Shattuck Lodge belongs to the earliest generation of Long Trail shelters — built the same decade the trail itself was being cut — and its history is inseparable from that of one man, Fred W. Mould, who built it, enlarged it, maintained it for nearly forty years, and ultimately died on the trail that led to it. By the time the shelter it inspired, Beaver Meadow Lodge, was finished in 1946, Shattuck Lodge itself had already been abandoned to the woods.
A Logging Camp Converted, 1913
Shattuck Lodge began, like a surprising number of early Long Trail shelters, as someone else’s building repurposed for hikers. In 1913, Fred W. Mould and a few others converted an old logging camp in the Beaver Meadow basin, east of Whiteface Mountain, into one of the earliest shelters on the Long Trail — or at least near it. They named it after Shattuck, the logger who had originally run the camp:
“The GMC did have Fred Mould, however, who with others, converted a logging camp into one of the earliest Long Trail shelters in 1913. Named Shattuck Lodge after the logger, it later became Mould’s Lodge on a U.S. topographic map.”
— Long Trail News, Spring 1997, p. 6
Mould himself is said to have carried a stove in to heat the structure. A 2001 Long Trail News retrospective on the Sterling Section’s history adds a further detail on Mould’s role and the era’s spirit of volunteer trail work:
“The Sterling Section and the name Fred W. Mould were practically synonymous from the teens until just after World War II. Fred was a lifetime GMCer who operated a granite business in Morrisville until retiring in 1930. In 1913, Fred and a few others established one of the earliest shelters on the Long Trail, or at least near it — it was located just east of the present-day Beaver Meadow Lodge. They converted an old logging camp into what became known as Mould’s Lodge.”
— Long Trail News, Fall 2001, p. 31
Early guidebooks describe the shelter Mould built as compact but hospitable, reached by a side trail from the ridge:
“An unpretentious but cozy camp with bunks for twenty, a good-sized box stove and out-door fireplace for summer use, and simple cooking utensils. In case of stormy weather, it is worth visiting.”
— Long Trail Guide Book, 7th ed. (1928), p. 21
Walter Collins O’Kane’s 1926 trail guide Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains gave hikers the same shelter under both of its names, and located it precisely relative to the main Trail:
“This shelter, also known as Mould’s Shelter, was located 1.5 miles east of the main LT on a loop trail that descends into a valley known as Chilcoot Pass.”
— Walter Collins O’Kane, Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains (1926)
Guidebook mileage tables through the 1920s and ’30s locate the shelter consistently: a side trail of between 0.7 and 1.5 miles (the figure varies slightly edition to edition) leaving the main Long Trail at Chilcoot Pass, below Whiteface Mountain and the ridge running toward Madonna Peak, and descending into the Beaver Meadow basin. The shelter’s capacity is likewise given consistently across multiple guidebook editions as bunks for twenty — a somewhat larger figure than the shelter database’s own summary of “approximately 10 people,” a discrepancy this history cannot resolve beyond noting that the contemporary guidebooks are unanimous on twenty.
Mould’s Long Career on the Trail
Shattuck Lodge was only one project in a long volunteer career. Around 1922, Mould enlarged the shelter with help from family members and others — the shelter database’s history record credits this expansion directly to him. He had already helped cut the original Long Trail between Smugglers’ Notch and Johnson, and his name recurs in the Long Trail News for decades afterward. A December 1926 issue singled him out for yet another project, a different shelter entirely:
“That tireless worker, Fred W. Mould of Morrisville, has built a new cabin of balsam logs at Sterling Pond.”
— Long Trail News, December 1926
In 1931, Mould added his labor to the Long Trail Patrol’s construction of French Camp and Barrows Camp, and the Fall 2001 retrospective considers it likely — though not proven by any source found — that he also helped build the first Whiteface Shelter in the early 1920s. Mould’s contributions to the newsletter itself continued into his later years: a 1947 Long Trail News item recounts him clipping and mailing in a poem from the Burlington Free Press for the editor, a small but telling sign of how closely he kept up with the club’s affairs even after retiring from his granite business around 1930.
Death on the Trail, June 9, 1950
By the early 1950s, Mould — by then in his eighties — had spent essentially his entire adult life as a hiker, woodsman, and trail and shelter maintainer in the mountains of Vermont. He was known for a particular wish, repeated often enough to friends that it became a kind of epitaph in advance:
“His devotion to outdoor activity in the mountains of Vermont was evident in the statement he often repeated to friends: ‘I hope to die on the Long Trail.'”
