won, taking office on January 9, 1919, at age 73. He served a single two-year term, during which the state legislature appropriated a million dollars to pay military draftees. He died in Rutland on January 9, 1927, interred at the city’s Evergreen Cemetery. The Rutland Herald’s memorial to him noted: "Honor, integrity and fairness were in his blood and dominated his life. To those most closely associated with him, he was a friend who could ever be depended on."
Ownership of the Rutland Herald then passed to Clement’s son-in-law, William H. Field. A Rutland native who had built his career in the national newspaper business — serving as an executive at the Chicago Tribune and as a co-founder of the New York Daily News — Field brought an ambitious sensibility to the Herald. He added its first comic strip, Little Orphan Annie, in 1934. The following year, facing progressive vision loss and the prospect of blindness, Field took his own life on March 15, 1935. He was 57 years old.
Two years after Clement’s death and well before Field’s, the Field family funded the construction of a stone shelter on the Long Trail near Killington in Clement’s memory. It was completed in 1929.
Construction and Setting: The Herb Haley Farm
The shelter was built in Shrewsbury, Vermont, roughly five miles south of Rutland, on land associated with the Herb Haley Farm. The farm had been a landmark for Long Trail hikers in the early years of the trail: a 1922 account in The Vermonter magazine by trail writer Herb Wheaton Congdon described it as "a plain enough place, but after days of camping it looms up with an air of grandeur; and to sit down to a table of good things, well served, with clean linen and beds like those at home to retire to after a chat with a couple that any state would be proud to have called typical citizens, is a treat." By the time of the shelter’s construction, the farm itself was winding down as an active operation; today the field is described in guide books as overgrown.
The shelter is a stone structure, an unusual material choice for Long Trail camps, which are predominantly built from logs or frame construction. The 11th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1937) described it as "a beautiful open front stone hut with bunks for 12 and a fireplace, located in an open field." Water is available from a brook approximately 200 feet to the east. The shelter is reached by a dirt road — a feature of its location that would later become the source of its most serious crisis.
The Blue Triangle Camp
Around 1930, a second structure appeared near the Governor Clement Shelter: the Blue Triangle Camp, built with funds from the Blue Triangle Club of the Vermont Y.W.C.A. and contributions from Girls’ Clubs at schools in Rutland, Wallingford, Wells River, Newbury, Thetford, Chester, Montpelier, Bristol, Franklin, Enosburg Falls, Springfield, St. Albans, and Windsor, as well as from Scout troops. The camp was a closed frame structure, 20 by 24 feet, situated in the woods on the bank of a nearby brook, and was intended particularly for girls’ groups using the Long Trail. Total construction cost was $550.
The two structures coexisted as neighboring shelters through the 1930s. The September 21, 1938 hurricane — one of the most destructive storms in New England history — caused serious damage to Blue Triangle Camp, and it was listed as the only Long Trail cabin "seriously damaged" by the storm. In 1949 it was disassembled and relocated to Spring Lake, leaving Governor Clement Shelter as the sole overnight facility at the site.
Early Maintenance
The shelter’s first decades required consistent but not extraordinary care. A 1957 Long Trail News note recorded a new table being built at Governor Clement and brush clearing completed. In 1963, a comprehensive work party cleared trail from Long Trail Lodge southward to within a mile and a half north of the shelter, with each camp along the route requiring at least a day’s work to prepare for the hiking season.
Long-time Long Trail hiker Paul Woodward, whose 1999 history of Long Trail shelters drew on decades of personal experience, noted a visit to the shelter in 1963 that showed a more difficult side of the site: very buggy conditions, porcupines attracted by a nearby dump, swarms of flying insects that required a smudge fire to tolerate, and an uncomfortable enough night that his party left at 4:15 in the morning.
The shelter’s most substantial maintenance gap in its early decades was the roof. According to a report in the February 1968 Long Trail News, the roof had not been replaced since the shelter’s construction in 1929. That finally changed in August 1967, when a work party organized by the Ogden boys, Kevin Hogan, and Churchill Scott undertook the first roof replacement in nearly four decades, leaving the shelter in what the LTN described as "A-1 condition." In June 1985, another major roof project followed: 16 volunteers replaced 25 percent of the roof, removing rotten boards, installing new plywood, and applying roofing paper and tar.
Crisis: Drive-Up Misuse in the 2000s
The shelter’s location beside a dirt road, which had been simply a convenience of access in earlier decades, became a serious liability in the early 2000s. Groups discovered that the road allowed vehicle access to the shelter, and the site began attracting parties of local visitors who had no intention of hiking — arriving by car, sometimes with alcohol, and at times with firearms. The situation made the shelter dangerous and unpleasant for hikers arriving on foot after a long day on the trail. At some point the Long Trail Guide Book explicitly advised hikers to avoid staying at Governor Clement. The Green Mountain Club came close to decommissioning and demolishing the shelter entirely rather than allowing the situation to continue indefinitely.
Instead, the GMC pursued a decade-plus collaborative effort to address the root cause. Working with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the Town of Shrewsbury, the Rutland County Sheriff’s office, and the Vermont Department of Forests and Parks, the club negotiated a management solution with the Town’s Select Board: a gate on the road to the shelter, to be locked during the hiking season to prevent drive-up access, but unlocked in winter to accommodate snowmobile traffic.
The gate proved effective. With drive-up misuse curtailed, the GMC resumed the maintenance projects that had been deferred while the shelter’s future was uncertain. The bunks were removed, the stone walls were repainted, and planning began for new interior furnishings and rafter replacement — restoration work treating the shelter as the historic structure it is rather than infrastructure being managed toward removal.
Recent Improvements
In late 2019, the Green Mountain Club completed installation of new ADA-compliant moldering privies at Governor Clement Shelter, replacing the older pit privies that had served the site for many years. The project was reported in Smoke and Blazes, the Killington Section’s newsletter, in 2020. A bear box for secure food storage is also available at the shelter.
The shelter remains in active use, maintained by the Killington Section of the GMC, which manages this stretch of the Long Trail and Appalachian Trail through central Vermont. It is listed in current trail guides as a functioning overnight stop, no longer flagged as a shelter to avoid.
Sources
- Governor Clement Shelter Map – Town of Shrewsbury, Vermont, USA. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://mapcarta.com/N419229527.
- Governor Clement Shelter – Green Mountain Club – Killington Section. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://gmckillington.org/about-us/early-history-of-the-green-mountain-club-killington-section/governor-clement-shelter/.
- Percival W. Clement – Wikipedia. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival_W._Clement.
- Percival Wood Clement, Vermont Governor 1919-1921 – Digital Vermont. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://digitalvermont.org/items/show/1063.
- GMC Annual Reports. Green Mountain Club. Pp. 4.
- “Governor Clement Shelter.” GMC Killington Sectoin. gmckillington.org..
- “Percival W. Clement.” Wikipedia.
- “Percival Wood Clement, Vermont Governor 1919–1921.” Digital Vermont. Accessed July 19, 2026. digitalvermont.org.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 0027 (27). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 20.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 0074 (74). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 3.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 0082 (82). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 2.
- Long Trail News 1957 (1957). Green Mountain Club. 4.
- "Long Trail News." , no. February (1968).
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 62 (2009). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 1.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 68 (2015). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 73 (2020). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 3.
- Congdon, Herb Wheaton, "From Silent Cliff to Stratton.." The Vermonter: The State Magazine 27 (1922).
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 11 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1937. Pp. 26.
