The Green Mountain House was founded around 1895 according to a 1977 Ski magazine profile, making it a product of the same late-nineteenth-century rural Vermont tourism economy that saw boarding houses, summer hotels, and wayside inns proliferate throughout the mountain valleys of Windham and Bennington counties. West Wardsboro — a small village in the upper West River valley — sat along the stage road that carried travelers into the southern Green Mountains before the automobile era transformed the region’s transportation patterns.
As a stagecoach stop, the inn occupied a function that was both practical and social: a place where horses were rested, travelers fed, and local news exchanged. Among the visitors the inn is said to have hosted in this era was Daniel Webster, the Massachusetts senator and orator, whose connection to Vermont was partly through his admiration for its mountain landscape. Norman Rockwell, the illustrator who eventually settled in nearby Stockbridge and later Arlington, Vermont, was another notable guest. The Ski magazine profile noted that the inn "probably looks very much the same" in 1977 as it had in earlier generations — a description of deliberate preservation as much as inertia, with what the magazine called "old attic furniture" giving the rooms their period character.
The proprietor listed in the inn’s early hiking-era records was Mrs. E.A. Eddy. The inn operated seasonally, from May 20 to October 1, a schedule calibrated to Vermont’s mountain tourism season rather than year-round residence.
The West River Railroad and Mountain Access
The geography of West Wardsboro placed the Green Mountain House at a natural convergence point for hikers approaching Stratton Mountain from the east. The West River Railroad — a narrow-gauge line that ran 36 miles from Brattleboro through the West River valley to South Londonderry — provided the primary means of reaching the region before automobile ownership became widespread. Built in 1879 and notorious enough for its unreliable service to be nicknamed "36 miles of trouble," the railroad nevertheless made the mountain towns of Windham County accessible to visitors from southern New England who otherwise faced a long overland journey.
Wardsboro was one of the stations along the line. Hikers arriving by train at the Wardsboro depot and seeking Stratton Mountain would have found the Green Mountain House a natural first stop — a place to spend a night before the mountain approach, to ask directions, and to reorient from train travel to foot travel. The first edition of the Green Mountain Club’s Long Trail Guide Book (1917) and the 1921 edition both listed the inn as an access point for Stratton Mountain, placing it explicitly within the emerging infrastructure of Long Trail travel. The West River Railroad continued to serve the valley until 1936, giving it a roughly forty-year window of overlap with the inn’s hiking-era function.
Stratton Mountain and the Early Hiking Community
Stratton Mountain occupies a singular place in American hiking history: it is the summit on which James P. Taylor, then assistant headmaster at Vermont Academy in Saxtons River, sheltered from rain in 1909 and conceived the idea of a trail running the length of the Green Mountains — the trail that became the Long Trail, and from which the idea of the Appalachian Trail eventually grew. The Green Mountain Club was formed the following year. By the time the earliest Long Trail Guide Books were published in the mid-1910s, Stratton was well established as a destination for organized hiking parties from across New England.
The Green Mountain House benefited from this identity. As one of the few establishments in the immediate area offering lodging and meals to hikers, it became a recognized first step on the approach to the mountain. The 1921 Long Trail Guide Book listed it as the place where visitors could obtain directions for climbing Stratton; it was, in the language of early trail culture, a service point as well as a shelter.
By 1916, the inn had become associated with the organized hiking community at a formal level. The Stratton Mountain Club held its annual meeting at the Green Mountain House on August 8, 1916 — placing the inn at the center of the local hiking club’s social calendar at a moment when organized mountain recreation in southern Vermont was still taking its early institutional shape.
The Green Mountain Club Connection: Worcester Section
Through the mid-twentieth century, the Green Mountain Club’s Worcester Section — one of the club’s Massachusetts-based sections — made the Green Mountain House a regular destination for its outings. The Long Trail News documented the section’s use of the inn across multiple decades. A 1929 LTN entry noted the Worcester Section’s activities in the area; by the 1950s the inn was serving as a base camp for section outings that combined hiking on the Stratton Mountain corridor with the pleasures of a comfortable inn at the end of the day.
The Worcester Section’s sustained attachment to the inn reflects a pattern common to GMC sections through this era: the development of favorite regional bases where multiple years of visits built a familiarity that went beyond mere convenience. For a section based in central Massachusetts, the train ride to Wardsboro and the walk up to the Green Mountain House represented a particular kind of Vermont immersion — a departure from the city into a landscape of mountain farms and forest roads that the inn embodied even as the surrounding region changed.
Mount Snow and the Mid-Century Transition
In the fall of 1954, Walt Schoenknecht opened Mount Snow ski area in West Dover — the first major downhill ski resort to open in the immediate Stratton/Dover corridor of southern Vermont. Mount Snow was built on land purchased from the Snow family for $15,000 and developed with an investment of more than four million dollars; it opened on December 12, 1954, with two chairlifts, two rope tows, seven trails, and a base lodge.
The Long Trail News documented Worcester Section visits to the Green Mountain House in 1955 and 1956 in which members combined their usual hiking activities with visits to the "then-new Mt. Snow Ski Area" — a phrase that places the inn squarely in the transitional moment when the southern Vermont mountains were being remade by winter sports. For the GMC hikers who had been using the inn for decades, Mt. Snow represented a new phenomenon in their familiar landscape, one worth investigating from the comfortable vantage point of an establishment they already knew.
In October 1966, the Worcester Section spent a fall foliage weekend at Green Mountain House, hiking to Stratton Pond and the George Storey Shelter — an outing that combined the section’s established hiking tradition with the autumn scenery that had drawn visitors to the Wardsboro area for generations.
Nordic Ski Operations: 1970–1979
In the inn’s final decade, the Green Mountain House adapted to Vermont’s expanding winter recreation economy by establishing a Nordic ski operation. Between 1970 and 1979, the inn was listed in ski directories as offering five miles of trails, lodging, meals, guided tours on Saturdays, and equipment rentals. The 1977 Ski magazine profile described the operation’s character: "The atmosphere is unpretentious and informal, and goes over best with high school and college groups — especially ski tourers, since the inn offers trails, equipment, and even low-cost trail lunch. Hearty ‘all you can eat’ meals are served family-style."
The Nordic ski era was operated by the parents of Marian Rice, whose food blog Canned preserved the most complete available account of the inn’s final years. The business model — affordable family-style hospitality, low-cost trail access, and the informal atmosphere the 1977 profile described as going over best with student groups — sat in a different market from the large resort hotels of the ski boom but served a real need for budget-conscious winter travelers in southern Vermont.
The Fire of 1979
The Green Mountain House burned down in May 1979, ending eight decades of continuous operation. The Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum archive, which holds the most complete documentary record of the inn’s Nordic skiing era, records the fire as the structure’s end. The cause and circumstances of the fire are not detailed in available sources.
Sources
- Green Mountain House – Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum Archive. Accessed July 19, 2026. https://www.archives.vtssm.com/exhibits/vermonts-nordic-traditions/197.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1921 (1921). Green Mountain Club. 27.
- Long Trail News 1929 (1929). Green Mountain Club. 4.
- Long Trail News 1955 (1955). Green Mountain Club. 5.
- Long Trail News 1955 (1955). Green Mountain Club. 5.
- Long Trail News 1956 (1956). Green Mountain Club. 4.
- Long Trail News 1967 (1967). Green Mountain Club. 5.
- Green Mouintain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 1 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1917. Pp. 9.
- Unknown. History of Stratton, Vermont. Green Mountain Club. Pp. 306.
