On the afternoon of October 2, 1937, the trustees of the Green Mountain Club walked a mile north from Sherburne Pass to inspect a new lodge, standing near good water, built in honor of a man who had given the club three decades of service.
Fred H. Tucker of Boston had been part of the Green Mountain Club’s leadership since at least 1923, when he was elected trustee alongside George A. Mathers of Bennington and presided as vice president at the club’s annual dinner. By 1929 he was already a benefactor of the club’s shelter-building program, having helped fund an earlier camp at Hazen’s Notch — a different structure entirely from the lodge that would later carry his name near Sherburne Pass. By 1935 he was still active enough in club affairs to be elected a delegate to the Appalachian Trail Conference at Skyland. He did not live to see the lodge dedicated in his memory; the Long Trail Guide Book of 1940 already refers to “the late Fred H. Tucker.”
“In the afternoon the trustees walked to the New Fred Tucker lodge, a mile north on the Trail, and near good water. They found an attractive and commodious building, with four large bunks inside, capable of accommodating a maximum of 16 people, and a loft above which might hold as many more.”
— Long Trail News, November 1937
The lodge the trustees found that October afternoon was built for warmth and durability against the Vermont weather. Its foundation was cobblestone; above it rose imitation log siding milled from Georgia cypress, chosen for its resistance to rot. Inside, the finish work was pine — some of it from North Carolina, some shipped from as far as Oregon. A single stove handled both heat and cooking, its oven built into the stovepipe above the firebox itself.
The building work was carried out by the Long Trail Patrol, and it was not cheap to do right. A season-end report by Patrol supervisor Wallace M. Fay laid out exactly what the memorial had cost, and where the money came from:
“When this was completed the new Tucker lodge was built in the agreed location about a mile north of Sherburne Pass at a cost of $615.28. This sum exceeded Mr. Tucker’s legacy of $500.00, but as agreed at the Trustees’ meeting in June some of the patrol fund was expended on this camp in order that a very fitting memorial to Mr. Tucker would be entirely completed.”
— Wallace M. Fay, “Patrol Activities, Season of 1937,” Long Trail News, November 1937, p. 2
By comparison, that same 1937 season, the Patrol built a shelter at Noyes Pond for a fraction of the cost — $137.64 — a reminder of how much larger and more finished a “lodge” like Tucker’s was meant to be beside the simpler open shelters the club maintained elsewhere on the Trail.
The guidebooks of the following decades repeated the same short tribute, edition after edition, with only minor variation:
“Fred Tucker Lodge, a comfortable cabin with stove and bunks for 12, built by the Long Trail Patrol in 1938, as a memorial to the late Fred H. Tucker, of Boston, long a valued member of the Board of Trustees of the Club.”
— Long Trail Guide Book, 12th ed. (1940), p. 35; repeated verbatim, 13th ed. (1947), p. 33
Three Decades on the Trail
For most of its life, Tucker Lodge — known interchangeably in club literature as Tucker Lodge and Fred Tucker Lodge — sat a mile’s walk north of Sherburne Pass, reached by a blue-blazed side trail off the main Long Trail, with water two hundred feet to the southwest. It came under the care of the Killington Section, whose members hiked in through every season, including deep winter.
From the Killington Section register: Winter visits to Tucker became something of a tradition for the section’s Smoke and Blazes newsletter, which recorded moonlight hikes to the lodge, work parties sent in specifically “to get Tucker Lodge into shape for the summer,” and a running, half-exasperated commentary on the state the shelter was left in: “Looking over the Tucker register… we were interested to note how general was the comment ‘found the camp a mess.'” Most parties, the writer noted, at least reported cleaning up after themselves.
The lodge needed real upkeep, not just tidying. By February 1953, sixteen window lights had been broken and needed replacing, and the original stove — the same one whose oven had impressed the trustees in 1937 — had a warped top that made cooking difficult.
16 broken lights need replacing, the stove is in bad shape with a warped top making cooking difficult.”
— Long Trail News, February 1953
Members occasionally took matters into their own hands in ways the section did not appreciate. One newsletter note describes arriving at Tucker to find that someone had installed an unauthorized auxiliary stove, cutting through two roof-supporting beams to do it and setting the new stove directly on the wooden floor — an early, small-scale preview of the “misuse” concerns that would eventually help seal the lodge’s fate.
By 1962, the accumulated wear had reached the foundation itself. That year’s maintenance plan, folded into a broader annual sweep across twenty-two miles of section trail, called for rebuilding the lodge’s stonework from the ground up:
“Plans are for the rebuilding of the foundation, the repair of the upper windows and the rebuilding of the annex in 1962.”
