Taft Lodge is the Long Trail’s founding shelter in more than one sense — the oldest structure still standing on the trail, the highest at 3,650 feet, and for over a century the almost inevitable stopping point for anyone climbing toward Mount Mansfield’s Chin. Its history runs through a probate judge who all but willed it into existence, a benefactor who never once set foot inside it, a caretaker’s son who slept nearby as a boy and decades later paid to rebuild it, and a volunteer restorer who called the job his lifelong dream.
Clarence Cowles and the Trails to the Chin
Before Taft Lodge existed, hiking on Mount Mansfield’s northern end meant staying at the Summit House hotel, reached by toll road, or at the smaller Half Way House on the Underhill side — there was no direct trail from the base of the mountain to the Chin. Burlington attorney Clarence P. Cowles was one of the mountain enthusiasts who explored from those hotels, and when James P. Taylor convened the first meeting of the Green Mountain Club in 1910, Cowles attended and signed on as a charter member. Over the next seven years he personally cut the original Long Trail from Mount Mansfield to Camel’s Hump and helped extend it south to Middlebury Gap — work that, on its own, would have secured his place in GMC history. It was only a prelude to his role at Taft Lodge.
By 1920 Cowles had become a probate judge, and it was in that capacity that Long Trail News later summarized his scouting work the winter before construction began:
“On a scouting trip the previous winter he had ‘slashed a tree with a blaze and there marked what he believed to be the finest location for a shelter.'”
— Long Trail News, Summer 2020, p. 14
Elihu Taft’s Gift, 1920
Cowles persuaded a fellow judge and mountain lover, Elihu B. Taft, to fund construction of the shelter — even though, by every account, Taft himself never climbed to the site. A 1994 Ridgelines retrospective, drawing on handwritten notes by longtime GMC figure Roy Buchanan, put it plainly:
“Taft ‘never climbed to the site for he was too old and rather feeble but he did agree to the site when shown it from the Smugglers Notch road.’ (Taft, in his time, hiked in the Alps, the Sierras, and the White as well as the Green Mountains.)”
— Ridgelines (Burlington), January 1994, p. 2
Cowles’ own son offered a similarly dry assessment of his father’s fellow judge decades later, recalled in the 2020 centennial article: “old Judge Taft was then unable to climb mountains, he couldn’t have gone to Taft Lodge if we’d hauled him up.” Taft was 73 at the time of the gift and would die nine years later, in 1929, having funded but never seen the shelter that bears his name.
Construction itself was a substantial undertaking for 1920. Cowles hired Stowe lumberman Willis Barnes and foreman Clyde Brink to build a large log cabin from huge spruce logs hauled up the mountain by teams of horses, and he did not merely oversee the work from a distance:
“Cowles climbed Mount Mansfield thirty-one times that summer to personally supervise the project and, on one occasion, to carry the new lodge’s wood stove up the mountain.”
— Long Trail News, Summer 2020, p. 14
A slightly different figure for Cowles’ effort appears in the 1994 Ridgelines account, which describes him having “made 27 trips up to the site while construction was going on” — the two counts (27 trips overseeing construction versus 31 total climbs that summer) are not necessarily contradictory, but no source found reconciles them precisely.
Immediate Popularity
Taft Lodge was, from the start, exactly the kind of shelter Burlington-area hikers had been missing. Its overnight capacity was thirty-two bunks, divided into men’s and women’s ends — though by one account as many as seventy people slept in and around the shelter on its busiest night. Cowles and his sons served as its caretakers for the first seven or eight summers, supplying blankets, wood, and water to hikers while continuing to build the trail network around it. The shelter’s register told its own story of rapid popularity:
“About 800 registered at Taft Lodge during the past season, coming from 23 states, the District of Columbia, and 8 foreign countries.”
— Long Trail News, 1925“By 1926 over 1500 people had signed the register.”
— Burlington Section Records, 1910
Taft Lodge’s fame even reached the club’s photographic contest: a 1930 Long Trail News records “The Snowy Trail to Taft Lodge,” by Prof. L. B. Puffer, taking second prize in its class.
While overseeing construction, Cowles simultaneously blazed the current route of the Long Trail from Smugglers’ Notch to the summit, finally routing the trail directly over the Chin rather than requiring a two-mile side trip. He wasn’t finished afterward, either: wanting a more direct route to Taft Lodge from his own home in Burlington, he built the Sunset Ridge Trail the following summer — a trail many hikers still consider the premier route in Vermont — whose lower portion, extending down to the lodge, became the Profanity Trail. A few years later he built the Cowles Cut-Off from the Half Way House site, later renamed for his wife Laura, an accomplished hiker in her own right and the first president of the Burlington Section. As the 2020 centennial article summed up the decade of trailbuilding Taft Lodge set in motion: “in a few short years, Clarence Cowles created a network of trails that shifted hikers’ focus from the Summit House to the Chin.”
