Tillotson Camp stands on a wooded hillside in Lowell, Vermont, about thirty feet off the Long Trail near a small sag in the ridge south of Tillotson Peak. It is the last surviving Buchanan Camp — the enclosed, four-sided frame shelters that Professor Roy O. Buchanan and his Long Trail Patrol built across northern Vermont during the 1930s and 1940s — still standing in its original location. The camp has been in continuous use since 1939, its frame and bunkrooms shaped by eight decades of hikers, its site defined by a landscape that carries the name of the man who first built a shelter here: Red Tillotson, fire warden, trail cutter, and farmer’s son from the valley below Belvidere Mountain.
For a decade, the original three-walled shelter, built by Red Tillotson, in 1929 served this stretch of trail. By the late 1930s, it had deteriorated from exposure and heavy use. The Old Hazen’s Notch Camp to the north was also in decline. The Long Trail Patrol turned its attention to both.
Professor Roy O. Buchanan and the 1939 Rebuild
In 1939, Professor Roy O. Buchanan and the Long Trail Patrol rebuilt Tillotson Camp from the ground up — or nearly so. Buchanan and his crew converted the original three-walled structure into a fully enclosed frame camp, likely reusing materials from the original shelter in the process. The result was a classic example of what had become, through more than a decade of Buchanan’s work, a distinctive shelter type: the Buchanan Camp.
Buchanan served as crew supervisor of the Long Trail Patrol for more than thirty years, from the Patrol’s founding in the early 1930s through his retirement in the 1960s. During those years, he and successive cohorts of volunteers and young workers built dozens of shelters on the Long Trail, particularly in the northern divisions where the trail crosses private timberland and remote ridges. Buchanan’s four-sided frame camps — insulated, fully enclosed, with two-tier bunks and a distinctive wooden window-shutter that could be lowered and locked into position to serve as an outdoor table — became known collectively as Buchanan Camps. Their design was borrowed, in spirit if not in exact detail, from the old lumber camps that had once peppered Vermont’s backcountry forests.
By the time Buchanan retired, a mountain just north of Hazen’s Notch on the Long Trail had been renamed in his honor. Buchanan Mountain — formerly called Old Splatterfoot — was officially renamed in 1957 in recognition of his more than thirty years as the club’s Trails and Shelters Chairman and as the active leader of the Long Trail Patrol. In 1983 the Long Trail Guide explained the renaming directly: "retired after more than 30 years as the Club’s Trails and Shelters Chairman and active leader of the Long Trail Patrol." A shelter on the Long Trail near Bolton — the Buchanan Shelter, built by the Burlington Section in 1984 — also honors his name.
The rebuilt Tillotson Camp of 1939 was a frame structure with bunks for eight. A report in the October 1939 Long Trail News announced that the Green Mountain Club "can now boast of another well-built stopping place with all modern conveniences" on the northern section of the Long Trail. The phrase was characteristically GMC understatement — in that era, "all modern conveniences" meant a stove, bunks, and a water source — but the sentiment was genuine. The rebuilt camp was well-constructed and well-sited, and it proved it: seventy years later, as the Long Trail News would observe during the 2007 restoration, "little had changed at Tillotson Camp except for the effects of wear and tear."
The Camp in the Guidebooks
Every edition of the Long Trail Guide Book from the 12th (1940) through the 24th (1996) and beyond described Tillotson Camp in the same essential terms. The language, though the mileages shifted slightly from edition to edition as the trail was rerouted, was consistent across more than a half-century:
"This camp, built in 1939, is a frame structure with bunks for about 8. Brook water 100 ft. to the north. From the front of the camp there is a limited view to the east through the trees."
The camp is located in Division XI of the Long Trail — the section running from French Camp (near Johnson, Vermont) to Tillotson Camp itself, with Division XII picking up northward to the Canadian border. Ritterbush Camp lies 7.7 miles to the south. From the camp, the Long Trail heads north to Tillotson Peak (0.5 miles), then Haystack Mountain (2.8 miles), before dropping to Hazen’s Notch and the Lowell-Montgomery Center Highway (Vermont Route 58) at 4.6 miles.
