By the mid-1920s, the Green Mountain Club’s trail-building effort had pushed northward through central Vermont and into Lamoille County. The Long Trail through the Sterling Range and the Johnson-Waterville corridor was among the later sections to be developed, and when it arrived, the Club faced a familiar challenge: where would hikers sleep?
In the early years of the Long Trail, the Club relied heavily on existing structures — old lumber camps, hunting cabins, farm outbuildings, and the occasional purpose-built lean-to — to shelter hikers along the route. The terrain around Johnson and Waterville was no exception. Somewhere near the Johnson-Waterville Upper Road, about a quarter mile north of the road itself, stood an old camp that someone had fitted up with bunks. Its history before the Long Trail is unrecorded — whether it had been a hunters’ camp, a farm outbuilding, or some other structure, we do not know. But by 1924, when the sixth edition of the Long Trail Guide Book was published, it had been pressed into service as a Long Trail shelter. The arrangement was informal in the way characteristic of the era: the camp was not built or owned by the Green Mountain Club, but use was granted to the Club by whoever held title. This was a common pattern in the early Long Trail system, where the Club maintained a patchwork of owned, leased, and permissively used shelters across the length of Vermont.
The camp appears in the Long Trail Guide Book under the singular spelling "Honted House Camp" — not "Haunted," as one might expect, but "Honted." Some later sources do render the name as "Haunted House Camp," and the Green Mountain Club’s Burlington Section notes that the two spellings coexist in the historical record. Whether the original spelling was a phonetic rendering, a typographical idiosyncrasy, or a deliberate variant is not known. The name itself suggests a structure with a reputation: a place that felt eerie or uncanny to those who encountered it, perhaps long-abandoned before the Club began using it, perhaps simply remote and shadowy in the mountain forest. The northern Vermont hills had long been associated in local folklore with spirits and strange occurrences, and an old, unoccupied camp in a lonely spot would have invited such associations. Whatever the exact origin of the name, it lodged itself in the Long Trail’s historical record in its "Honted" form — a small orthographic mystery that has outlasted the camp itself by nearly a century. O’Kane’s 1926 map of the Long Trail region marks the location of the camp, providing one of the few contemporary cartographic records of its position relative to the trail and the Johnson-Waterville Upper Road.
Seven Years of Use
Between 1924 and 1931, Honted House Camp served as a waystation for Long Trail hikers moving through the Sterling Range section. It appeared in successive editions of the Long Trail Guide Book, indicating that the Club regarded it as a functioning part of the shelter network during those years. The 7th edition of the guidebook (1928) still listed it, though with an ominous annotation.
In August 1929, a Long Trail hiker named E.P. Dickinson passed through and took note of the camp’s condition. His verdict, preserved in the guidebook’s notes, was blunt: the camp was in very poor condition. By this point, seven years of use without the benefit of Club ownership or systematic maintenance had taken their toll. The structure, already old when the Club began using it, was deteriorating faster than the informal arrangement could address. "Aug. ’29 in very poor condition. Noted by LT hiker, E.P. Dickinson."– Long Trail Guide Book, 7th Edition, 1928 Dickinson’s observation captures a moment that must have been familiar across the Long Trail system in those years: the gap between the pace of the trail’s expansion and the Club’s capacity to maintain the infrastructure it depended on. A borrowed camp was better than no camp at all, but borrowed camps required the goodwill of their owners and the durability of their structures — neither of which could be counted on indefinitely.
Abandonment and Replacement
The ninth edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1932) recorded what E.P. Dickinson had seen coming: Honted House Camp was abandoned in 1931. The decision was likely not a difficult one — a structure in very poor condition, not owned by the Club, with no clear mechanism for repair or upkeep, had reached the end of its useful life.
What makes the timing significant is what replaced it. In 1931, the same year Honted House Camp was abandoned, Barrows Camp was constructed nearby, also near the Johnson-Waterville Upper Road. Built on the Barrows farm for which it was named, the new camp was a purpose-built frame structure with bunks for twelve, a nearby spring, and good views of the Sterling Range. It was constructed with help from Fred Mould, a prolific trail and shelter builder in the Sterling area who would become something of a legend in this part of the Long Trail. Barrows Camp’s simple design served as a prototype for subsequent shelters in the region, and it remained in service until 1994.
The replacement of Honted House Camp with Barrows Camp illustrates a broader transition in the Long Trail shelter system during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Club was moving away from improvised and borrowed structures toward purpose-built, Club-owned shelters with defined standards. In 1934, the Committee on Requirements for Long Trail Buildings would formalize this shift with an official decree distinguishing shelters, lodges, and camps by design and capacity. Honted House Camp belonged to the earlier, more improvisational era — a transitional fixture that served its purpose and was superseded by something better.
Sources
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 6th ed. Green Mountain Club, 1924. P. 16.
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 7th ed. Green Mountain Club, 1928.
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 9th ed. Green Mountain Club, 1931.
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 9th ed. Green Mountain Club, 1932. P. 54.
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 11th ed. Green Mountain Club, 1937. P. 57.
O’Kane, Walter Collins. Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains. The Riverside Press, 1926.
Long Trail News. Green Mountain Club, 1935. Vol. 3.
Long Trail News. Green Mountain Club, 2005. Vol. 31.
Ridgelines (Burlington). Burlington Section, Green Mountain Club, 1980. Vol. 4.
Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999. P. 54.
Green Mountain Club, Burlington Section. "Honted House Camp." Long Trail System Shelter History. gmcburlington.org, 2023.
Green Mountain Club, Burlington Section. "Barrows Camp." Long Trail System Shelter History. gmcburlington.org, 2023.
Photo of Haunted House Camp (1931): gmcburlington.org/honted-house-camp/
