The first Taylor Lodge stood at the east end of Nebraska Notch on the eastern slope of Mt. Mansfield from 1926 until December 1950, when it was destroyed by fire. Built by the Burlington Section of the Green Mountain Club as a closed log cabin — unusual at a time when most GMC structures were open-front lean-tos — it served for nearly a quarter century as one of the most popular shelters on the northern Long Trail. Originally called Nebraska Notch Lodge, it was later renamed to honor James P. Taylor, founder of the Green Mountain Club. Taylor himself visited the lodge in 1928, posing beneath its sign for a photograph. The structure was replaced in 1951 by a second lodge on the same site, also built by the Burlington Section.
Setting
Nebraska Notch is a deep cleft between the Forehead — the northern extension of Mt. Mansfield — and Mt. Dewey to the south. It is not a pass in the conventional sense but rather a narrow rocky gap through which a brook threads between boulder fields. The notch was accessible historically by the Lake Mansfield Trail (Trail No. 10 in the GMC system), which began at the Mansfield Trout Club on the valley floor and climbed approximately 1½ miles to the lodge. By 1938 the old wagon road through the notch bottom was "barely recognizable as an old lumbering road," according to a Long Trail News account. Through the notch itself hikers faced a choice: pick their way over boulders in the stream bed, using a ten-foot ladder at one point, or take an alternate route over the shoulder of Sugarloaf. The lodge stood at the eastern edge of this notch, at an elevation of approximately 1,900 feet.
Behind the lodge, a short path led to a lookout with a view down the valley to Lake Mansfield, the Mansfield Trout Club, and the wooded hills beyond. Water was available from a brook several hundred feet down the approach trail toward the lake. The trail from Underhill began at the sign-in at the end of Stevensville Road, and the Lodge could also be reached from the Long Trail over the Mansfield ridge.
Origins: The Need for a Lodge at Nebraska Notch (1925–1926)
By the summer of 1925, the Burlington Section of the GMC had identified the Nebraska Notch area as in need of a lodge. The Section had been making use of the Mansfield Trout Club’s facilities for years, but members recognized that a dedicated overnight structure at the notch would serve both the through-hikers on the Long Trail and the section’s own outings parties.
The path to construction was not straightforward. The Trout Club was willing to donate land for the purpose but stipulated that whatever was built should be an open shelter. The Burlington Section wanted a closed lodge. With this impasse unresolved and funds lacking, the project stalled.
The deadlock broke when the Main Club came through with an offer of $1,000 from the Judge Hazelton Fund for the building of a lodge. The Section voted to proceed, setting a construction budget not to exceed $750. How exactly the Trout Club’s objection to a closed structure was overcome is not clear from the surviving records; what is clear is that the lodge that was eventually built was very much the closed cabin the Section had wanted. According to the Burlington Section Records (1910–1927), the structure was built for $150 less than the authorized amount — that is, at a cost of approximately $600.
Construction proceeded in 1926, under the direction of Ernest E. Smith and Dr. E. G. Twitchell. The lodge was known initially as Nebraska Notch Lodge.
The context of the time is worth noting. In 1926, when the first lodge was constructed, the stock market was soaring, the jazz age was in full swing, and Calvin Coolidge was President. The Burlington Section was in some ways ahead of its era: it had already elected two women as section presidents, one of them Mrs. Laura Cowles, who had been the first woman to snowshoe to the top of Mt. Mansfield. Judge Cowles had written to James P. Taylor as early as 1910 — the year the GMC was founded — proposing a trail from Mansfield to Bolton with a branch running down to the Trout Club. That vision was still being realized in 1926; the Long Trail itself was not yet complete when the first Taylor Lodge was built.
Construction and Character of the Lodge
The Burlington Section built a comfortable closed lodge of peeled logs, with bunks and mattresses for approximately 14 to 16 campers. A stove provided heat and cooking capability, with simple cooking utensils on hand. The outhouse was, by the recollection of Larry Dean — whose family arrived in Vermont from Manchester, N.H., during this period — "on the primitive side, and only semi-private."
One architectural feature distinguished the first lodge from its successors: unlike the 1951 and 1978 structures, the first Taylor Lodge faced away from the outlook. The lookout behind the lodge offered the view down to Lake Mansfield, but the building itself was oriented in the opposite direction. The 1951 rebuilding would correct this.
