At 4,241 feet, Killington Peak is the second highest summit in Vermont, a commanding presence in the central Green Mountains above the city of Rutland. Its views are extraordinary — to the west the Taconic Range and, on clear days, the Adirondacks beyond Lake Champlain; to the north Pico Peak and the long ridge of the Greens stretching toward Camel’s Hump and Mansfield; to the south and east the rolling country of the upper Connecticut watershed. It was the western panorama that drew visitors most consistently, and it was for that view, as much as for the mountain air itself, that Killington’s first hotel was built.
The carriage road era on Killington began in earnest in 1879, when citizens of Rutland raised money to build a horse-and-carriage road from Wheelerville, climbing some 3,000 vertical feet over four miles to the summit. The project was completed quickly, and by June 17, 1880, Vincent C. Meyerhoffer — who had previously entertained guests in a rustic cabin near the peak — had enlarged his accommodation into a proper hotel. Killington House, as it came to be known, had rooms for thirty or forty guests, stables, sheds, annexes, and porches. An 1886 history of Rutland County called it "more ambitious than the original hotels on either Mansfield or Camel’s Hump."
Meyerhoffer’s enterprise drew a steady clientele through the 1880s and 1890s. Rutlanders made the ten-mile journey by night to arrive before dawn and climb to the rocky summit for a sunrise; poets wrote rapturously about the views; visiting journalists compared the mountain favorably with anything in New England. In 1888 Meyerhoffer paid $500 to purchase 324 acres of land at the summit, expecting that a proposed electric railway would extend his trade. The railway never materialized. As the automobile began to replace the horse-and-buggy, the carriage-road era faded, and by 1901 Meyerhoffer had sold his property to M. E. Wheeler of Rutland for $2,000. The hotel trade on Killington came to an end by 1910.
With its closure, the buildings on the Killington summit "soon felt the ravages of storms and porcupines while picnickers used parts for fuel and other scavengers helped themselves to the timbers." A fire may have finished off what remained in 1915 or 1916. What was left — a cellar hole, some collapsed walls, and the westward view that had always been Killington’s finest feature — became the setting for one of the most consequential nights in Vermont outdoor history.
A Miserable Night: The Origins of the Long Trail
In 1908 James P. Taylor, a schoolmaster at Vermont Academy in Saxtons River who made a practice of taking students on mountain rambles, led a group of boys up the washed-out carriage road to Killington Peak. The only shelter available was the collapsible kitchen ell of the ruined Killington Mountain House. The night that followed was memorable for all the wrong reasons.
"All through the dark hours whole tribes of porcupines came out to gnaw the ancient grease of the kitchen floor, squealing and scrabbling about without let up in spite of yells and flung boots. Sunrise revealed further casualties; an overturned kettle, and mangled asparagus stalks strewn about Killington’s rocky summit."
The following morning Taylor attempted to guide his party along a ridge toward Pico Peak, only to find no trail through the dense brush. The expedition was a failure by conventional measures. But the experience on the summit — the miserable accommodation, the animal ravages, the absence of any trail connecting the peaks — lodged itself in Taylor’s mind.
The summer of 1909 found Taylor on the side of Stratton Mountain, waiting for the mist to clear and reflecting that only eight trails led to Vermont’s mountaintops. He had walked the Black Forest hiking trail in Germany and knew what a connected system of mountain paths could offer. He began to conceive of a trail that would link Vermont’s peaks from one end to the other. On March 11, 1910, Taylor convened the meeting at which the Green Mountain Club was formed, with himself as its first president. The resulting Long Trail, 265 miles from the Massachusetts border to Canada, would eventually pass over both Little Killington and Killington peaks — and, in doing so, would bring the summit of Killington into the orbit of organized trail hospitality for the first time since the hotel had closed.
BKillington Camp: The Metal Huts
As the Long Trail was built southward through the central Greens during the 1910s, the Green Mountain Club erected a round metal hut on Killington Peak near the site of the old hotel, providing the first purpose-built shelter for Long Trail travelers on the summit. By the time of the Club’s second edition guidebook in 1920, "Killington Camp" was listed as an established facility, comprising an open camp and a round sheet-metal hut equipped with bunks, a stove, and cooking utensils.
The camp’s location near the ruins of the old hotel gave it a distinctive character. The hotel’s foundation and collapsed walls served as a windbreak and gathering place; a very fine spring nearby provided water. The westerly views that had made the hotel so celebrated in the carriage-road era were still available from among the ruins, and Long Trail hikers in the 1920s found themselves looking out over the same panorama that had drawn Rutland’s society visitors forty years before.
The metal huts presented certain challenges from the outset. The Killington summit is exposed, and the fury of the elements — ice storms, wind, the long winters of the central Green Mountains — worked on the thin sheet-metal construction with relentless effect. Equally destructive were the human visitors who arrived not as hikers but as picnickers, building fires in or near the huts and burning the bunks in lieu of firewood. By the fourth edition guidebook of 1922, the facility was described somewhat differently, reflecting the attrition the camp had already suffered. The sixth edition of 1924 described the camp as a round sheet-metal hut with a stove — simpler than the original description, suggesting that components had been lost or damaged.
The porcupine, that most persistent antagonist of Vermont mountain shelters, also took its toll. The same animal that had tormented James Taylor’s party in the hotel ruins sixteen years earlier proved equally troublesome to the metal huts, gnawing at wood components, food, and anything that had absorbed human scent or grease. The mountain’s elevation and isolation made regular maintenance difficult, and by the mid-1920s the facilities at Killington Camp were in need of supplementation if not replacement.
