Johnny Seesaw’s is a lodge on Vermont Route 11 in Peru, roughly a half-mile east of Bromley Mountain, with a history that stretches from a Russian immigrant’s dance hall in the 1920s to one of southern Vermont’s most storied inns. The property’s connection to the Long Trail begins in 1938, when two skiers purchased the abandoned building and reopened it as a year-round hiker and ski lodge. The 12th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1940) listed it as an "excellent all-the-year-round Lodge" with "comfortable quarters and provisions for hikers." In 1978 the GMC held its annual meeting at nearby Bromley and used Johnny Seesaw’s as the official lodging venue; it appeared again as recommended lodging at the club’s 2007 annual meeting. The lodge also holds a secure place in American ski history: in February 1940, at a dinner at Johnny Seesaw’s, Charles "Minnie" Dole and fellow veteran skiers drafted a letter to the War Department proposing a military unit trained in mountain combat — the correspondence that eventually led to the formation of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division. The original building was razed in 2018 and rebuilt as Seesaw’s Lodge, which continues to operate on the same Route 11 property. (GMC ID 000330)
Setting: Peru and the Route 11 Corridor
Peru is a small mountain town in Bennington County in the southern Green Mountains, chartered in 1761 as "Brumley" by Royal Governor Benning Wentworth and renamed in 1804 after the gold-rich South American country. The first sawmill was built in Peru the same year as the renaming; logging and milling became the dominant industry for more than a century. The town’s steep, rocky terrain made agricultural success difficult, and by the early twentieth century, as the timber industry declined, the local economy was struggling.
Vermont Route 11 — once the Peru Turnpike, a toll road through the Green Mountains — runs east-west through the town, crossing the Long Trail approximately six miles east of Manchester Center. The road had been incorporated into the Vermont state highway system in 1931, transforming a regional toll route into a through corridor accessible to automobile travelers. Johnny Seesaw’s sits on the north side of that road, a short distance east of where the trail descends from Bromley Mountain.
The Long Trail crosses Route 11 at a point the GMC’s early guides called part of the "Ideal Tour" — a designated circuit combining driving and hiking. Auto stages ran daily through the crossing. Bromley Lodge, built by the Manchester Section in 1933, stood just north of the highway. The corridor was also served, from 1932 through the late 1930s, by the Oliver La Chance Tourist Camp — a small cottage operation just east of the trail crossing that offered food and lodgings to hikers. By 1940, when the 12th edition of the guide book was published, it was Johnny Seesaw’s — further east on the road — that had taken over that role for the GMC’s hikers.
Origins: The Wonder View Log Pavilion (1924–1932)
The land on which Johnny Seesaw’s stands has a documented history as an inn site going back to 1805, when Benjamin Barnard Jr. bought the property for $400 and built a log house and barn that reportedly became a tavern. The property passed through various hands over the following century before arriving at its most consequential owner.
John Ivan Sesow — born Kryill Sessof near Minsk, Russia, in 1887 — arrived at Ellis Island in 1913 and eventually settled near Somerset, Vermont, south of Stratton Mountain, where the landscape was said to remind him of his former home. He worked for the Deerfield Lumber Company until he was laid off in 1924, when the collapse of the logging and milling economy had a "disastrous impact" on the area, in the words of the National Register of Historic Places nomination form. Buying the Peru property that year, Sesow and his wife Vinnie built the Wonder View Log Pavilion — a log dance hall and speakeasy designed to capitalize on the demand generated by Prohibition. The Sesows offered dancing and music along with homemade wine and bootlegged liquor; spirits were available to-go, concealed in maple syrup cans colored with burnt sugar. The main structure was a 1½-story saddle-notched log building with a broad gabled roof, built by Sesow and friends from the lumber camps using only hand tools — its design said to be modeled on the Russian izba.
