The first Laura Woodward Shelter stood for roughly a quarter century near the northern end of the Long Trail in Division 12, not far from Jay Peak. Built in the summer of 1930 as part of the final push to complete the Long Trail, it was a log camp with an open front, stone fireplace, and bunks for six to eight — and it ended dramatically in August 1955, when it burned to the ground.
Laura Woodward
The shelter bore the name of one of the Green Mountain Club’s most committed early members. Laura Woodward was a charter member of the New York Section of the GMC, joining in October 1916, just a year after the Club’s founding. She served as president of the New York Section from 1927 to 1929, leading day hikes and overnight outings throughout the summer and snowshoe trips in winter. In 1929, the Club voted her a life membership in recognition of her contributions to the organization and the Long Trail. The Long Trail News (Spring 1995) described her simply as a "pioneer supporter of the Long Trail project" — the same phrase used in every guidebook edition that carried the shelter’s name.
In 1932, two years after the shelter was built and used, members formally named it the Laura Woodward Lodge in her honor.
Building the Final Miles: Summer 1930
By the late 1920s the Long Trail was nearly complete, but a stretch in the far north — Division 12, through the remote Jay Peak country — still needed to be cut. Roy O. Buchanan and his family had blazed the route, but the physical work of clearing and opening the trail remained.
In the summer of 1930, the GMC hired a party from the University of Vermont to finish the job. The crew was headed by two faculty members: Charles G. Doll, a geologist, and Phillips D. Carleton, an English instructor. The two men and their crew spent three months almost entirely camped in the woods — an extended wilderness immersion that Laura and Guy Waterman, in Forest and Crag (1989), described as the defining effort to open the last ten miles of the Long Trail.
The UVM party did more than cut trail. During those three months, they also built Laura Woodward Shelter from logs on the ridge at 2,800 feet, creating one of the northernmost shelters on a nearly-complete trail. The 9th Edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1932), the first to list the shelter, described it as: a log camp, open front, stone fireplace, with water and bunks for 6 or 8.
A photograph from 1930 shows Carleton and Doll together at the shelter site — two academics who spent a summer as trail builders, leaving behind both a path and a place to sleep.
Twenty-Five Years of Service
Laura Woodward Shelter served hikers on the northern Long Trail from 1931 through 1955 — a quarter century in which the Long Trail itself grew from a newly-completed route into an established institution. It appeared in successive editions of the Long Trail Guide Book and, after the GMC’s Adopt-A-Shelter program was established, was eventually listed among the shelters available for adoption. Its location near Jay Peak made it an important waypoint in Division 12, the final division before the Canadian border.
The shelter appears in the Club’s fire records as the tenth Long Trail shelter known to have burned — a list that, by the time Paul and Joanne Woodward compiled the Long Trail System Shelter History in 1999, totaled twenty-nine structures, representing roughly twelve percent of all GMC shelters ever built.
The Fire: August 1955
The shelter burned in August 1955. The GMC learned of it through a letter, dated August 9th, received at the Club office from P. S. Skell and S. S. Marsden, two hikers from Pennsylvania State University. They had arrived at the shelter to find the remains still smoldering. The two men put out the fire, then walked to the nearest camps north and south to post notices warning other hikers that the shelter was gone.
No cause of the fire was recorded in the available sources.
Replacement
The Long Trail Patrol built a replacement on the same site in 1956. A lumber road on the east gave construction crews access to the ridge, reducing the total cost to $386.14. The second Laura Woodward Shelter was an open log lean-to sleeping eight, with water at a spring 200 feet north along the Long Trail — a slightly larger and more accessible structure than its predecessor. It carried the same name and the same designation: a memorial to one of the Club’s pioneer supporters, located at the same elevation where Doll and Carleton had camped and built a quarter century before.
The 1966 Long Trail News, cataloguing all new shelters built in the decade since 1955, listed it simply: "Laura Woodward Shelter, 1956. Long Trail Patrol, replacement of burned Laura Woodward Shelter (1931)."
Sources
- Long Trail Guide Book. 9th Edition ed. Green Mountain Club, 1932.
- Long Trail News 1935 (1935). Green Mountain Club. 3.
- Long Trail News 1938 (1938). Green Mountain Club. 4.
- Long Trail News 1955 (1955). Green Mountain Club. 1.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 9 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1932. Pp. 62.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 9 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1932. Pp. 59.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 10 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1935. Pp. 58.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 11 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1937. Pp. 62.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 12 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1940. Pp. 65.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 14 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1951. Pp. 56.
- Laura and Guy Waterman. Forest & Crag. 1989.
- Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999. Pp. 60.