One puzzle about the original construction has apparently never been solved. As the same article notes: “The biggest mystery about the construction of Taft Lodge? Why is the door so low that it dents hundreds of heads every summer?”
Decline, Repair, and a Boy Who Came Back
Taft Lodge’s exposed position below the Chin took a steady toll across the following decades. By 1941 the shelter, only twenty-one years old, was showing serious wear, and a Burlington Section crew hauled tools up the Sunset Ridge Trail to fix it:
“It took seven week-end trips to slap on the roofing, lay a metal ridge cap, put in a stove pipe chimney, cut a new window space in the logs of the east wall, and install three window sashes. Daan gave the cabin a creosote lotioning and chinked up the sides.”
— Long Trail News, November 1941, p. 6
The 1994 Ridgelines retrospective, quoting a 1974 history of the Burlington Section by Marion Holmes, described the same repair in more dramatic terms — jacks, cable drills, hammers, and steel pegs used to pull the cabin “back to a standing position” and anchor it to the mountain’s ledges, while caretaker Daan Zwick packed rolls of roofing across the ridge from the Hotel, on some trips carrying 120 pounds.
Zwick’s connection to Taft Lodge, it turns out, began years earlier and would not end for decades. In the summer of 1930, when Taft Lodge was only two years older than he was, an eight-year-old Daan Zwick climbed the Halfway House Trail with his father and sister:
“‘There, my father put us to bed under an overhanging rock, and he went down to Taft Lodge to play cards with the caretaker,’ said Daan Zwick, remembering that trip of sixty-six years ago… ‘The lodge fee was one of the reasons my dad had us camping out,’ Zwick said. ‘I think he wanted to give us that outdoor experience, but I think he also was avoiding the fee,’ for staying overnight. By 1940, it cost fifty cents to sleep in one of the thirty-two bunk spaces in Taft Lodge.”
— Long Trail News, Fall 1996, p. 1
The boy who so rarely got to actually stay inside Taft Lodge became its caretaker in 1939–41 — the same repair era quoted above — and, as later events would show, was not done with the shelter even then.
World War II and a Long Gap
The Second World War brought an end to the era of summer caretakers at Taft Lodge; the modern caretaker program would not begin again until 1969. In the interim the shelter relied on periodic volunteer repair trips. The Long Trail Patrol spent three weeks at Taft Lodge in 1962, replacing bottom logs and a leaking roof section with rolled roofing, and returned in force later in the decade:
“The Patrol spent 3 weeks at this lodge. Four logs put in on the south end, a new roof, floor replaced, bunks repaired, and a new outhouse completed. The Mountain Co. hauled our supplies up to the top of the new lift.”
— Long Trail News, November 1968
A rededication ceremony on March 16, 1969 drew a large group under decidedly wintry conditions — overnighters dug some nine feet of snow to reach the brook for water, and snow completely covered the lodge’s upstairs window on the north side.
The 1996 Reconstruction
By the 1990s, thirty-five years since its last major overhaul, Taft Lodge needed more than patchwork repair. The Green Mountain Club hired Alfred “Fred” Carlton Gilbert III, a longtime volunteer, GMC director, and trails and shelters committee member, to oversee a complete rebuild in 1996. Gilbert had wanted the job badly, as a note tucked into his own restoration journal — later preserved in GMC’s archives — makes clear:
“I may be attaining my life-long dream next year… I’ll be supervising the replacement of Taft Lodge on Mt. Mansfield. To be a Paul Bunyan in 1996! To be a revered personality in the veritable Green Mountains. Me, lowly, loving, me. I really hope all things work out.”
— Fred Gilbert, restoration journal (1995), quoted in Long Trail News, Summer 2020, p. 15
His hope worked out. In January 1996, fifty twenty-foot spruce logs were delivered to Barnes’ Camp at Smugglers’ Notch — this time, no teams of horses were needed. On May 8 and 9, the Vermont Army Air National Guard flew sixty helicopter trips to carry those logs, plus sixty ten-foot spruce logs, one hundred hemlock boards, metal roofing, mortar mix, and tools to a landing site roughly 700 feet above the lodge. Gilbert and his assistant, John Bennett, moved onto the mountain on May 14 and lived there through the summer and into the fall, working what a Ridgelines account called long days to finish the job.
