Three Shanties was not a shelter the Green Mountain Club built. It was a private cabin — actually one of three surviving structures from the nineteenth-century logging operations of the Mount Tabor wilderness — that the owners quietly left open for Long Trail hikers from the trail’s earliest years. It stood about a mile south of the deserted town of Griffith, in Mount Tabor, Vermont, reached by an excellent wood road branching off the Long Trail at a red schoolhouse. Hikers used it from at least 1920, when the GMC first listed it in the Long Trail Guide Book, until around 1928, when the construction of a proper GMC lodge at Griffith made the mile-long detour to Three Shanties unnecessary.
The name, and the landscape it inhabited, belonged to an older story: the logging empire of Silas Griffith, the charcoal kilns, and the woodcutters who worked the Green Mountains before anyone thought to cut a trail through them.
The Landscape: Mount Tabor and the Griffith Era
The Long Trail in this section of Vermont passes through one of the most thoroughly worked-over industrial landscapes in the Green Mountains. In the 1870s and 1880s, Silas Griffith and his partner McIntyre operated one of the most extensive charcoal-manufacturing enterprises in Vermont at Mount Tabor. The operation employed a hundred men, who worked in gangs of twelve to fifteen, cutting wood from October to April. Some of these men lived in the woods in log shanties; others returned nightly to the settlement of Griffith, which had grown into a village large enough to earn its own post office and its own name on the 1893 USGS topographic map.
Three Shanties Brook, which runs about a mile south of where the old village of Griffith stood, takes its name from the cluster of log shanties where woodcutters lived during those operations. A study of charcoal mounds and kilns in the region captures the relationship precisely: "a hundred men in gangs of 12 to 15 men each cut wood from October to April. Some remained in the woods living in log shanties (note Three Shanties Brook about a mile south) while others returned nightly to the settlement."
The industry deforested Mount Tabor with remarkable speed. The sawmill at Griffith closed around 1905. Within seven years the village was nearly deserted. By 1930, the population of Mount Tabor had dropped to 130, and most of the original Griffith holdings had become part of the newly created Green Mountain National Forest. What remained in the clearing where Griffith had stood were ruins of the charcoal kilns, an old boarding house, a schoolhouse, and — a mile to the south — the structures that gave Three Shanties Brook its name.
The Shelter Itself
When Long Trail hikers arrived at Three Shanties in the 1920s, they were not staying in crude frontier huts. The 1921 photographs in the GMC’s collection — the earliest known images of the structure — show a proper wooden building with a steeply pitched shingled roof, a chimney, and windows with panes intact, surrounded by a clearing and what appears to be a well-established meadow. The interior photograph from the same year reveals something more refined still: a dining table covered with a cloth, Windsor chairs, an oil lamp on the table, a wooden plank floor, and the general air of a furnished house rather than a utilitarian camp. Whatever the original three shanties were in the woodcutters’ era, the structure that Long Trail hikers used had evolved into a real building — a cabin with domestic comforts.
Every edition of the Long Trail Guide Book that listed Three Shanties described it in similar terms. The 4th edition (1922) and those that followed used language that reappeared with only minor variation across nearly a decade of guidebooks:
"Passing the ruined charcoal kilns The Trail follows an excellent wood road south, branching from the highway at the red schoolhouse, to the open cabin known as Three Shanties, about a mile from Griffith. Good stove, bunks, furniture and utensils are loaned to hikers by the owners, who ask in return that the cabin be left clean and neat."
The owners are never named in any guidebook edition. What they offered was unusual: not just shelter from the elements, but stove, bunks, furniture, and kitchen utensils — far more than a lean-to or abandoned lumber camp could provide. The only condition was that hikers leave things as they found them.
The shelter sat at approximately 1,820 feet elevation, a relatively low point in this stretch of the southern Long Trail. The Roaring Branch stream, which the Trail had followed up from the valley, forked at Three Shanties and provided excellent water. From Three Shanties the Long Trail continued south and climbed, eventually reaching Long Hole Camp (an abandoned lumber camp at 2,530 feet) and then Buffum Pond, also called Lake Griffith, at 2,650 feet.
