Smugglers’ Notch Camp was a small wooden lodge that served hikers passing through Smugglers’ Notch in the years before the Green Mountain Club built a formal shelter system in northern Vermont. Its exact origins are obscure, and the camp left only a thin paper trail — a handful of photographs, a few lines in the Long Trail News, and an entry in the Long Trail Guide Book. But those traces, read alongside the broader history of the notch, suggest that the camp occupied a site that would eventually become the original Smugglers’ Notch State Park campground, and that its story ends with the land exchange of 1996 that transferred that ground to Stowe Mountain Resort.
The Notch and Its Early Travelers
Smugglers’ Notch is a narrow mountain pass through the Green Mountains of Vermont, separating Mount Mansfield on the west from Spruce Peak and the Sterling Range to the east. The pass sits at roughly 2,160 feet elevation, with cliffs rising nearly a thousand feet on either side. Its name comes from the illegal trade that flowed through it during and after President Jefferson’s 1807 Embargo Act, when northern Vermonters herded cattle and carried goods to and from Canada through the only convenient route available. During Prohibition in the 1920s, the same geography made it useful again.
The Long Trail entered the notch early. The trail’s first section through Smugglers’ Notch was among the first blazed with the now-standard white paint mark, and the 1917 first edition of the Long Trail Guide Book already listed Barnes Camp — a lumber camp operated by W.M. Barnes on the Stowe (south) side of the height of land — as a place where hikers could find "good accommodations, food, and lodging." Barnes Camp sat near the trailhead where the Long Trail crossed the road from the Stowe side. Travelers approaching from the north, through Jeffersonville and the Cambridge side of the pass, needed a comparable stopping point. Smugglers’ Notch Camp appears to have filled that role.
The 1920 Photograph
The earliest firm evidence of the camp is a lantern slide photograph taken in August 1920 by Herbert W. Congdon, a charter member of the Green Mountain Club and one of its most systematic early documentarians. Congdon photographed Long Trail facilities and routes across Vermont during the club’s first decades, and his collection — held in Special Collections at the Bailey/Howe Library, University of Vermont — is among the richest visual records of the trail’s early years.
The slide in question (UVM Landscape Change Program, LS14867) shows three figures on a dirt road in a forested landscape: Mr. and Mrs. Bigelow and their son Edson, dressed in hiking clothes and carrying knapsacks and walking sticks. Behind them, slightly uphill from the road, stands a wooden lodge with a front porch covered by a tin roof. Congdon’s original caption reads: "Smuggler’s Notch Camp. Mr. and Mrs. and Edson Bigelow Aug. 1920."
The placement of this image within Congdon’s "Long Trail photos and slides" series — not among his general Vermont photographs — strongly suggests the camp was known to and used by Long Trail hikers. Whether Congdon himself helped establish it, or was simply documenting a facility that predated the GMC’s formal shelter program, is not known. The camp was already standing and in use in the summer of 1920; how much earlier it may have been built remains an open question.
A Shelter in the State Forest
The camp continued to appear in Green Mountain Club publications through the early 1950s. The Long Trail News of 1951 (Vol. XV, No. 3) places "Smugglers Notch Camp" within Mount Mansfield State Forest, a designation that by then covered much of the terrain around the notch. The Long Trail News returned to the camp again in 1955. These references establish that the camp was still functioning as a hiking shelter into the mid-twentieth century — more than three decades after Congdon’s photograph — and that it had by then fallen within the boundaries of state-managed land.
The Long Trail Guide Book continued to carry an entry for the camp at least through the twentieth edition (1971), which lists the camp on page 61. This makes Smugglers’ Notch Camp a fixture of the Long Trail system for at least fifty years.