The camp’s position is reached by a short spur — about 30 feet — off the Long Trail in a sag just south of Tillotson Peak. Lockwood Pond, barely 0.1 miles south via the Long Trail, is described in later guidebooks as a favorite stopping point for morning coffee. The 24th edition (1996) noted that "brook water below a beaver pond is 100 ft. to the north on the LT. It has been in use from 1939 to present."
The Frank Post Trail
Departing from Tillotson Camp, the Frank Post Trail descends 0.5 miles to a logging road, follows it eastward for 1.5 miles, and then reaches a public road leading to the asbestos mine road between Eden Mills and Vermont Route 58 west of Lowell. The Frank Post Trail was named in memory of Frank Post, "an active Boy Scout leader and member of the Burlington Section of the GMC" — a detail carried in every guidebook from at least the 17th edition (1963) onward. The trail provided an important alternative approach to Tillotson Camp from the east, making the camp accessible to hikers arriving from the Eden Mills road rather than via the Long Trail from north or south.
The trail also connected to the Tillotson family’s landscape: the public road it eventually reached led to the Forester’s Trail down to the Warner Farm, also called the Tillotson Mill, a reminder that the mountain and the valley below it had been Tillotson country for generations.
Maintenance and Changes, 1939–2006
Through the mid-twentieth century, Tillotson Camp was maintained by the Montreal Section of the GMC, which was responsible for the Long Trail from Tillotson Camp north to Hazen’s Notch. (From Hazen’s Notch to the Canadian border, the Long Trail was maintained by Club volunteers and the Long Trail Patrol.)
One recorded change during this period: the stove was removed from the camp. The February 1977 Long Trail News noted tersely, "The stove has been removed." The camp’s cooking fire was thereafter the fireplace in front of the camp — the guidebooks had always noted this as the sole permissible fire location, consistent with GMC regulations on the private timberlands the northern Long Trail traverses.
By the early 2000s, the trail from Vermont Route 118 to Tillotson Camp (5.4 miles of Long Trail through Division XI) was maintained by individual GMC maintainers rather than a section. Paul Badger, one of those maintainers, described the section in the Summer 2018 Long Trail News: "The 2.8-mile section from Belvidere Saddle to Tillotson Camp is an area with high traffic of moose, with reminders almost every step you take." He also named Lockwood Pond as "one of my favorite spots on this section — a beautiful spot to have your morning coffee or stop for a snack." The stretch between Belvidere Saddle and Tillotson Peak, he noted, "has areas that are extremely muddy all summer long, requiring much work with planks, redirecting water sources, or bringing in rocks."
Red Tillotson, Revisited: The 1999 Interview
In the fall of 1999, GMC Director of Field Programs Dave Hardy, together with Randonnée Aventure (a trails volunteer), Susan Harris, and Maureen Robertson, sat down with Red Tillotson — then ninety-one years old — to record his memories of the Long Trail, Belvidere Mountain, and the shelter he had built. The interview was published in the Long Trail News, Fall 1999.
Red, who by then was living out his last years, remembered the mountain in vivid detail: the wooden fire tower built with standing trees for posts, the warden’s cabin beneath it, the phone line and the thunderstorm that had once sent lightning through the rods and knocked the first warden out cold. He remembered his snowshoe trip with his father onto the cabin roof. He remembered the 88-pound packs. He remembered building the original camp in four days.
By the time the 2007 Long Trail News restoration article was published, Red Tillotson was gone. His daughter Elsie had written to the GMC in the summer of 2007: "I want you to know that if Dad were still here he would be turning 100 tomorrow, and I can’t think of anything he would have loved more than knowing that the camp is being taken care of."
The 2007 Restoration
By 2007, Tillotson Camp had stood for sixty-eight years. The frame, floorboards, and roofing had seen decades of use by end-to-enders, section hikers, and weekend visitors — an especially high volume of traffic for a shelter in a remote section of the northern Long Trail. When the frame, floorboards, and roofing rotted out, the GMC faced the same decision it faces with any aging shelter: rebuild or replace.
