Griffith Camp was not a built shelter but an industrial ruin — the surviving buildings of a once-substantial company town established in 1888 by Vermont lumber and charcoal magnate Silas Lapham Griffith along the Black Branch in Peru, Vermont. At its peak, the settlement employed approximately 300 workers, supported a steam sawmill, multiple charcoal kilns, a boarding house, a school, and dozens of cabins and homes. By 1912 the surrounding forest had been stripped bare and the town was abandoned. When the United States Forest Service repurposed the old town road for the Long Trail in 1917, early hikers entering the area found the empty buildings still standing and began taking shelter in them. The Long Trail Guide Book described the settlement in 1920 as "a once prosperous village, now only inhabited for a week or two in the autumn when the fern pickers camp there while getting ferns for shipments to the cities." Approximately a mile north of the main village, early hikers also sheltered within the vaulted brick chambers of Griffith’s abandoned charcoal kilns, a waypoint that entered the guide as Kiln Camp in the fifth edition (1924). The kilns near Danby Station were demolished by the USFS in the 1940s on safety grounds; the village buildings have long since disappeared. The clearing where the settlement stood — among the last traces of the old industrial landscape — is marked today by stone foundations and an enormous pile of century-old sawdust. Among Long Trail users the place has always been known as Old Job.
Peru and the Green Mountains Lumber Trade
Peru is a small mountain town in Bennington County, Vermont, organized in 1761 but settled slowly because of its rugged terrain. The western half of the town runs along the high spine of the Green Mountains — elevations poorly suited to farming but richly covered with spruce, hardwood, and fir that made the area attractive to lumbermen once markets developed and the technology of steam-powered milling arrived. By the mid-nineteenth century, charcoal was also made near the notch mill in brick ovens, and multiple mills processing railroad ties, chair parts, and lumber operated on the town’s various brooks. The completion of the Western Vermont Railroad brought outside capital closer to the mountain timber, and the operations that Silas Griffith eventually established on Peru Mountain were an extension of the larger transformation that the railroad made possible across southern Vermont’s forested interior.
Black Branch drains a narrow high valley in the mountain terrain between Peru and Mount Tabor, feeding into the Big Branch and eventually the Otter Creek below. It was up this valley and along the road system that Griffith’s operations climbed into the interior — a physical infrastructure of wagon tracks, later supplemented by a private railroad siding at Danby Station to service the charcoal kilns near the valley floor.
Silas Griffith and the Green Mountain Lumber Company
Silas Lapham Griffith formed the Green Mountain Lumber Company in 1888 with several partners including Eugene, Warren, and James McIntyre and E. L. Staples. The company owned approximately 1,400 to 1,500 acres on Peru Mountain — a tract that formed one of four "jobs" in Griffith’s sprawling mountain operation, alongside holdings in Danby, Arlington, and elsewhere. A steam sawmill was the centerpiece of the Peru operation, producing approximately two million feet of lumber per year at its height, along with clapboards and shingles. The mill ran night and day. The product was shipped south through the mountains and out from South Londonderry to markets beyond.
Griffith’s modus operandi across all his operations was vertical integration: he cut timber, converted waste wood into charcoal, sold sawdust for ice insulation, and ran the company stores from which his workers were expected to buy their food and clothing. On Peru Mountain, as at his larger settlement in Mount Tabor, the mill became the nucleus of a company town — a collection of buildings that provided housing, meals, schooling, and commerce to the several hundred workers and their families who lived there while the timber lasted.
The resulting village — originally called "Mill Village" before taking the name "Griffith" — grew to include cabins and homes for workers and families, a boarding house for male employees, a school, and the supporting structures of a small industrial settlement. The Mt. Tabor–Danby Historical Society records from the period describe the Peru Mountain operation as employing roughly 300 people and representing one of four coordinated industrial "jobs" that Griffith ran simultaneously across his timberlands.
The Life and End of the Village (1888–1912)
From 1888 through roughly the first decade of the twentieth century, the village of Griffith was a functioning mountain community — isolated, company-owned, and entirely dependent on the standing timber of the surrounding slopes. Workers rose before dawn, logged from dawn to dark as Griffith famously insisted they enjoyed doing, and cycled their wages back through the company store. Each kiln required forty cords of wood to fill; the sawmill ran around the clock; and the accumulated products — lumber, charcoal, clapboards, shingles — moved down the mountain to the railroad.
Silas Griffith himself died in San Diego on July 21, 1903, before the inevitable end arrived. After his death his business empire, sustained by his personal energy and control, wound down rapidly. The timber supply on Peru Mountain was finite, and by approximately 1912 — some twenty-four years after operations began — the surrounding woodlands were exhausted. The village of Griffith was abandoned. Workers and their families departed; the company store closed; the school fell silent; the boarding house emptied. What remained was the physical infrastructure of the settlement — the buildings themselves, the road network, and the charcoal kilns — standing in a landscape of logged-over slopes beginning their slow reversion to second-growth forest.
The 1889 Vermont: Its Resources and Industries described Griffith’s Peru Mountain operation as part of a coordinated network producing more than ten million feet of lumber and 825,000 bushels of charcoal annually across all his properties. The scale of the extraction that this represented, sustained for roughly two decades, transformed the mountain interior around Black Branch from old-growth forest to a cleared industrial zone and eventually to the recovering scrub woodland that Long Trail hikers would begin traveling through after 1917.