— Long Trail News, Spring 1997, p. 6
On June 9, 1950, Mould got his wish. He and fellow GMC member Eugene L. Bamforth set out hiking toward Beaver Meadow Lodge, apparently intending to continue on to the summit of Sterling Mountain. It was, by the account preserved in Robert L. Hagerman’s unpublished History of the Sterling Section and retold in the Fall 2001 Long Trail News, an unlikely day for an octogenarian to be carrying a heavy pack:
“On June 9 that year Mould and another GMC stalwart, Eugene L. Bamforth, were hiking to Beaver Meadow Lodge and apparently planned to continue to the top of Sterling Mountain. Carrying a forty-pound pack, the diminutive octogenarian (he was five feet, two inches tall and weighed only 135 pounds) and his companion set out on what was a scorching hot day. Just short of the lodge, Mould sat down to rest. Moments later he toppled over and was gone.”
— Long Trail News, Fall 2001, p. 31 (quoting Robert L. Hagerman, History of the Sterling Section)
The same article reflected on the fittingness of how Mould died, and on the timing that let him see his life’s work carried forward before the end:
“It is fitting that a man like Fred would spend his last day on the trail. It is also fitting, and fortunate, that a man who devoted so much of himself to the Sterling Section died knowing that the section was in good hands. Fred’s son Henry became president in 1946. His main accomplishment was orchestrating the replacement of Mould’s Lodge with Beaver Meadow Lodge.”
— Long Trail News, Fall 2001, p. 31
Replaced by Beaver Meadow Lodge
The organization that would replace Shattuck Lodge had, in fact, already begun its work by the time Mould died. The present-day Sterling Section formed in 1946 when a group of Morrisville-area GMC members decided to build a successor to Mould’s Lodge:
“The present Sterling Section dates to 1946 when a group of Morrisville-area people decided to build a replacement for Mould’s Lodge on the Long Trail. Every Sunday from early May until fall, the group worked on what would later become known as Beaver Meadow Lodge.”
— Long Trail News, Spring 1997, p. 6
Shattuck Lodge closed around 1946, with the shelter database’s history record noting simply that the site “fell into disrepair and was eventually abandoned” once its replacement was ready — sited, fittingly, just west of where the old logging camp had stood. Fred’s son Henry Mould led the Sterling Section through this transition as its president, seeing his father’s shelter through to its replacement before the section itself entered a long period of decline: interest lagged through the late 1950s, saw a brief revival, and by 1970 the section was inactive. It was reestablished on September 24, 1970, at a meeting organized by Edmour Germain and Robert Hagerman that drew about thirty-five interested members, and the section has maintained the trail and its shelters — including, eventually, building Bear Hollow Shelter in 1991 to replace French Camp, one of the very structures Mould himself had helped build in 1931.
An Earlier, Tangled History of “Sterling Sections”
The 1997 Long Trail News retrospective makes clear that the Sterling Section which built Beaver Meadow Lodge in 1946 was not, strictly, a continuation of anything organized during Mould’s early years — despite sharing a name and a mountain. A Sterling Section had organized in Morrisville as early as 1911 to open a trail up Mount Elmore, unconnected to the GMC. In 1913 — the same year Mould converted the logging camp into Shattuck Lodge — a separate “Mount Sterling Section” formed in Johnson, opened a trail to the summit of Sterling Mountain, and built a shelter near the summit in 1915; that same year, volunteers opened the stretch of Long Trail between Sterling Pond and Johnson, and the official GMC Pathfinders Section was established at Johnson High School. None of these groups lasted: by the account preserved in the newsletter, no Morrisville-area section existed at all between 1916 and 1946. Through that entire gap, it was Fred Mould, largely working alone or with a handful of others outside any formal section structure, who kept Shattuck Lodge standing and the surrounding trails passable.
## Sources
- Long Trail News, December 1926 (Fred W. Mould’s balsam-log cabin at Sterling Pond).
- Long Trail News, August 1947, p. 5.
- Long Trail News, May 1961, p. 6.
- Long Trail News, Spring 1997, p. 6 (“A Sterling Section History,” by “Old Ridgerunner”).
- Long Trail News, Fall 2001, p. 31 (“Two Lions of the Sterling Section,” by “Old Ridge Runner”).
- Long Trail Guide Book, 1st ed. (1917).
- Long Trail Guide Book, 2nd ed. (1920), p. 12.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 4th ed. (1922), pp. 10, 12.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 5th ed. (1924), pp. 13, 15.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 6th ed. (1924), pp. 17, 19.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 7th ed. (1928), pp. 19, 20, 21.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 8th ed. (1930), pp. 14, 19.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 9th ed. (1932), pp. 51, 53.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 10th ed. (1935), pp. 50, 51, 52.
- Long Trail Guide Book, 11th ed. (1937), pp. 54, 55, 56.
- Walter Collins O’Kane, Trails and Summits of the Green Mountains (The Riverside Press, 1926), pp. 416, 419, 435.
- Robert L. Hagerman, History of the Sterling Section (unpublished), quoted in Long Trail News, Fall 2001, p. 31.