At Tillotson Camp, the decision was to restore. The shelter’s historical significance — as the last Buchanan Camp in its original location, and as the rebuilt expression of the shelter Red Tillotson had built at Perry Merrill’s request — made replacement unthinkable. The Long Trail News article about the project, written by Kelly Walsh, opened with this framing: "In the case of Tillotson Camp in Lowell however, the important role this shelter played in the history of the Green Mountain Club prevailed. Instead of tearing down the shelter and building a new one, this past fall GMC restored Tillotson Camp."
Restoration began in August 2007. Volunteers and GMC field and office staff assembled at a staging site off Vermont Route 58 in Montgomery, preparing materials for an airlift. More than nineteen loads were packed — over 14,500 pounds of lumber, materials, and supplies. On August 29, 2007, a hot, clear summer day, a helicopter began shuttling loads to the camp site. Teams of volunteers and staff at the camp received each delivery. That same day, puncheon (bog bridging) materials were airlifted to Haystack and Laraway Mountains along the same northern section.
Funding for the historic restoration came from two sources: a major Vermont Recreation Trails grant and a contribution from Dr. Richard Goldsmith.
The restored camp maintained the essential character of the 1939 Buchanan structure: a fully enclosed frame camp with two-tier bunks for eight, the distinctive wooden window-shutter that could serve as an outdoor table, and the eastern view through the trees that Red Tillotson had first looked out through more than seventy years before.
The Camp Today
Tillotson Camp is a Roy Buchanan-era enclosed frame shelter with bunks for eight, located 30 feet off the Long Trail on a short spur in a wooded sag south of Tillotson Peak in Lowell, Vermont. It sits at approximately 2,560 feet elevation. Water is available at a brook 100 feet to the north (below a beaver pond). From the front of the camp there is a limited view to the east through the trees.
The camp is the southern terminus of Division XII of the Long Trail. Northbound hikers leaving Tillotson Camp begin the 23.6-mile final stretch to the U.S.-Canada border at Line Post 592 — the northern end of the Long Trail. The Frank Post Trail provides an alternative descent to the east. Lockwood Pond, 0.1 miles south, remains one of the quieter and more beautiful spots in this stretch of the northern Long Trail.
The camp is maintained by individual GMC maintainers. The Green Mountain Club owns Belvidere Mountain, acquired in 1988 through the Long Trail Protection Program. The steel fire tower on the Belvidere summit — which replaced the original wooden tower after the 1938 hurricane toppled it — still stands and offers sweeping views of the Green Mountains, the Cold Hollow Mountains, and, on clear days, the White Mountains to the east.
Tillotson Camp stands as the sole remaining Buchanan Camp in its original location on the Long Trail. Every other camp of that era has been replaced or relocated. This one remains where Red Tillotson first put up a shelter at Perry Merrill’s request, where Roy Buchanan and the Long Trail Patrol rebuilt it in 1939, and where hikers have been stopping — to cook their biscuits, to scan the eastern view, to look for moose at Lockwood Pond — ever since.
Sources
- "Long Trail News." , no. October (1939).
- Long Trail Guide Book 1947 (1947). Green Mountain Club. 60.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1951 (1951). Green Mountain Club. 53.
- Smoke and Blazes (Killington) 05 (1952). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. 32.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1956 (1956). Green Mountain Club. 57.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1956 (1956). Green Mountain Club. 56.
- Long Trail Guide Book 1960 (1960). Green Mountain Club. 64.
- "Long Trail News." , no. February (1977).
- Long Trail Guide Book. 24th Edition ed. Green Mountain Club, 1996.
- Long Trail Guide Book 24th Edition, 1996. 1996.
- Long Trail News 2007 (2007). Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Long Trail News 2008 (2008). Green Mountain Club. 6.
- Long Trail News 2018 (2018). Green Mountain Club. 27.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 12 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1940. Pp. 63.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 17 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1963. Pp. 66.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 18 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1966. Pp. 67.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 19 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1968. Pp. 67.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 20 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1971. Pp. 80.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 20 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1971. Pp. 71.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 21 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1977. Pp. 80.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 21 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1977. Pp. 81.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 22 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1983. Pp. 80.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 22 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1983. Pp. 82.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 23 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1985. Pp. 83.
- Green Mountain Club. Long Trail Guide Book. 23 ed. Green Mountain Club, 1985. Pp. 85.