A Lodge with a Name: Taylor Lodge
The lodge was renamed Taylor Lodge to honor James P. Taylor, the founder of the Green Mountain Club. Taylor himself was associated with the lodge from its early years: a photograph published in the Long Trail News in November 1978 shows Taylor posing in 1928 beneath the sign on the original lodge. This image, captioned "James P. Taylor poses in 1928 beneath sign on the original Taylor Lodge," confirms that Taylor visited the lodge within two years of its opening and that it already bore his name by that date.
The original naming sequence — Nebraska Notch Lodge first, Taylor Lodge after — reflected a pattern common in GMC practice of the period, where a lodge would first be named for its location and later for a donor or honored individual.
James P. Taylor: Founder of the Green Mountain Club
The lodge was named for a man whom later generations would call the "Father of the Long Trail." James P. Taylor taught at Vermont Academy, a private preparatory school in Saxtons River that prided itself on "special attention to life in the open." As assistant headmaster, he was constantly bothered by the lack of trails and shelters in the Green Mountains, and he founded the Vermont Academy Mountain Club to get his students into the hills. Membership requirements included climbing a prescribed list of local peaks. "What was the point," Taylor asked himself, "of living in one of the most beautiful states in the Union and never getting to know its beauties at close hand?"
His chance to act came at a banquet for Vermont schoolmasters at the Van Ness House hotel in Burlington, where he was asked to fill in for the academy’s principal as speaker. He had five minutes. He used them to describe his dream of a hiking club. The response was enthusiastic. Invitations went out and on March 11, 1910, twenty-three men gathered at the same hotel to form the Green Mountain Club. They were a cross-section of Vermont’s professional class — eight were school superintendents or principals, three were lawyers, one was a supreme court judge, three were editors or journalists, one was a minister, one a college professor. Also present were the State Superintendent of Education, the State Highway Commissioner, and the Fish and Game Commissioner. Letters of regret had come from the governor, the president of National Life Insurance, and the president of AT&T. Taylor was elected the club’s first president.
During the decade that followed he served simultaneously as corresponding secretary — the operational nerve center of the club — handling daily correspondence, dues, communications, and guidebook matters. The first twenty-nine miles of trail, from Camel’s Hump to Smuggler’s Notch, were completed in the summer of 1911. By 1920 the trail ran from the Massachusetts line to Johnson. In 1927, the year after the first Taylor Lodge was built, James Taylor was present at the formation of the Jay Peak Section, where he told the assembled four hundred that the men of Worcester, Massachusetts had built their trail and now it was up to Vermonters to use, enjoy, and develop it. He added, with a grin, that an end-to-end trek should be a condition for voting in state elections. Two hundred people climbed Jay Peak in the rain that day. In 1931 the final link to the Canadian border was cut and Taylor’s "footpath in the wilderness" — 265 miles from Massachusetts to Canada — was complete. His interests had by then broadened: the Greater Vermont Association, which he helped lead, became the Vermont Chamber of Commerce in 1922, and as its Executive Secretary he campaigned up and down the state for better roads, stream pollution abatement, and tourist promotion. Two historians later described him, affectionately, as "this slightly shabby, slightly disreputable chamber of commerce huckster, this amiable schemer, this compulsive promoter, this mercurial and most unvermonterish grand champion of Vermont."
Taylor returned to the GMC presidency in 1931, the year the trail was completed. A camp on the Mt. Mansfield ridgeline had already been named for him — "J. P. Taylor Camp" appeared in the 1927 club trail list between Dunsmore Lodge and the summit — and the Nebraska Notch lodge honoring his name was already seven years old. By the time it burned in December 1950, the man it honored had spent four decades shaping Vermont’s mountains into a public resource. A 1971 Joint Resolution of the Vermont Legislature formally designated the Green Mountain Club the "founder, sponsor, defender and protector of the Long Trail System." Taylor had been that first.
Life at the Lodge: Caretakers and Use (1930s–1940s)
By the late 1930s, Taylor Lodge was being maintained in hiking season by a caretaker, with an overnight fee of twenty-five cents. The caretaking history has been partially reconstructed from several sources.
Daan Zwick served as caretaker beginning in 1938, and his memoir — published in Long Trail News Spring 2017 — describes being "the first ever caretaker at Taylor Lodge." Woodward (1999) records additional details: Rod Rice served at age fifteen in 1939, spending two weeks during which no overnight campers appeared; Zwick continued through 1941; Sandy Austin took over in 1942; and Dave Sullivan Jr. and Sr. served in 1946.
The lodge attracted regular outings parties from the Burlington Section throughout this period. The GMC photo collection documents a party on February 22, 1927 — George Washington’s Birthday, a traditional GMC outing date — as well as parties in 1931, 1936, and through the 1940s.