The speakeasy did well for a time. Business began declining as the Great Depression deepened. The Sesow family moved from Peru in 1932, defaulting on loans they had taken out on the property. The buildings stood abandoned. In that same year — 1932 — Charles Lindbergh is reported to have visited the property to escape public attention following the kidnapping and murder of his son, withdrawing to this remote mountain site during one of the most intensely publicized criminal cases of the era. The property was foreclosed in 1933.
The Ski Lodge Era: deSchweinitz and Parrish (1938–1974)
While the Wonder View buildings sat empty, Vermont was reinventing itself. The federal government established the Green Mountain National Forest in 1932. The Civilian Conservation Corps cut the first downhill ski trail on Bromley Mountain in 1933, and Bromley Mountain Ski Resort opened in 1936 under Fred Pabst. Visitors from New York, Boston, and Albany began arriving in the mountains, drawn by the new skiing economy.
At the encouragement of his mother, Lew deSchweinitz — an avid skier who recognized the potential of the Sesow property — purchased it along with his brother-in-law Bill Parrish. They opened the lodge on December 26, 1938, and were fully booked within days. The establishment was called "Johnny Seesaw’s" — "Johnny" being an anglicization of Ivan, "Seesaw" a loose phonetic rendering of Sesow — in tribute to the man who had built the original structure. The lodge was run by deSchweinitz’s sister Mary and her husband Bill Parrish.
The new operation moved quickly to integrate itself into the surrounding community. Johnny Seesaw’s needed electricity; the lodge’s requirements drove the introduction of electrical service to the area in 1939. By 1940, the 12th edition of the Long Trail Guide Book listed it in the index under Peru and described it in the trail narrative as "the excellent all-the-year-round Lodge, ‘Johnny Seesaw’s,’ with comfortable quarters and provisions for hikers" — located 2½ miles east of the Long Trail crossing on Route 11.
The lodge attracted a remarkable range of guests in its early decades. Charles Lindbergh, who had reportedly first visited the property in 1932 when it was still the Wonder View, returned. Commander Whitehead — the "Schweppervescence" advertising figure — came in the 1950s. Gerald Ford came in the 1960s before his presidency. Julia Child came in the 1970s. These famous visitors were the visible surface of a lodge that also employed and fed and housed several generations of local families from Peru, South Londonderry, and the surrounding hill towns.
During the Second World War, the lodge demonstrated an unusual combination of commercial resilience and moral seriousness. On the commercial side: in 1941 the Parrishes established the High Mountain Farm on the inn property, producing milk, eggs, meat, and produce that allowed the lodge to remain open and fed during the war years. "Ski trains" continued to bring tourists from the cities into Manchester and the surrounding mountains despite gas rationing. On the moral side: when a Chinese philosopher and author, Lin Yutang, was mistaken by a fellow guest for Japanese and treated with hostility, the innkeepers were so disturbed by the incident that they instituted a policy requiring all new patrons to be recommended by a known guest — "to ensure equal access for those…who were tolerant of all races and creeds," as the National Register nomination form records. The policy was a quiet, private form of social control in an era when such things were rarely formalized in Vermont’s mountain inns.
A Footnote to Military History: The 10th Mountain Division
In February 1940, Charles "Minnie" Dole — founder of the National Ski Patrol and an early champion of the idea that the United States needed a military unit trained in mountain and winter warfare — was at Johnny Seesaw’s for a gathering of veteran skiers. That evening, at dinner, Dole and a colleague named Langley discussed the growing likelihood of American involvement in the war in Europe and decided to act. They drafted a letter to the War Department offering the services of their respective organizations in the nation’s defense. That letter initiated a chain of correspondence and advocacy that eventually led to the formation of the 10th Mountain Division — the army unit that fought in the Italian Alps in the final campaigns of the European war.
The decision was made on a winter evening in a log lodge on a Vermont mountainside. That context — a room full of people who understood cold, altitude, and snow from direct experience — was not incidental to what was decided there.
