The story of Old Job Shelter begins with one of Vermont’s most ambitious industrial enterprises. Silas L. Griffith (1837–1903), a Danby-born entrepreneur with a knack for hard bargaining, built a sprawling lumber and charcoal empire across the Green Mountain forests of southern Vermont. By the 1880s he had assembled more than 50,000 acres of timberland across Mount Tabor, Danby, Dorset, Arlington, Peru, Manchester, and Groton.
At the heart of his operations in Mount Tabor, Griffith constructed a full company town — originally called "Mill Village," then "Griffith" — in a broad mountain clearing along the Black Branch watershed. At its height the settlement boasted forty to fifty structures: a steam-powered sawmill, four charcoal kilns, a school, a store, a boarding house for male employees, and a blacksmith’s shop with stables. To connect his nine scattered mills, Griffith installed what may have been Vermont’s first private telephone system, running some seventy miles of copper wire through the mountains. He was not content with lumber alone: the mill’s waste wood fed approximately thirty-five huge charcoal kilns that together produced about a million bushels of charcoal per year, fueling steel furnaces as far away as Lime Rock, Connecticut. The enterprise made Griffith the first millionaire in Vermont history.
The operation came at a human cost. Workers and their families were expected to trade at Griffith’s six company stores, cycling their wages back into his pocket. He forbade his employees from wearing watches, insisting they enjoyed working from dawn to dark. By the late 1890s, the surrounding forests were nearly exhausted. After Griffith’s death in San Diego on July 21, 1903, his business empire began to unravel: a disgruntled rival poisoned his fish hatchery, coal was displacing charcoal in the steel industry, and the remaining timberlands were sold off. By 1912 the town was wholly abandoned, its buildings vacant amid an enormous clearing and a century’s worth of sawdust.
The Long Trail Arrives: Griffith Camp
In 1917, the United States Forest Service routed the newly blazed Long Trail along the old Griffith town road, threading hikers through the ghostly clearing. The abandoned village became known among trail travelers as "Old Job" — the colloquial term for an old lumber-camp site — and the settlement’s derelict structures began serving an entirely new purpose. Hikers sheltering in the crumbling buildings gave this stopover the name "Griffith Camp," the first of the shelters to occupy the site. The 1920 edition of the Long Trail Guide Book described the location as "a once prosperous village, now only inhabited for a week or two in the autumn when the fern pickers camp there while getting ferns for shipments to the cities."
The Second Griffith Camp
As use of the site grew, the Killington Section of the Green Mountain Club constructed a purpose-built open camp in the Old Job clearing, with a rustic fireplace in front. This second Griffith Camp preceded the current shelter and was itself replaced by the CCC’s 1935 log structure on the same site.
The CCC Shelter, 1935
The third and defining shelter at the site arrived with the New Deal. The Civilian Conservation Corps — the public works army of young men assembled by President Franklin D. Roosevelt beginning in 1933 to put Depression-era workers into conservation projects — operated a camp at Peru, Vermont, whose crews worked extensively on the southern Long Trail. In 1935 the CCC’s Peru Camp built a log structure at the Old Job clearing, replacing the second Griffith Camp. Constructed on what was by then definitively called the Old Job site, the new shelter offered bunks for eight hikers in the style typical of CCC work along the Long Trail: simple, durable, and built with materials drawn from the surrounding second-growth forest.
Reconstruction, 1963
Records indicate that the shelter was substantially rebuilt in 1963, this time by the United States Forest Service. The reconstructed structure — a framed lean-to with floor space for eight — reflects the Adirondack open-face style that the Forest Service had adopted as standard for backcountry shelters during this period. Water was supplied from Lake Brook, which drains nearby Griffith Lake and runs adjacent to the shelter site.
The Long Trail Relocation and Declining Use
Old Job Shelter sat directly on the Long Trail — and on the Appalachian Trail, which coincided with the Long Trail through this section of Vermont — for nearly three decades after the CCC’s construction. The route ran along an old wood road through the valley, a lowland passage that, while historically significant, was notoriously wet and poorly suited to through-hiking. For years the approach to the shelter also required a ¾-mile walk along Route 10, a road corridor that clashed with the trail’s wilderness character.
In 1964, trail managers relocated the Long Trail between Griffith Lake and Baker Peak, shifting the route westward over higher, drier ground and eliminating the muddy wood road entirely. At a stroke, Old Job Shelter passed from a main-line trail stop to an off-route destination. Use of the shelter declined significantly following the relocation.
A Repository of Memory
Although removed from the main trail, Old Job Shelter has persisted as a place of layered history. The large clearing around the shelter still bears the traces of the nineteenth-century lumber town: stone foundations, the contours of old roads, and an enormous mound of century-old sawdust from Griffith’s mill. A notebook kept inside the shelter has accumulated old photographs, maps, and newspaper clippings documenting the industrial past of the area.
The former Long Trail route through Old Job remains as a maintained alternate route, available to hikers who want a quick low-elevation connection between Griffith Lake and Big Branch, or who wish to camp in the historic clearing. The shelter stands today as the third successive structure on a site that has served travelers — loggers, fern pickers, Long Trail hikers, and backcountry campers — for more than a century.
Sources
- GMC Annual Reports. Green Mountain Club. Pp. 15.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 0029 (29). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 3.
- Long Trail News 1943 (1943). Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 05 (1952). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 37.
- Long Trail News 1961 (1961). Green Mountain Club. 5.
- Long Trail News 1962 (1962). Green Mountain Club. 2.
- Long Trail News 1964 (1964). Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Long Trail News 1966 (1966). Green Mountain Club. 7.
- Long Trail News 1994 (1994). Green Mountain Club. 11.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 54 (2001). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 8.
- Long Trail News 2003 (2003). Green Mountain Club. 12.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 64 (2011). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 13.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 11 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1937. Pp. 22.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 12 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1940. Pp. 23.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 12 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1940. Pp. 23.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 13 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1947. Pp. 22.
- Green Mountain Club. Guide Book of the Long Trail. 16 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1960. Pp. 3.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 18 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1966. Pp. 28.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 19 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1968. Pp. 28.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 20 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1971. Pp. 30.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 21 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1977. Pp. 36.
- Woodward, Paul & Joanne. Long Trail System Shelter History. 2nd ed. Green Mountain Club, 1999. Pp. 49.