In the winter dimension, the Burlington Section developed a cross-country ski trail from Stevensville to Taylor Lodge, marked with yellow blazes, which was in use by 1942 (referenced in Long Trail News, February 1942). The trail gave the lodge a winter constituency beyond the summer hiking season.
The approach trail had its own character. A Long Trail News account from 1938 described the route through Nebraska Notch as passing through what was "barely recognizable as an old lumbering road." The CCC had been active in the area and had stacked split chestnut along portions of the trail — salvage timber from trees killed by the chestnut blight, cut and piled but never retrieved.
The Fire of December 1950
The first Taylor Lodge was destroyed by fire in December 1950. According to an account published in Ridgelines (Fall 2005), the fire was set by careless users — a group of boys who burned the lodge’s mattresses in an attempt to keep warm. The entire structure was lost.
The Long Trail News for February 1951 reported the loss and noted a mitigating circumstance: "The bright spot to this tragedy is that the Section carried fire insurance for the rebuilding." The Burlington Section thus had the means to replace the lodge without an emergency fundraising campaign.
Aftermath and Replacement
The Burlington Section moved quickly to rebuild. The second Taylor Lodge was constructed in 1951 by the Long Trail Patrol under the direction of Prof. Roy O. Buchanan. It was dedicated on October 29, 1951, at a gathering that drew 74 hikers to what the record describes as a "cabin-shower party." The second structure was sited on the same location but — in a deliberate departure from the design of the first — faced toward the outlook rather than away from it.
The second lodge served until 1978, when it too was replaced. A third Taylor Lodge, dedicated in September 1978, stands today.
Sources
- Jan Abbott. "A 3 Part History of Taylor Lodge (Part 1)." Ridgelines (Burlington Section, GMC), Summer 2026. [Reproduces remarks at Dedication of 3rd Taylor Lodge, Sept. 1978. Sources the construction narrative from Burlington Section Records 1910–1927.]
- Paul and Joanne Woodward. Long Trail System Shelter History, 2nd edition. Green Mountain Club, September 10, 1999. pp. 117, 121. [Caretaker history; description of 1951 rebuilding; note that first lodge "faced away from the outlook."]
- Burlington Section Records, 1910–1927. Green Mountain Club. [Construction budget of $750; built for $150 less than authorized. Cited in Abbott (2026).]
- Daan Zwick. Memoir. Long Trail News, Spring 2017. [Describes serving as "the first ever caretaker at Taylor Lodge," beginning 1938.]
- Long Trail News (November 1978). Green Mountain Club. [Photo caption: "James P. Taylor poses in 1928 beneath sign on the original Taylor Lodge."]
- Long Trail News (February 1942). Green Mountain Club. [Burlington Section ski trail from Stevensville to Taylor Lodge, yellow blazes.]
- Long Trail News (February 1951). Green Mountain Club. [Fire loss reported; "The bright spot to this tragedy is that the Section carried fire insurance for the rebuilding."]
- Ridgelines (Burlington Section, GMC), Fall 2005. [Fire account: careless users burned mattresses to keep warm, destroying the lodge.]
- Long Trail News (November 1985). Green Mountain Club. p. 16. [Review of Green Mountain Adventure by Jane and Will Curtis and Frank Lieberman; biography of Taylor as "assistant headmaster of the Vermont Academy in Saxtons River" and founding of the GMC at the Van Ness House, March 11, 1910.]
- Long Trail News (February 1970). Green Mountain Club. p. 2. [Taylor biographical summary: first 29 miles of trail completed 1911; 1927 Jay Peak Section formation; 1931 trail completed to Canadian border; Taylor’s role as Executive Secretary of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce.]
- Long Trail News (May 1985). Green Mountain Club. p. 4. [Detailed account of the March 11, 1910 founding meeting; description of Taylor as "slightly disreputable chamber of commerce huckster"; his founding of the Vermont Academy Mountain Club.]
- Long Trail News (April 1931). Green Mountain Club. p. 3. [Lists Taylor as GMC President in 1931: "President, J. P. Taylor, of Saxtons River."]
- Long Trail News (April 1927). Green Mountain Club. p. 2. ["J. P. Taylor Camp" listed in trail camp table, between Dunsmore Lodge and the Mansfield Summit House.]
- Vermont Legislature. Joint Resolution designating GMC "founder, sponsor, defender and protector of the Long Trail System," 1971. [Cited in Long Trail News (Fall 1994), p. 2.]