Three Shanties in the Guidebooks
The first Long Trail Guide Book to list Three Shanties was the 2nd edition, published in 1920, which noted simply: "Three Shanties camp open for hikers, 1820 [elevation], 1.6 [miles from Danby]." The same entry appeared in the 3rd edition (1921) and 4th edition (1922), each time carrying the same distance and elevation, and each time followed by the listing of Long Hole Camp (an abandoned lumber camp giving "some shelter") and Buffum Pond Camp (a private property whose barn and porches afforded modest shelter when the owners were not in residence).
The 4th edition (1922) was the first to include the detailed trail narrative that accompanied the table entries, and its description of Three Shanties is the fullest of the early period. Approaching from the north, southbound hikers on the Long Trail crossed the Big Branch on a steel bridge, followed the Danby-Weston highway half a mile east to the deserted town of Griffith ("once a prosperous village, which occupies a clearing of considerable size, the old boarding house and the school being about all that is still standing"), passed the ruined charcoal kilns, and then followed "an excellent wood road south, branching from the highway at the red schoolhouse" for a mile to Three Shanties.
The 5th edition (1924) repeated this description nearly verbatim. The 6th edition (1924) introduced a small mystery: the summary table on one page listed "Three Shanties (closed comp)" in the northbound column while the same edition’s southbound narrative listed the camp as "open for hikers." The discrepancy — whether reflecting a temporary closure, an editorial confusion between the two directions, or an error — does not appear in any other edition. The detailed trail description in the 6th edition gave no indication of closure.
The 7th edition (1928) showed Three Shanties for the last time in any guidebook. By this edition, something new had appeared in Griffith itself: "Here is located the new Griffith Camp, an open lodge with stove, fireplace and bunks for twenty-four." The GMC had built its own shelter at the site of the old village, right on the trail and with three times the capacity of Three Shanties. The 7th edition still listed Three Shanties as "open for hikers," but the need for it had quietly diminished.
By the 8th edition (1930), Three Shanties was gone from the guide entirely. Only Griffith Camp remained. The privately-owned shelter had served its purpose and stepped aside.
The First End-to-Enders and the Trail in 1922
In August 1922 — the same year as the 4th edition of the guidebook — a group of young women known as "The Big Four" completed what they believed to be the first end-to-end traverse of the Long Trail. The party included Lesley Frost, daughter of the poet Robert Frost; Lesley’s friend Catherine Fobes; and two other companions. They walked 225 miles in 17 days, carrying packs that ranged from fifteen to thirty pounds. Robert Frost himself attempted to join them partway through, but famously fell short of his goal.
The Long Trail in 1922 was a very different route from today’s, particularly in the south. Among its features were camping sites at Three Shanties and Buffum Pond — names that would persist in the guidebooks for several more years, then be lost as the GMC built its own infrastructure and the trail was rerouted. A 2020 article in the Long Trail News, recounting the story of the Big Four’s achievement, noted that the trail "had long lost campsites like Somerset Bridge south of Stratton, Three Shanties near Griffith Lake, and Buffum Camp between White Rocks and Clarendon Gorge" — placing Three Shanties squarely in the company of the early trail’s vanished overnight places.
Whether Lesley Frost and her companions actually stayed at Three Shanties is not recorded in the sources available. But the shelter was listed in every edition of the guidebook during the years they might have passed through, and the excellent wood road from the red schoolhouse at Griffith was as fine an approach to a overnight stop as any in the southern Green Mountains.
The Trail Record of Irving D. Appleby, 1926
The most vivid firsthand account of the Three Shanties stretch of the Long Trail comes from Irving D. Appleby of Boston, who in July 1926 walked the entire trail from Jay Peak to the Massachusetts line — 256 miles in 14 days and 5 hours, a record reported in the Long Trail News that December. The GMC’s newsletter called it "a most remarkable" feat that "figures out nearly 18 miles a day, which is some going when it is considered that, according to ‘Trails & Summits of the Green Mountains’, from 5 to 8 miles a day is a comfortable day’s journey."