The GMC Annual Meetings: 1978 and 2007
In 1978, the GMC held its annual Memorial Day weekend meeting at Big Bromley Ski Area in Peru — the first time in several years the meeting had come to southern Vermont. Johnny Seesaw’s served as the official lodging venue for the gathering. The February 1978 Long Trail News described it as an inn on Vermont 11 "about a half-mile east of Big Bromley," offering a 15-bunk room for men and several four-bunk rooms for women at $6.00 per night per person, including linens and a full breakfast. Reservations required a $5.00 deposit by May 20. The May 1978 issue repeated this information for those who had not yet booked. The same telephone number — 802-824-5533 — was printed in both issues; it would still be the lodge’s number thirty years later.
The 2007 GMC annual meeting was held at Hildene in Manchester, and the Spring 2007 Long Trail News listed "Johnny Seesaw’s Country Inn, Peru, (802) 824-5533, www.jseesaw.com" alongside a dozen other lodging options in the area. By 2007 the lodge was well established as a country inn, its original ski lodge character having been supplemented by a full roster of seasonal activities and a dining room with a loyal local following.
Ownership Changes and Decline (1974–2014)
Lew deSchweinitz retired from the business in 1974. Mary and Bill Parrish helped transition the property to new owners, who struggled to maintain the guest volume the lodge had known. The property changed hands again in 1975. In 1980, Gary Okun and his wife Nancy purchased it, becoming what the lodge’s own historical account describes as "great stewards of Seesaw’s in the modern era, operating seven days per week, always bustling with locals and out-of-towners." The 1980s and 1990s were a period of renewed community life at the lodge — local families like Kelen LaPan’s, whose grandmother and mother had worked there in the deSchweinitz era, returned as staff. LaPan met her husband working as a waitress in the 1980s and held her wedding reception at Seesaw’s in May 1981.
The restaurant closed permanently in 2014. By this time the original log building had deteriorated badly; much of the structural wood had rotted, and the building was out of code.
Demolition and Rebirth (2015–2018)
In 2015, Ryan Prins of Arlington-based JS LLC purchased the property at auction, along with business partners John Eastman and Dave DiDomenico — families with long connections to Peru and to Seesaw’s as patrons. Prins initially bought it "just based on value," he told the Chester Telegraph, not fully aware of the property’s history. "Over time, I ended up learning about the history, and what this place meant to everybody here."
The original restaurant building was demolished on January 29, 2018. Structural salvage recovered historic logs, the round fireplace, and the "seducerie" mural (the bandstand area where, by local tradition, many marriage proposals had been made). The National Register designation — awarded in 2008 — was lost when the original structure came down; a reconstructed building cannot hold a designation based on the original fabric.
The rebuilt Seesaw’s Lodge opened in 2018, featuring three cabins, a main lodge building, a 60-seat restaurant under the name "Johnny Seesaw’s," an event barn, and a warming hut fashioned from an old sugaring house moved from a nearby farm. The distillery that had operated on the property in the 1920s was revived in the basement of the restaurant. The floor wood, furniture, and architectural details salvaged from the original building were incorporated into the new construction. The telephone number — 802-824-5533 — remained in service.
Sources
- History ofJohnny Seesaw’s.” Wikipedia*. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Seesaw%27s]
- Long Trail Guide Book. 12th ed. Green Mountain Club, 1940.
- "GMC Annual Meeting announcement; Johnny Seesaw’s lodging details." Long Trail News, 1978. Green Mountain Club. 11.
- "GMC Annual Meeting follow-up; Johnny Seesaw’s lodging." Long Trail News, 1978. Green Mountain Club. 14.
- "GMC Annual Meeting lodging listings; Johnny Seesaw’s Country Inn." Long Trail News, 2007. Green Mountain Club. 7.
- Madigan, Cherise. “Johnny Seesaw’s razed to rise again.” Chester Telegraph, 2018.