— Long Trail News, May 1962
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A Shelter Outgrown
By the late 1960s, Tucker Lodge’s setting had begun to change around it. A ski-area access road had crept close enough to the old lodge that the club no longer considered it worth keeping in repair, and residential development had grown up nearby as well. The Long Trail itself was being realigned through the area, and the club decided the memorial to Fred Tucker needed a successor rather than another round of patchwork repair.
In 1969, the Long Trail Patrol — under builder Louis “Sandy” Stare and Patrol Leader Fred Gilbert — joined with members of the Killington Section to raise a replacement a short distance away, on the Long Trail near Eagle Square Brook. It carried Tucker’s name forward, and added a second: Otto Johnson of Proctor, Vermont, had bequeathed $1,000 toward the new building’s construction. The new Tucker-Johnson Shelter took its own three weeks to build, with the Patrol using the aging Tucker Lodge itself as their base of operations during construction.
“On Sunday, October 5, seventeen GMCers and guests hiked in to the new Tucker-Johnson Shelter for the dedication ceremony… Rod Rice, chairman of Trails and Shelters, gave a brief history of Old Tucker and explained the new name was in memory of Otto Johnson of Proctor who gave $1,000 for its construction.”
— Long Trail News, November 1969, p. 8
With its replacement dedicated, the old lodge’s days were numbered, and the club’s own newsletter said so plainly within months:
“Tucker Lodge (and its blue-blazed approach trail) will probably be removed due to its condition and nearby housing development.”
— Long Trail News, February 1970, p. 9
By early 1971, the description had hardened from a prediction into a fact:
“Tucker-Johnson Shelter replaces Tucker Lodge, now abandoned and unusable.”
— Long Trail News, February 1971, p. 5
March 27, — 1971 Given Back to the Mountain
Tucker Lodge stood abandoned for barely a season before Killington Section members ended its thirty-four years on the Long Trail — not through neglect, but through a deliberate decision, made in the club’s own name, that a wrecked and unmaintained building near a popular trail was more dangerous standing than gone.
“March 27, 1971, this lodge was burned by a group of Killington Section members to prevent possible accidents and misuse of this shelter.”
— Long Trail News, May 1971
A fuller account, found decades later: A 2017 retrospective in the Killington Section’s own newsletter fills in what the 1971 club record left out: the lodge had already been fatally damaged before anyone lit a match. “The old Tucker Lodge was cremated on March 27, 1971 after having been fatally damaged by a falling beech tree.” Read against that detail, the burning looks less like an act against a living building and more like the disposal of a hazard that a storm had already destroyed — a controlled end to a structure the mountain had, in its own way, already brought down.
Its successor, Tucker-Johnson Shelter, carried the memory of both Fred Tucker and Otto Johnson for another forty-two years before it too was lost to fire, in 2011 — the cause of that later blaze never recorded in any surviving club publication. A second Tucker-Johnson Shelter was raised in 2018, honoring Manchester Section president Marge Fish and built to a design based on drawings by former GMC president George Pearlstein, and stands today. It, and the trail beside it, are the only things left standing anywhere near where Fred Tucker’s memorial once stood — cobblestone, cypress, and pine, a mile north of Sherburne Pass.
Sources
Long Trail News
- “Patrol Activities, Season of 1937.” Long Trail News, November 1937, p. 2.
- Long Trail News, February 1953.
- Long Trail News, May 1962, p. 5.
- Long Trail News, November 1969, p. 8.
- Long Trail News, February 1970, p. 9.
- Long Trail News, February 1971, p. 5.
- Long Trail News, May 1971.
- Long Trail News, Spring 2018, p. 15 (“Tucker-Johnson Shelter Replacement”).
- Long Trail News, Spring 2019, pp. 22–23.
- Long Trail News, Summer 2021, p. 21 (In Memoriam, Louis “Sandy” Stare Jr.).
Long Trail Guide Book
- 12th ed. (1940), p. 35.
- 13th ed. (1947), p. 33.
- 15th ed. (1956), p. 29.
- 16th–ed. (1960), p. 37.
- 17th–18th eds. (1963, 1966), p. 37.
Smoke and Blazes (Killington Section)
- Issue 0026 (Killington Section newsletter, c. 1959–60), pp. 1, 27, 31, 50,
- 2013, V66 N03, p. 3 (“Roma’s Ramblings”).
- 2017, V70 N01, p. 3 (Bob Perkins, “Archived Smoke & Blazes”).
- 1990, V42 N04, p. 4.
Other
- Woodward, Long Trail System Shelter History, 2nd ed. (1999), pp. 128–129.
- Green Mountain Club shelter database: shelter records for Tucker Lodge (id 248) and Tucker-Johnson Shelter, 1st & 2nd (ids 247, 268).
- Long Trail News, October 1929, p. 4, and July 1935, p. 1 (Fred H. Tucker biographical background)