Appleby wrote to the GMC about the conditions he encountered. His description of the Mount Tabor section was frank about the state of the trail that summer:
"On Style’s Peak, Mt. Tabor, I struggled 5½ hours to make a single mile. Ten thousand fallen trees in a tangled criss-cross like jackstraws blocked my path. Between Lake Griffith and Three Shanties I was forced to fell large trees upon which to cross brooks which had grown to raging rivers of considerable depth and width from the torrential rains."
The passage captures something of the terrain in this section — the Big Branch drainage, the streams descending from the high terrain around Styles Peak, and the difficulty of the last stretch into Three Shanties after summer thunderstorms had swollen the watercourses crossing the wood road. By July 1926, the shelter had been listed in the guidebook for six years. Appleby reached it, presumably, after an extremely difficult day on the trail.
Three Shanties in the Era of Private Camps
Three Shanties was never the only private camp available to Long Trail hikers in the early decades of the trail. The 1976 Long Trail News, in an article mourning the demolition of Carmel Camp — "the last privately owned and maintained private camp left open to hikers" at that time — provided the historical perspective:
"In the early days of the Trail, hikers depended heavily on hunting camps, fishing shanties, logging camps, and other private buildings, plus inns and farmhouses near the trail, for overnight accommodations. Over the years a vigorous program of shelter construction gradually eliminated reliance on these private structures."
Three Shanties was precisely this kind of shelter: a logging-era structure whose private owners made it available as a courtesy to trail users during the years when the GMC’s own shelter network was still thin. The generous gesture — loaning not just the building but its furniture, stove, and utensils, with only the request that hikers leave things clean and neat — was typical of the relationships between Vermont landowners and the early Long Trail.
A 1961 Long Trail News article, describing the Mount Tabor section for a generation of hikers who came to the trail after Three Shanties had already been retired, still described the approach in terms that echoed the original guidebook language: "After crossing the Danby-Weston highway, we reach the deserted town of Griffith, pass ruins of charcoal kilns, then pass a red schoolhouse and reach a shelter known as Three Shanties open to hikers by permission of the owners." By 1961, this was a historical description — a way of evoking what the trail had once been like in this section — but the landmarks it named (the Danby-Weston highway, the ruins of the kilns, the red schoolhouse) were still there to be recognized.
What Replaced Three Shanties
The Griffith Camp built by the GMC in time for the 7th edition of the guidebook (1928) was the direct successor to Three Shanties as the stopping place in the Mount Tabor section. It was everything Three Shanties was not: a GMC-owned structure, with stove, fireplace, and bunks for twenty-four people, located right in Griffith at the crossing of the Danby-Weston highway rather than a mile’s walk down an excellent wood road. Its advantages in terms of capacity and trail access were decisive. Three Shanties, however hospitable, could not compete.
The Griffith Camp itself had a complicated later history, eventually being replaced by the Old Job Shelter as the Long Trail was rerouted in this section and the Green Mountain National Forest was established. But that is a different shelter’s story.
The Name Persists
Though the shelter is long gone, Three Shanties Brook continues to carry the name on USGS topographic maps of Mount Tabor. The brook drains the area about a mile south of where Griffith once stood, running through what is now Green Mountain National Forest land. It marks the place where, for as long as anyone can now determine, gangs of woodcutters lived in log shanties during the logging operations that stripped the mountain of its first-growth forest. The shelter they eventually left behind — furnished, weathertight, with a good stove and bunks — served Long Trail hikers for approximately a decade in the 1920s before the GMC’s own building program made it redundant.
Three Shanties Brook, and the memory of Three Shanties camp that the name carries, is one of the quieter monuments to the industrial past of the Vermont mountains and to the trail that was pieced together through it.
Sources
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