Hapgood Pond Forest Camp began as a small, weedy, largely unused body of water — the kind of place easy to walk past without a second look. What it became, over the course of a single Depression-era building season, was a public beach and picnic ground that has drawn Vermonters and Long Trail hikers alike for nearly ninety years. Its story belongs as much to the Civilian Conservation Corps and the founding of the Green Mountain National Forest as it does to the pond itself.
Four Camps and a New Forest
The Green Mountain National Forest was still young when the CCC arrived in Vermont. President Herbert Hoover signed the proclamation officially establishing the forest on April 25, 1932, driven by demands for a steady timber supply, watershed protection, and recreation:
“Green Mountain National Forest created thanks to Vermonters’ persistence. By 1928 planning for the forest was begun. Finally on April 25, 1932, President Herbert Hoover signed the proclamation officially establishing the Green Mountain National Forest. Demands for a steady supply of timber, the protection of the state’s watershed, and recreation led to creation of the Green Mountain National Forest.”
— Long Trail News, August 1982, p. 3
Within a year of that proclamation, the Civilian Conservation Corps had established a presence across the new forest. Four CCC camps operated within its bounds during the Depression — at Danby, Peru, Rochester, and Weston — and their crews, working under local men serving as foremen, reshaped a striking amount of the region’s public infrastructure in a few short years: building roads, maintaining the Long Trail itself, laying out ski trails at Bread Loaf and Bromley, and improving timber stands and stream flow. Their built legacy included the Greendale Recreation Area north of Weston, the White Rocks Picnic Area east of Wallingford, and picnic grounds at Texas Falls and at Hapgood Pond.
The CCC’s imprint on the Long Trail itself has proven durable. Guidebook entries across the decades credit the Corps directly with building several backcountry shelters still associated with the Trail — Griffith Shelter and Old Job Shelter, both log structures built in 1935, and Peru Peak Shelter, also built in 1935 and later rebuilt by the Youth Conservation Corps in 1979. Mad Tom Notch Shelter was built in 1934 “by the CCC for the U.S. Forest Service.” Even the logs used to build the later Spruce Peak Shelter were cut from a stand in Peru, Vermont that the CCC had planted in the 1930s — the trees themselves part of the Corps’ reforestation work, decades before they became lumber. By 2009, only two of these CCC-built shelters remained standing on the Trail, a reminder of how much of that original work has since been replaced or retired even as the forest around it endured.
Building the Pond
Hapgood Pond’s transformation was complete by 1936. The CCC crews raised the water level with a new dam, brought in sand and gravel to create a proper beach, and built a bathhouse and pavilion on what had been, by every account, an unremarkable site. A 1936 photograph in the Forest Service’s own record captures the bathhouse as first built — ten booths, with plans already underway for a larger replacement the following year — and a companion image from May 1937 shows the finished camp drawing day-trippers to its shaded lakeside sites.
The transformation was significant enough that a well-known Vermont writer devoted a newspaper column to it. Vrest Orton — a printer, book designer, and writer based in Weston who had spent much of the mid-1930s publicly advocating for the preservation of the Green Mountains — described what the CCC had accomplished at Hapgood Pond in terms that read almost like wonder at what public works could achieve for so little cost to the individual visitor:
“The people of Vermont now have a lovely pond and beach surrounded by well-kept green slopes in the midst of a beautiful forest.”
— Vrest Orton, quoted in the Hapgood Pond Forest Camp history
Orton’s column did not stop at description. He posed a pointed question about what might have happened to the little pond under different circumstances — one that has aged well as a defense of public land, and of the CCC’s particular model of development:
“What kind of place would this little pond have been had some promoter bought it, sold out concessions and opened the place for profit?”
— Vrest Orton
Orton’s interest in Vermont’s wild places was not a passing one. As early as April 1936, the Long Trail News was reporting on his advocacy for organized conservation:
“Vrest Orton, of Weston, Vt., famed for its playhouse and community house, printer, designer of choice books, typographical expert and writer, says that the fight to preserve the Vermont wilderness has just begun… He advocates the formation of an association of those interested in the preservation of the Green Mountains and adjacent forests in their natural condition.”
— Long Trail News, April 1936, p. 4
He continued making that case in the Rutland Herald the following year, and later served on and eventually chaired the Vermont Historic Sites Commission in the mid-1950s, and was for a time an editorial associate of Vermont Life magazine alongside Walter Hard and Arthur Wallace Peach — a career spent, in various forms, arguing for the value of Vermont’s shared landscape and history.
Gerald S. Wheeler
The Hapgood Pond history singles out one figure above all others as central to the Green Mountain National Forest’s founding and to the pond’s own development: Gerald S. Wheeler, a U.S. Forest Service official based in Rutland. The archival record confirms Wheeler was a real and long-serving presence in the Green Mountain Club’s own affairs, though it does not independently corroborate the fuller claim of his role in establishing the forest itself — that attribution rests on the Conrad source cited in the official history, and no additional Forest Service account of his specific contribution to the forest’s founding, or to Hapgood Pond’s development, turned up elsewhere in the newsletters and guidebooks searched for this narrative.