The Porky Shelter and the Caretaker Era
In 1926 a second structure was added to the summit complex: a stone shelter that came to be known, with some dark humor, as the "Porky Shelter" — an acknowledgment of the porcupine problem that had plagued the metal hut and of the hope that stone construction might better resist the animal’s attentions. With the Porky Shelter’s completion, Killington Peak had two huts, and the Killington Section of the Green Mountain Club, based in Rutland, began to develop a more organized approach to summit hospitality.
The most significant development in this direction came in 1927, when the Killington Section placed a caretaker in the two huts on Killington Peak. The caretaker was Edward Cooper, son of Charles Paine Cooper, who had served as the third president of the Green Mountain Club from 1917 to 1925 and was one of the Club’s most tireless early workers — a "painter of signs whose paint-spattered jacket was known the length of the trail," as one account described him. Edward Cooper came to the summit prepared to furnish blankets and food for all comers.
The terms of the arrangement were carefully calibrated to make the summit accessible to as many hikers as possible. No charge was made for lodging to Club members; a nominal fee was asked for the use of blankets; and food was sold at a small advance on cost. The service represented an important shift from the earlier self-service ethic of the Long Trail’s shelter system toward something more like organized mountain hospitality — a miniature version, in the Green Mountains, of the staffed mountain huts common in the Alps.
The logistics of the operation were not trivial. Blankets, food, and supplies had to be carried up the mountain on the backs of the caretaker and his assistant, as no road access remained to the summit. Every egg, every tin of beans, every woolen blanket had to travel on foot from the valley below. The arrangement demonstrated both the ambitions of the Killington Section and the physical commitment the position demanded of whoever held it.
The End of the Metal Huts
Despite the caretaker arrangement and the addition of the stone Porky Shelter, the metal hut at the core of Killington Camp could not survive the combined assault of altitude, weather, and human interference. The Long Trail News for July 1927 recorded the situation candidly: the stone construction of additional facilities had become necessary "because of exposure to the fury of the elements and the destructive efforts of vandals and hedgehogs, which combined to wreck the metal hut."
The phrase is worth pausing over. "Hedgehogs" was the colloquial Vermont term for porcupines, and the image it conjures — of wind and ice on one side and relentlessly gnawing porcupines on the other, with human vandals completing the destruction from within — captures something essential about the conditions facing early Long Trail shelters at high elevation. Wood was burned; metal was corroded and bent by ice; stone seemed the only material that might outlast the combined forces arrayed against any structure on the Killington summit.
By the early 1930s the original Killington Camp facilities were effectively superseded. The stone Porky Shelter continued to provide some accommodation, but it too would eventually succumb to the mountain’s elements. The need for a substantial, permanent structure — one that could withstand the summit winters and the attentions of both wildlife and the occasional destructive visitor — had become clear to the Killington Section and to the Green Mountain Club more broadly.
Cooper Lodge: A Stone Memorial
Construction of a replacement facility began in the summer of 1938. The new structure was to be a substantial stone and wood lodge, large enough to sleep twelve, positioned about one-tenth of a mile above the site of Killington Camp on the slope leading toward the summit. The September 1938 hurricane — one of the most severe storms in New England history — interrupted construction and damaged work already completed, delaying the project by a full season.
The lodge was completed in the summer and fall of 1939 by workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps Plymouth Camp, under the direction of the Vermont State Forestry Department. The CCC, established as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, had been engaged throughout the decade in trail and shelter construction across Vermont’s Green Mountains; their work on the Killington summit was among the most demanding, given the elevation and the need to transport stone and materials to the site. The finished structure had a large fireplace, bunks, and storage, and accommodated ten persons with considerably more comfort than any of its predecessors.
Charles Paine Cooper — for whom the lodge was named — had died on March 15, 1936, at the age of 68, while hiking with his daughter Frances in Maywood, Illinois. He had been born in Michigan in 1868 and had come to Rutland in 1907, where he became involved in community life while working as a Silo Manager for the Creamery Package Manufacturing Company. He served on the Rutland Board of Aldermen, the Rutland Playground Committee, the Vermont Boy Scout Council, and the Rutland Rotary Club. As GMC’s third president, he had helped to clear many miles of the Long Trail and painted trail signs the length of the route. The lodge built at the summit where his son had once served as caretaker was a fitting memorial to a man who had spent decades making Killington’s mountains accessible to others.
The Charles P. Cooper Memorial Lodge was formally dedicated on June 2, 1940. It stands today as the highest shelter on the Long Trail, at approximately 3,850 feet on Killington Peak — above the cellar hole of the Meyerhoffer hotel, above the site of the metal huts, above the spot where James P. Taylor’s party had a sleepless night among the porcupines thirty-two years before. The mountain that had, in a roundabout way, given Vermont its Long Trail would now shelter those who walked it.
Sources
- Long Trail Guide Book 1921 (1921). Green Mountain Club. 23.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1921 (1921). Green Mountain Club. 22.
- "Long Trail News." , no. July (1927).
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 2 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1920. Pp. 22.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 2 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1920. Pp. 21.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 4 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1922. Pp. 28.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 4 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1922. Pp. 29.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 5 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1924. Pp. 31.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 6 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1924. Pp. 38.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 6 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1924. Pp. 35.