The CCC and the State Park Campground
The Civilian Conservation Corps arrived in the Smugglers’ Notch area in the mid-1930s. In 1936 the CCC constructed a picnic area in the notch, and in subsequent years built the Smugglers’ Notch State Park Campground: four remote lean-tos and a bathhouse, situated on the south (Stowe) side of the height of land, across Route 108 from what would later become the entrance to Stowe Mountain Resort. These four CCC-built structures were eventually listed on both the National Register of Historic Places and the State Register of Historic Places for their architectural significance.
The relationship between the original private Smugglers’ Notch Camp and the CCC campground is not documented in surviving records, but the sequence of events is suggestive. A private lodge existed in the notch in 1920. The state began developing the notch as a public recreation area in 1936. By 1951 the camp was described as being within Mount Mansfield State Forest. The most plausible reading of this sequence is that Smugglers’ Notch Camp was a private facility that the state eventually absorbed — either by purchase, donation, or simply by the expansion of state forest boundaries around it — and that the site became part of the state park campground complex. The CCC lean-tos may have been added alongside or in replacement of the original wooden lodge.
The Land Exchange and the End of the Original Campground
The state park campground occupied the Stowe-side site for decades, eventually expanding to 35 sites in the 1960s. In 1996 the Vermont Legislature authorized the Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation to enter a land exchange with Mt. Mansfield Company, Inc. (doing business as Stowe Mountain Resort): the state would convey up to 25 acres of the original campground site in exchange for 1,092 acres of Stowe Mountain Resort land in Stowe and Cambridge. A new campground was constructed across from Bingham Falls to replace the existing facility. As a condition of the exchange, the four historic CCC structures were physically relocated to the new campground site rather than demolished.
The original campground site — the ground on which Smugglers’ Notch Camp had stood, or near which it had stood, for more than seventy years — passed to Stowe Mountain Resort. The 2002 Mt. Mansfield State Forest Long-Range Management Plan, which governed the transition, documented the history and rationale of the exchange. The new campground opened around 2002–2003.
What Remains Unknown
The origins of Smugglers’ Notch Camp — who built it, when, and with what purpose — remain undocumented in any source yet located. The camp predates the CCC by at least a decade and a half. It may have been a private lodge built by a local landowner to serve hikers traveling through the notch from the Cambridge side, similar to the farms and lumber camps that served as informal Long Trail stopping points throughout the GMC’s early years. It may have had some formal connection to the GMC, given its appearance in Congdon’s systematic documentation. The full Herbert W. Congdon collection at UVM — particularly the August 1920 slides in carton three, box 3 — and the early Long Trail Guide Books held at the Vermont Historical Society (MSA 65, editions 1917–1922) would be the most productive places to look for answers.
Sources
Long Trail News, Vol. XV, No. 3 (1951). Green Mountain Club.
Long Trail News (1955). Green Mountain Club, p. 2.
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book, 20th ed. Green Mountain Club, 1971, p. 61.
Agency of Natural Resources, Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. Mt. Mansfield State Forest Long-Range Management Plan. State of Vermont, 2002. https://fpr.vermont.gov/sites/fpr/files/State_Lands_Administration/Lands_Management_Planning/Library/mansfieldplan.pdf
UVM Landscape Change Program, LS14867 ("The Bigelow’s Leaving Smugglers’ Notch Camp," August 1920, Herbert W. Congdon collection, Special Collections, Bailey/Howe Library, University of Vermont). https://landscape.uvm.edu/landscape_new/search/details.php?ls=14867
GMC Burlington, Long Trail System Shelter History (Barnes Camp). https://gmcburlington.org/barnes-camp/
Sources
- “LS14867 ("The Bigelow’s Leaving Smugglers’ Notch Camp," August 1920, Herbert W. Congdon collection, Special Collections, Bailey/Howe Library, University of Vermont). .” UVM Landscape Change Program. UVM. https://landscape.uvm.edu/landscape_new/search/details.php?ls=14867.
- Long Trail News 1955 (1955). Green Mountain Club. 2.
- Agency of Natural Resources Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. Mt. Mansfield State Forest Long-Range Management Plan . State of Vermont, 2002.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 20 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1971. Pp. 61.