What the record does show is a man deeply embedded in the club’s leadership through the 1940s and 1950s. Guidebooks from the era list him plainly by his day job:
He was elected a GMC trustee in 1945, to complete the unexpired term of a resigning member, and by 1954 sat on both the Trails and Shelters Committee (chaired by Roy Buchanan) and chaired the Conservation Committee himself. His trustee term appears to have concluded around 1955, when another member was elected to fill out his remaining time. No obituary or formal tribute to Wheeler was found in the sources searched, leaving his fuller biography — and the specifics of exactly what “instrumental” meant in his work at Hapgood Pond — outside what the archive can confirm.
Fifty Years, and Counting
Hapgood Pond quickly became a fixture of Green Mountain Club outings, appearing on section trip calendars within just over a decade of its completion. A July 1947 outing listing places it alongside Clarendon Shelter, Buffum Shelter, and Stratton Pond as a standard section destination. A 1950 account captures the pond doing exactly the job it was built for:
“On August 14th, 20 members and friends visited Hapgood Pond. Some young and hardy souls went swimming in the ice cold water while others visited. After tramping around and inspecting the park… the group had a picnic and then left for a pretty ride home.”
— Long Trail News, May 1950, p. 3
A 1954 account describes a similarly idyllic scene: “picnicking, swimming, and boating were in full progress in glorious unbroken sunshine,” while a rainier 1957 hike paired a visit to Hapgood Pond with a stop at Mad Tom Shelter. Guidebooks of the period used the camp as a fixed point of reference for hikers navigating the surrounding trail network, noting it lay 2.5 miles east of Mad Tom Notch Shelter — a distance and orientation repeated essentially unchanged across guidebook editions from the 1950s into the 1980s.
The pond’s connection to the forest’s own founding came full circle in 1982, when the Green Mountain National Forest marked its fiftieth anniversary with a celebration held at the site the CCC had built exactly to showcase what the young forest could offer the public:
“Harry made note of the highly successful 50th anniversary party held for the Green Mountain National Forest at Hapgood Pond. Everyone had a great time, and the occasion was graced by the presence of Vermont’s elder statesman, George Aiken.”
— Long Trail News, November 1982, p. 6
Recreational use has continued essentially uninterrupted into the twenty-first century. A 2007 Annual Meeting camping guide still listed “Hapgood Pond Recreation Area (GMNF), 10 miles northeast, Peru,” with a Forest Service reservation line, alongside the CCC’s other surviving showpiece, the Greendale Campground near Weston. A 2018 Killington Section outing report describes a group racing to claim one of the pond’s gazebos for a hot dog roast, only to find another party had beaten them to it with a strategically placed cooler — a small, cheerful sign of a public recreation area doing, eighty-some years on, exactly what it was built to do:
“Hapgood Pond and campground is a Green Mountain National Forest recreation area, which is located east of Manchester. The swimming area is nice and there is a pleasant loop trail around the Pond for hiking.”
— Smoke and Blazes (Killington), 2018
No closures, storm damage, or major incidents at Hapgood Pond turned up anywhere in the seventy years of newsletters searched for this history — only a long, steady record of picnics, swims, and cookouts, generation after generation, at the pond a 1930s newspaper column once wondered whether some private promoter might otherwise have fenced off for profit.
Sources
- Long Trail News, August 1945, p. 1.
- Long Trail News, April 1936, p. 4.
- Long Trail News, February 1937, p. 4.
- Long Trail News, 1947, p. 2.
- Long Trail News, August 1949, p. 2.
- Long Trail News, May 1950, p. 3.
- Long Trail News, 1951, p. 6.
- Long Trail News, August 1954, pp. 2–3.
- Long Trail News, November 1954, p. 3.
- Long Trail News, 1955, p. 1.
- Long Trail News, November 1957, p. 4.
- Long Trail News, August 1982, p. 3 (Green Mountain National Forest founding).
- Long Trail News, November 1982, p. 6 (50th anniversary party).
- Long Trail News, 1999, p. 13.
- Long Trail News, 2002, p. 16.
- Long Trail News, Spring 2007, p. 7 (camping/lodging guide).
- Long Trail News, Winter 2009 (CCC shelter renovation).
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington), 02 (1949), p. 5.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington), 04 (1951), p. 8.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington), 10 (1957), p. 25.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington), 63 (2010), p. 6.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington), 71 (2018), pp. 6, 9.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington), 72 (2019), p. 10.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 13th ed. (1947), p. 71.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 14th ed. (1951), p. 64.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 15th ed. (1956), p. 19.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 16th ed. (1960), p. 27.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 17th ed. (1963), p. 28.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 23rd ed. (1985), p. 37.
- David E. Conrad, The Land We Cared For: A History of the Forest Service’s Eastern Region (1997).
- Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History, 2nd ed. (1999), p. 51.