The Long Trail Takes the Town Road (1917)
When the United States Forest Service repurposed the old town road through the abandoned settlement for the Long Trail in 1917, the Griffith village buildings were still standing — weathered, empty, but structurally present. The USFS road that had served the lumber operation’s logistical needs became the Long Trail’s route through this section of the southern Green Mountains, threading through the clearing where the village had been and continuing toward Griffith Lake to the north. The trail that hikers now followed into the area passed through an industrial archaeological landscape: stone foundations, sawdust piles, the cleared opening of the former mill yard, and the remnant structures of the company town.
Early hikers moving through in the years after 1917 found the empty buildings available and began using them as improvised shelter. There was no purpose-built Long Trail lean-to or camp in this section yet; the trail’s shelter infrastructure in the southern Green Mountains was still sparse in the early 1920s, and the abandoned Griffith buildings filled the gap naturally. What they lacked in comfort and upkeep, they offered in structural protection from the weather — the essential function of any trail shelter.
Griffith Camp and the Fern Pickers
The second edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1920) gave the first published description of the Griffith site as a shelter point. Its language captures both the utility and the peculiarity of the arrangement: the camp at Griffith was "a once prosperous village, now only inhabited for a week or two in the autumn when the fern pickers camp there while getting ferns for shipments to the cities."
The fern pickers are a distinctive detail. The logged-over slopes around the abandoned village, now open to light and beginning to fill with second-growth vegetation, supported commercial fern harvests. Workers — distinct from Long Trail hikers — arrived seasonally to gather ferns for the florist trade, shipping the fronds to urban markets. They used the abandoned village buildings as their own seasonal camp, occupying the same structures that hikers rested in during the hiking season. The Griffith village thus supported two overlapping populations of transient users in the years after its industrial abandonment: recreationists moving through on the Long Trail, and seasonal laborers harvesting the forest products of the recovering landscape. Neither group was the kind of permanent occupant the village had been built for.
The guide book listing of Griffith Camp persisted through the early 1920s, reflecting continuing use of the abandoned buildings. The fifth edition (1924) is the last edition to list Kiln Camp to the north, and the sequence of listings suggests that both the village buildings and the charcoal kiln shelters were in use through approximately 1924. By the eighth edition (1930) Kiln Camp no longer appears, and the construction of new purpose-built shelters in the area — including the CCC-built Old Job Shelter on the same site in 1935 — eventually superseded any remaining utility the original structures could have offered.
Kiln Camp: Shelter in the Charcoal Kilns
Approximately a mile north of the main village, along the Long Trail’s route toward Danby, stood the charcoal kilns that Silas Griffith had built near the Rutland Railroad line to service his charcoal shipments. These were four large brick structures — each twenty-five to thirty feet in diameter and twelve feet high — located on the hill just east of the railroad tracks at Danby Station, on what is technically the Mount Tabor side of the area. Griffith had maintained a private railroad siding on the east side of the present tracks to load charcoal directly into freight cars.
The kilns’ construction — massive domed brick chambers — made them inadvertently suitable as emergency shelters. With their thick walls, circular interiors, and arched openings, they offered more weather protection than most open structures of the era. Early hikers discovered this utility and began sleeping in them. The fifth edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1924) formalized the arrangement with the entry: "Just north of Black Branch Crossing is Kiln Camp. Bunks in an old charcoal kiln." — a terse notation that captures the improvised nature of the facility perfectly.
The kilns were demolished by the USFS in the 1940s. The reason given was structural instability: after half a century of weathering and intermittent use, the brick structures had become hazardous, and the agency determined that their continued existence posed unacceptable risks to hikers camping in them. A railroad siding that served the kilns remained visible into the twentieth century behind what later became Crosby’s Lumber and Hardware in Danby. The kiln sites themselves disappeared under vegetation. Kiln Camp, like Griffith Camp before it, vanished from the guide book record — in the case of Kiln Camp, not even surviving into the eighth edition of 1930.
"Old Job": The Name and Its Meaning
Among Long Trail users, the area of the former Griffith village quickly acquired a different name from the one Griffith had given it. "Old Job" — a piece of logging industry vernacular referring to an abandoned timber operation — attached itself to the site and persisted through decades of trail use, eventually becoming the formal place name for the area in guide book and USFS usage alike. The Old Job Trail that hikers follow today takes its name from this usage, as does the clearing at the former village site — "an extensive clearing where the village of Griffith once stood," in the guide book’s description — that marks the location of what was, for a quarter-century, a community of several hundred people in the Vermont mountain interior.
The name "Old Job" is more than informal trail slang. It captures something accurate about the site’s character: the emptied, overgrown remnant of industrial purpose, a place where a specific economic function ran its course and left its traces in the landscape. The Long Trail’s passage through this kind of landscape was not accidental. The USFS’s 1917 decision to route the trail along the old town road was a practical one — the road existed, was cleared, and reached the terrain the trail needed to cross — but it also meant that the trail’s earliest users in this section were walking through an industrial aftermath rather than a pristine wilderness. That experience, and the improvised shelter it generated, gave the first Griffith Camp its particular character.
Sources
- “S.L. Griffith..” Mt. Tabor–Danby Historical Society.. Accessed July 19, 2026. mtdhistoricalsociety.org/sl-griffith.
- Long Trail Guide Book 2nd Edition, 1920. 1920.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1921 (1921). Green Mountain Club. 26.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 4 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1922. Pp. 32.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 6 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1924. Pp. 39.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 6 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1924. Pp. 40.
