Griffith Camp (2nd) was an open camp with a rustic fireplace, stove, and bunks for twenty-four persons, built in 1924 by the Killington Section of the Green Mountain Club at the site of the former company town of Griffith — the abandoned lumber and charcoal settlement known among Long Trail users as "Old Job" — in Mount Tabor, Vermont. It was the first purpose-built Long Trail shelter at this location, replacing the informal use of the old company town’s surviving buildings that had served early hikers since approximately 1920. Sited where the lumber road crossed Roaring Branch, in the large clearing that still marked the former village’s footprint, the camp stood near present-day USFS Road 10 just east of the current Long Trail crossing. It was announced in the Green Mountain News in December 1924 and formally described in the supplement to the sixth edition of the Long Trail Guide Book in July 1927. The camp served Long Trail hikers through the late 1920s and early 1930s, a period during which Willis M. Ross of Rutland maintained the trail section between Buffum Pond (the former name for Griffith Lake) and the camp. In 1935 the Civilian Conservation Corps built the Old Job Shelter — the third shelter at this location — and Griffith Camp (2nd) was superseded. The structure no longer stands.
The Old Job Clearing
By 1924, the former village of Griffith had been abandoned for roughly a dozen years. The cleared ground that Silas Griffith’s Green Mountain Lumber Company had opened up from 1888 onward — the mill yard, the streets between cabins and homes, the space around the boarding house and school — had not yet fully returned to forest, and a substantial opening remained where the village had stood. The old lumber road still ran through this clearing, crossing Roaring Branch before continuing through the mountain interior. Stone foundations, perhaps the sawdust pile already accumulating its patina of age, and the outlines of former structures still defined the site in the early 1920s.
The Long Trail passed through this clearing on the route the USFS had established along the old town road in 1917, and the combination of open ground, a road crossing, and proximity to water made the Old Job clearing a natural stopping point. Walter Collins O’Kane, writing in Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains (1926), captured the scene as hikers would have encountered it: the club shelter at what was once the deserted village of Griffith, positioned where the lumber road crossed Roaring Branch, "where many buildings occupied a large clearing." By then the new camp had already been standing for two years; O’Kane’s description confirms both its location and the persistent character of the former village site — a clearing in the forest that bore the ghost-traces of an industrial community that had existed within living memory.
The Killington Section Builds a Camp: December 1924
The transition from improvised shelter — the abandoned company buildings of the first Griffith Camp — to a purpose-built facility was announced in the Green Mountain News in December 1924. The announcement described the new structure in terms that capture the Killington Section’s ambition for the site: "The Killington section has built an open camp in Mt Tabor with a rustic fireplace in front, at what is called the ‘old job’, where the village of Griffith once stood."
The phrase "rustic fireplace in front" signals the camp’s design philosophy. The open camp — a three-sided structure open at the front — was one of the standard forms of Long Trail shelter in this period, and the addition of a fireplace at the open face was a distinctive feature that made the structure both more comfortable for extended stays and more socially suited to the camp experience of the era, when a fire in front of the shelter was as much a gathering point as a heat source. The camp’s setting in the Old Job clearing gave it an unusually spacious situation compared with shelters tucked into denser forest: the open ground of the former village provided views and air that few comparable Long Trail camps could offer.
By the time the supplement to the sixth edition of the Long Trail Guide Book was issued in July 1927, the camp had been standing for three years and its description had become more specific: "The new camp is located in the deserted town of Griffith. It is an open camp with stove, fireplace, and bunks to accommodate 24 persons." The capacity of twenty-four made it one of the larger facilities on the Long Trail at the time — a reflection of the site’s suitability for substantial groups rather than just individual through-hikers, and perhaps also of the Killington Section’s sense of the clearing’s potential as a destination and gathering point rather than merely an overnight waypoint.
The Camp in Use: Late 1920s
The seventh edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1928) listed the camp on multiple pages — at pages 43, 44, and 46 — indicating it was a reference point for hikers approaching from different directions in the guide’s route descriptions, a sign of the camp’s centrality to this section of the trail. The eighth edition (1930) continued the listing. Long Trail News for 1928 and 1929 documented activity at the camp and in its section of the trail, confirming that the facility was in regular use and that the surrounding trail was receiving maintenance attention.
It was during this period that Willis M. Ross of Rutland became a key figure in the management of the trail section in which Griffith Camp stood. The Long Trail News for 1929 recorded that Ross oversaw trail maintenance in the section running from Buffum Pond — the old name for Griffith Lake, just north of the camp — to Griffith Camp itself. The section between these two points is a short but significant stretch of the Long Trail, passing through the Old Job clearing and connecting the lake’s trail junction to the main ridge route south. Ross was a Rutland-area figure of some standing in the GMC’s section maintenance network: in the same year, the Worcester Section built a shelter at Stratton Pond and named it Willis Ross Camp in his honor, attributing the naming to "the efforts through which many miles of Long Trail were built." The coincidence of this recognition with his documented maintenance work at Griffith Camp in 1929 suggests that the late 1920s represented the height of his active involvement in the section.
The Open Camp Form
The design of Griffith Camp (2nd) — an open camp with stove and fireplace, bunks for twenty-four — placed it within the mainstream of Killington Section shelter construction in the 1920s. The open camp model, which the GMC built at numerous locations along the southern Long Trail during this decade, represented a deliberate middle ground between the entirely improvised shelters of the trail’s earliest years (abandoned farmhouses, company town buildings, charcoal kilns) and the more substantial enclosed structures that would follow in the CCC era. Open to the elements at the front but roofed and sided on three sides, with sleeping platforms and a fireplace that provided both warmth and light, the open camp was well-suited to the hiking culture of the 1920s — a period of rapid growth in Long Trail use and parallel rapid growth in the GMC’s institutional capacity to build and maintain dedicated shelter infrastructure.
The addition of a stove alongside the outdoor fireplace gave the Griffith Camp a degree of cooking and heating capability unusual for such structures, and the capacity for twenty-four persons — likely organized as two rows of bunks along the side and back walls — made it the functional equivalent of a small hostel rather than a minimal overnight shelter. Its location in the Old Job clearing, on flat cleared ground near water, with the old lumber road providing reasonable access, made it a practical destination for larger organized parties as well as individual hikers.
