The Stratton Mountain Fire Warden’s Cabin is a small wood-frame structure near the summit of Stratton Mountain in Windham County, Vermont. Built in 1928 by the Vermont Timber Owners’ Association and the Vermont State Forestry Department, it was erected approximately 100 feet from the fire lookout tower that stands at the summit. It is the second fire-spotter’s cabin to have occupied Stratton Mountain — the first being Manicknung Cabin (GMC ID 000213), which preceded it during the era of the Stratton Mountain Club. Despite surviving decades of harsh mountaintop winters and outlasting a newer, larger cabin built beside it in 1970, the 1928 structure still stands today with few changes from its original construction.
Setting: Stratton Mountain Summit
Stratton Mountain, at 3,940 feet, is the highest peak in southern Vermont and carries the Long Trail across its wooded summit plateau. The summit has long offered what the Long Trail guidebooks called "the finest view from the southern part of the Trail, including parts of New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York, as well as most of southern Vermont." To the south lie Grout Pond and Somerset Reservoir; to the west, Stratton Pond. On clear days, the views extend to Mount Greylock in Massachusetts, Monadnock in New Hampshire, and Killington Peak to the north.
The mountain lies almost entirely within the Green Mountain National Forest, though in the early twentieth century most of it was privately held timber land — a fact that made fire detection both economically urgent and logistically complicated.
Origins: Forest Fire and the Vermont Fire Warden System
The cabin’s origins lie in a century-old crisis of Vermont’s forests. Poor logging practices at the turn of the twentieth century, combined with the rapid expansion of the timber industry, created conditions for catastrophic wildfire. In 1903, thousands of acres of Vermont forest burned. The disaster prompted the creation of a network of town fire wardens in 1904, but losses continued: in 1908, nearly 16,000 acres burned. State legislation in 1910 authorized fire patrols and state-employed watchmen at stations created by private landowners.
The first fire lookout on Stratton came in 1914, when the Stratton Mountain Club — a local hiking organization founded in 1912 — partnered with the Vermont State Forestry Department to build a 60-foot steel tower at the summit. The tower was partially destroyed in a winter storm in 1920–21, but the remains continued in service. The Stratton Mountain Club, alongside timber interests and local residents, drove this effort; fire protection of the mountain’s valuable woodlands was the project that turned the club from a handful of hikers into a serious community organization.
The Vermont Timber Owners’ Association (later known as the Vermont Timberland Owners’ Association) had a direct financial stake in these forests. When it came time to house the fire-spotter permanently, the Association co-funded construction of a new cabin with the Vermont State Forestry Department.
The 1928 Cabin
On June 19, 1928, Vermont’s Commissioner of Forestry, Robert M. Ross, approved the design specifications for the new fire-spotter’s cabin. Ross was a seasoned forester: he had served as Deputy State Fire Warden based in Jamaica, Vermont, before his appointment in 1917 as Assistant Vermont State Forester, and he served as Commissioner of Forestry from 1924 to 1928. His design called for thoroughly dried, matched pine boards; two windows; a door; a roof engineered for heavy snow loads; a six-inch stovepipe hole protected with galvanized iron; and a double-boarded floor for insulation.
Leon Stocker of Wardsboro was hired to build the cabin. His contract price was $150.
The resulting structure was small — what later sources would call a "little fire-spotter’s cabin" — but stout enough to survive a mountaintop environment that would eventually defeat a much larger building. It was placed approximately 100 feet from the fire tower, close enough for practical use but clear of the tower’s footprint. A photograph from 1928 captures "Fire-Spotter’s Cabin resident Marge Holman" at the cabin in its first year of operation.
Descriptions of the cabin appeared immediately in GMC guidebooks. The 9th edition of the Long Trail Guide (1932) noted: "At the top are the Fire Warden’s cabin and a steel tower. This tower was erected by the Stratton Mt. Club and is at present maintained by the State Forestry Dept."
The Fire Tower: Old and New
The original 1914 tower underwent repairs documented in the Vermont Forest Service’s biennial report of 1930–32. The following report cycle, 1932–34, announced something more substantial: the construction of several "new steel towers with stairs and glass enclosures," including the present tower on Stratton. The construction was carried out during 1934 by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), created the previous year by the Roosevelt administration. Perry H. Merrill, director of the CCC in Vermont, credited the organization with putting "Vermont’s state recreational development ahead by 50 years."
