About 1880, Joel F. Grout and his sons developed a prosperous lumber complex in Stratton, known as the Grout Job, on the old Hawkes and Wetherbee site. The Taft and Stewart Mill, the Dufresne Job and the Upper Tudor Mill also brought jobs to Stratton during the last decade of the 19th Century
The Grout family dominated this area and in the first decades of the 20th Century, logger families living at the Grout Job on the East Branch of the Deerfield accounted for a third of Stratton’s population. The complex there included a large boarding house, barns, a school, the mill and various outbuildings. This area is now covered by forest and the last of the Grout Job’s old outbuildings was intentionally destroyed by the National Forest in the Fall of 1999
The Grout Job
This mill site was located on a prime site along the East Branch of the Deerfield River. Before it became the property of the Grouts, this site was the location of various milling operations. These operations included: Hawkes and Wetherbee Mill: Daniel Wetherbee and Benjamin Hawkes, both of Leominster, Massachusetts purchased this site – part of 5L8R – from Atherton Hall on August 22, 1801 and described as being about 200 feet from the road, which leads from Samuel Boutell’s over the mountain (the Sunderland Rd. – now the Stratton-Arlington Rd.), beginning about 100
feet west of the bridge (across the East Branch of the Deerfield River). It was a one-acre lot west of the river and north of the road. Hall sold this lot on the
condition that Wetherbee and Hawkes build a sawmill on the land within one year and they must keep it in repair for two years. They apparently did just that. Daniel sold his half of the rights to Bezaliel Lawrence of Leominster on May 22, 1802, and eventually resettled in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Benjamin returned to Leominster and sold his half of the rights to Daniel Newhall on September 17, 1802. This mill site was mentioned in a deed in
Grout Job and the Long trail
Grout Job was never an official Green Mountain Club shelter, but rather an abandoned lumber camp that early Long Trail hikers occasionally used for emergency refuge. It appears in Long Trail literature between 1917 and 1930, after which it disappears from guidebooks as the site fell into complete abandonment.
The 1st Edition of the Long Trail Guide (1917) identifies Grout Job as a former lumbering center located on a branch of the Deerfield River, roughly five miles north of the Massachusetts border. The camp had originally been the permanent headquarters of S. B. Hawks, a regional lumber operator. At the time, the buildings were still standing and “fully equipped,” though access required obtaining a key from Griswold’s Store in Bennington, Vermont—a reminder that this was a private industrial site, not a GMC facility.
By the mid‑1920s, Walter A. O’Kane’s 1926 guide noted that one or more buildings at the Grout Job lumbering center remained capable of providing emergency shelter, but emphasized that “there was no Club camp at this location.” The GMC neither maintained the structures nor encouraged hikers to rely on them, as their condition varied and they were remnants of a declining logging operation.
By the 8th Edition of the Long Trail Guide (1930), the situation had changed: the guidebook explicitly states that Grout Job was abandoned. The buildings were no longer considered usable, and the site ceased to appear as a recommended stopping point. As the Long Trail became more formally developed in the 1920s and 1930s—with purpose‑built shelters replacing ad‑hoc lodging—former lumber camps like Grout Job were gradually removed from official trail descriptions.
Today, Grout Job survives only as a brief footnote in early Long Trail history, representing the era when hikers often relied on logging camps, private cabins, and industrial remnants before the GMC established a consistent shelter system.
Sources
- Long Trail Guide Book. 1st Edition ed. Green Mountain Club, 1917.
- D.K. Young. The History of Stratton Vermont to the End of the 20th Century.
- Walter O’Kane. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. 1926.
