Silas L. Griffith was born in Danby in 1837 and spent his life transforming the mountain landscape of southern Vermont into personal fortune. Beginning with a general store in his home village — which was already valued at $48,000 by the time he was twenty-seven — Griffith expanded into land acquisition, timber, and ultimately charcoal manufacture on a scale that had no precedent in Vermont. He acquired more than 50,000 acres across the towns of Mount Tabor, Danby, Dorset, Arlington, Peru, Manchester, and Groton, often through foreclosure, and built nine lumber mills across his holdings, each with a small settlement to support it.
In Mount Tabor he constructed a full company town called Griffith — later known as Old Job — complete with a school, store, boarding house, blacksmith, stables, charcoal kilns, and a steam-powered sawmill, comprising forty to fifty buildings in all. To connect his scattered operations, he installed what is believed to have been the first private telephone system in Vermont, running seventy miles of copper wire between his mills and his main office. By 1872 he had converted his waste timber into charcoal through thirty-five large kilns producing approximately a million bushels a year, fueling steel furnaces in Lime Rock, Connecticut. The revenue made him Vermont’s first millionaire.
At the height of this empire, Griffith maintained a private retreat at the lake above his company town. The lake — which appears in historical sources as both "Griffith Lake" and "Lake Griffith" — bore his name in recognition of his ownership of the surrounding land. The retreat stood on a knoll on the west shore, visible from the water, and was substantial enough to support gas lighting. Photographs held by the Mount Tabor–Danby Historical Society show the house with what appears to be a gas street lamp, a horse barn with Silas Griffith’s surrey standing beside it, family members in rowboats on the lake, and a social gathering — the lake in its prosperous years was clearly a place of leisure for the family and their guests.
The Lake House as Retreat and Trail Resource
The precise date of the lake house’s construction is not documented in available sources, but its connection to the peak of Griffith’s success places it most plausibly in the 1880s or early 1890s, when his charcoal operations were at their height and Mount Tabor’s population was near its maximum. The stage coach road that Griffith’s operations required for moving goods between the valley and the mountain interior served equally as the carriage road to the lake — the same route that the Green Mountain Club would later designate the Lake Trail, measuring 3.5 miles from Route 7 in Mount Tabor.
When the Long Trail came through this section — a date not precisely established but consistent with the GMC’s approximate listing of the house as a shelter from around 1890 — the lake house was available as a resource for hikers moving through the high country between the Danby–Peru divide and the terrain around Peru Peak to the north. The house stood on the west shore, accessible via a side trail that led around the lake from its north end, where the Long Trail and several other paths converged. A spring of water located south of the house provided the essential water supply. The barn on the property, a working element of the retreat’s infrastructure during Griffith’s tenure, persisted longer than the house and served eventually as the only shelter the property could offer.
The Long Trail Through Griffith Lake
The Long Trail passes along the east shore of Griffith Lake on its route through the southern Green Mountains, running north from the Big Branch area and the terrain around Baker Peak and Styles Peak toward Peru Peak and ultimately the Bromley Mountain area to the north. The lake junction served historically as the meeting point for multiple routes: the Lake Trail from the west (the old carriage road from Route 7 in Mount Tabor), the Old Job Trail descending south and east to the former company town site, and the AT/LT continuing north toward Peru Peak Shelter, 0.7 miles further along the main ridge.
This concentration of trails at the lake’s north end made the Griffith Lake area a natural stopping and staging point for Long Trail travelers, and the presence of the lake house on the west shore — even after it had ceased to be a functioning private retreat — gave hikers a nominal shelter option that the guide book listed through the years of the structure’s slow decline. The 1932 ninth edition was explicit about the state of the house: it was "now falling to ruin," a description that suggests the listing was retained partly out of inertia and partly because the barn remained a functional fallback. The note about the spring south of the house indicates that the water source, at least, remained reliable.
The route from Route 7 to the lake — the Lake Trail, 3.5 miles — follows the old stage coach road that once connected Griffith’s mountain operations to the Danby valley. The Forest Service description of this approach from Forest Road 58 in Peru notes that the trail "once an old carriage road, meanders through a scenic mixed hardwood/softwood forest," with gradual inclines and a beaver pond at 0.5 miles; the lake and the AT/LT junction lie 2.0 miles in. The approach from the Old Job Trailhead on Forest Road 30 in Mount Tabor — still part of the same carriage road — covers 3 miles with 850 feet of elevation gain, following Lake Brook. These are the same roads that Griffith’s workers, horses, and eventually hikers traveled across four generations.
Decline and Abandonment: 1903 to 1932
Silas L. Griffith died on July 21, 1903, at his fruit ranch in San Diego, California. His business empire, which had been sustained entirely by his personal energy and control, collapsed rapidly after his death. The remaining timberland in Mount Tabor was sold to the Emporium Lumber Company; a competitor poisoned his fish hatchery; and the charcoal industry was already giving way to coked coal. Within two decades, the company town of Griffith was abandoned. The abandoned buildings and mills were burned as hazards or moved; charcoal kilns were torn down; railroad sidings pulled up. The United States Forest Service ultimately acquired much of the land, which now supports second-growth forest. The former company town site — Old Job — is marked today only by stone foundations and a century-old sawdust pile.
The lake house followed the same trajectory. Separated from the active management that a private retreat requires, and no longer part of any operating enterprise, the building deteriorated through the first three decades of the twentieth century as the forest reclaimed the cleared land around it. By 1932 — nearly thirty years after Griffith’s death — the Green Mountain Club’s guide book recorded the terminal condition: "now falling to ruin." The barn, a simpler and more durable structure, survived longer and retained at least nominal utility for emergency shelter. The spring persisted regardless of the house’s condition. But the Griffith Lake House as a functioning shelter had reached the end of its usefulness.
3 The Carriage Road Legacy
The physical legacy of the Griffith era that persisted most durably was not any building but the road network. The carriage roads that connected Griffith’s mills, his company town, and his lake retreat to the valley below became, after the industrial operations ended and the Forest Service acquired the land, the access routes used by hikers, and eventually by the snowmobilers and trail runners who use them today. The Lake Trail designation formalized a route that had existed for industrial purposes before the Long Trail was blazed through the area.
By 1989, the carriage road to the former Griffith Lake House site had become badly eroded, with hikers encountering major and minor stream crossings and areas of difficult terrain — conditions documented in the Killington Section’s Smoke and Blazes newsletter (no. 42, 1990, p. 3). The erosion reflects the natural progression of an unimproved mountain road through wet Vermont terrain in the absence of the maintenance that Griffith’s operations would have required. The road that carriages once traveled to a gas-lit lake house on a mountaintop had become a demanding backcountry approach requiring attention to water crossings and unstable ground.
The modern Griffith Lake campsite operates through an altogether different model than the Griffith Lake House era: a USFS and GMC–managed facility with tent platforms, a lean-to shelter, composting toilets, and a seasonal on-site caretaker, with a $5 overnight fee and water requiring treatment from the lake. The lake is stocked annually with brook trout by helicopter — a technical solution to the access problem that Griffith’s carriage roads once solved more laboriously and, in the end, more permanently.
Sources
- “Lake Retreat of the Griffiths..” Mt. Tabor–Danby Historical Society. Accessed July 19, 2026. mtdhistoricalsociety.org/lake-retreat-of-the-griffiths.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 0077 (77). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 42 (1990). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 3.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 9 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1932. Pp. 21.