The CCC’s Stratton work included erecting a new 55-foot Aermotor steel tower and installing a new telephone line from the mountain to West Wardsboro — four miles down the slope to the Stratton-Arlington Road, where it connected to a party line shared with the Fort Orange Boy Scouts at Grout Pond and the Town Clerk’s office.
In 1936, the old tower was razed. The Vermont Forest Service’s 1936–38 report records the work tersely: "Razed old tower. Improved camp — lined interior. Graded area around tower and camp." Twisted and broken remains of the old structure are still visible in the woods near the present tower. Some pieces are stenciled "Robert M. Ross, Deputy State Fire Warden, Jamaica, Vt." — the shipping address used when the original tower components were delivered to Wardsboro Station on the now-abandoned West River Railroad, the closest rail point to Stratton at the time.
From 1935 onward, guidebook descriptions updated to reflect the new CCC tower. The 10th edition (1935) and every edition through the 14th (1951) used nearly identical language: "At the top are the Fire Warden’s cabin and a new steel tower, erected and maintained by the State Forestry Department."
The tower was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992.
Post-War Improvements
After World War II, a series of modest upgrades made the cabin more functional for year-round fire-watching:
1951–52: A new sink was installed, along with additional cupboards and shelves, a new woodshed, and an outhouse.
1953–54: The telephone system was upgraded to two-wire dialing service.
1955–56: The roof was covered with sheet aluminum to better shed the mountain’s heavy snow loads.
A storage addition was documented in the Vermont Forestry Department’s 1957–58 biennial report, though it may have been built somewhat earlier.
The 1970 Log Cabin
In 1970, the State of Vermont built a second, larger cabin on the Stratton summit, placed between the 1928 cabin and the fire tower. The structure was a prefabricated log cabin produced by Green Mountain Cabins of Chester, Vermont. Construction ran from July through September 1970 under Junior A. Harwood, supervisor of Vermont Fire District #4.
The cabin’s purchase came with a logistical surprise. Green Mountain Cabins had guaranteed "free delivery to the site ‘anywhere in Vermont’" — and the contract was signed by all parties before the company discovered that the delivery site was the top of Stratton Mountain. They honored their guarantee.
The 1970 cabin was considerably larger than the 1928 original, but it did not outlast it. As D.K. Young wrote in The History of Stratton, Vermont: "And so, with only a few changes from its original construction in 1928, the little fire spotter’s cabin still stands today, outlasting another log cabin that had been constructed in 1970."
The Cabin Today
Vermont’s network of staffed fire lookout towers wound down in the latter decades of the twentieth century as aerial surveillance took over wildfire detection. The Stratton tower was eventually decommissioned as an active state fire station. The 1928 cabin passed into GMC stewardship and has served hikers and caretakers since. As Paul Woodward noted in a personal communication, the cabin was "surely occasionally used by hikers and or caretakers at time over the years of their existence."
Recent work has kept the structure in good repair. The Ridgelines newsletter of the Burlington Section (Spring 2024) noted the completion of several shelter projects during the 2023 field season, including the Stratton Mountain Cabin. The cabin is documented in a 2019 photograph and a 2023 painting by Jim Robertson.
Sources
Green Mountain Club (GMC). GMC Shelter Database, Shelter ID 000214: Stratton Mountain Fire Warden’s Cabin.
Green Mountain Club (GMC). GMC Shelter Database: Downloaded History, Shelter ID 000214.
Unknown Author. The History of Stratton, Vermont. Green Mountain Club. p. 318.
D.K. Young. The History of Stratton, Vt.
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide, 7th ed. 1928. p. 51.
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide, 9th ed. 1932. p. 18.
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide, 10th ed. 1935. p. 15.
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide, 11th ed. 1937. p. 19.
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide, 12th ed. 1940. p. 19.
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide, 13th ed. 1947. p. 19.
Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide, 14th ed. 1951. p. 19.
Paul Woodward. Personal communication. (Date unknown.)
Ridgelines (Burlington Section, GMC). Spring 2024. p. 6.
National Historic Lookout Register. "Stratton Mountain Lookout." http://nhlr.org/lookouts/us/vt/stratton-mountain-lookout/