Crucially, this rebuild had a direct line back to the boy who had first visited Taft Lodge in 1930. The financing for the reconstruction came from Daan Zwick — the same Daan Zwick who had once been too poor a family’s fee-averse camper to sleep inside the lodge, and who had served as its caretaker in the early 1940s:
“Many people contributed to the effort to reconstruct Taft. There was Daan Zwick, who contributed the financing; Bill Sayre, who donated the logs; Fred and John, the full-time construction crew; the Army National Guard and the Mount Mansfield Company, who helped with transportation of material, supplies and people; and the many volunteers who worked all summer to make the project a success.”
— Ridgelines (Burlington), September 1996, p. 1
The reconstruction was finished on September 5, 1996, complete with a green enamel metal roof, a redesigned interior with stronger bunks and a built-in closet for the caretaker’s supplies, and a new outhouse built from the project’s scrap lumber. An Open House and Dedication was held on Sunday, October 6, 1996, drawing roughly fifty hikers up the mountain to mark the occasion. The same September 1996 account captured the paradox of a building simultaneously brand-new and unmistakably itself:
“When you visit Taft now, you will find that everything is spiffy and new. Yet, sitting on the ledge in front of the shelter and looking back at Taft nestled below the Chin, there can be no mistake: this is still Taft Lodge.”
— Ridgelines (Burlington), September 1996, p. 1
Fred Gilbert continued volunteering for the club for years afterward and died at age 73 on June 1, 2019 — not quite living to see the shelter’s hundredth anniversary the following year, though his restoration ensured it would reach that milestone intact.
Historic Status and Continued Use
Taft Lodge underwent a further round of log replacement in 2016, this time targeting two seriously deteriorated bottom logs south of the entry door. The project doubled as a formal historic assessment: GMC’s Historic Preservation Consultant, Mary Jo Llewellyn, completed a Historic Buildings Evaluation Report that spring, confirming what club members had long assumed about the shelter’s standing:
“Taft Lodge is listed on the Vermont State Register and is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places… the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation stated that ‘Taft Lodge is perhaps the most significant historic structure associated with the Green Mountain Club and outdoor hiking in Vermont and is a high priority for sensitive historic preservation treatment.'”
— Ridgelines (Burlington), Fall 2016, p. 3
That report also confirmed a detail worth noting for anyone comparing figures across sources: Taft Lodge’s built-in two-decker bunks now provide sleeping space for twenty-four people — the shelter database’s own figure — even though earlier twentieth-century accounts consistently describe an official capacity of thirty-two, with crowds of sixty not uncommon on busy nights. The 2016 repair work itself had to be timed around the nesting season of Bicknell’s Thrush, a species of conservation concern found on Mansfield’s upper slopes, with new logs airlifted to the site only after nesting ended.
The lodge remains, in the club’s own words from its centennial coverage, the oldest, largest, and most heavily used shelter on the Long Trail — a magnet for both overnight backpackers and the much larger number of day hikers who pass it on the popular route up from Smugglers’ Notch to the Chin. A Burlington Section editor’s aside from the same 2016 issue captures something of what still draws people there even in the harshest conditions, recounting two New Year’s Eves spent at the lodge with temperatures inside the shelter “in the twenties,” watching Burlington’s midnight fireworks from the summit of the Chin in crampons before returning to sleeping bags and a half-and-half mixture of peach schnapps and boiling water.
What the Record Does Not Say
No source found explains the discrepancy between Clarence Cowles’ “27 trips” (per the 1994 Ridgelines account, quoting Roy Buchanan’s handwritten notes) and his “thirty-one” climbs of Mount Mansfield that summer (per the 2020 centennial article) — both figures describe the same 1920 construction season. Similarly, no source reconciles the shelter’s original and long-standing official capacity of thirty-two bunks with the twenty-four-person figure given in the 2016 Historic Buildings Evaluation Report and echoed in the shelter database’s current summary; whether this reflects an actual reduction in sleeping space during the 1996 or later rebuilds, or simply inconsistent record-keeping across a century of accounts, was not established. Elihu B. Taft’s fuller biography — his career as a judge, and the circumstances of his death in 1929 — was not found beyond the brief characterization of him as elderly, “feeble,” and widely traveled in his younger years. No source located gives a comprehensive account of Taft Lodge’s ownership structure (the 2016 report notes it is owned by the State of Vermont and maintained by GMC), including when or how that arrangement was formalized. Finally, while the shelter is confirmed eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, no source found indicates whether it has since been formally listed.
## Sources
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