Underhill State Park

Underhill State Park sits on the west slope of Mount Mansfield at roughly 2,000 feet elevation, on the headwaters of the Browns River in Chittenden County. From its parking area, trails climb to the summit ridge of Vermont’s highest peak — and to the Long Trail, which traverses that ridge. The park was never a Long Trail shelter in the conventional sense: the Green Mountain Club did not build it, the Long Trail does not pass through it, and no overnight hiker stumbles upon it by following white blazes. Yet for roughly a century, Underhill State Park and its shelters have served as the primary western approach corridor to the Long Trail on Mansfield, and the shelter maintained here between approximately 1940 and 1964 was listed in successive editions of the Long Trail Guide Book as a waypoint for hikers bound for the summit.

Understanding the park’s relationship with the Long Trail requires starting not with the GMC but with a small hotel built on the mountainside in 1858.

The Halfway House Era, 1858–1939

Long before the Green Mountain Club was founded (1910) or the Long Trail was blazed (beginning 1910), Mount Mansfield drew visitors from Burlington and across New England. The west face, accessible from the small farming town of Underhill, offered the most direct ascent from the Champlain Valley. In 1858 an enterprising entrepreneur built a staging facility on the west slope of the mountain, roughly four miles east of Underhill Center along what is now Mountain Road. Called the Halfway House, the structure served as a depot where tourists could leave their horses and buggies — and, in later decades, their automobiles — while they climbed to the summit on foot. It occupied a clearing that would have looked across the Browns River drainage toward Underhill and Lake Champlain beyond.

The Halfway House burned in 1879 and was rebuilt sometime before 1924. A series of hiking trails from Underhill already existed by 1917, when the first edition of the Long Trail Guide Book described the "Stevensville Trail," "Lee River Trail," and "Halfway House Trail" as approaches to the Long Trail from the Underhill side. The Halfway House was a landmark in all of these descriptions.

By 1939 the building was in deteriorating condition and was torn down. Its stone foundation, along with scattered wild apple trees, survived to become an archaeological feature within the later state park. The site of the Halfway House marks the upper terminus of the CCC-built Mountain Road and the junction of the trails that still climb from the park to the summit ridge.

The Green Mountain Club and the Underhill Approach

The first edition of the Long Trail Guide Book (1917) described three approach routes to Mount Mansfield from the Underhill side. All were steep and involved connecting to the Long Trail at or near the summit ridge. By the 1940 edition (twelfth), the Guide Book had settled on a consolidated set of numbered side trails in the Mount Mansfield region, and a key footnote had appeared:

"Vermont Forestry Department maintains large open-front shelter on road ¾ mile below Halfway House."

This was the shelter — the one recorded in GMC files as Shelter ID 000250. It was not built by the GMC, bore no GMC designation, and sat not on the Long Trail itself but on the state road leading to the Sunset Ridge Trail trailhead. The Forestry Department maintained it as a hiker’s waypoint at the base of the mountain’s west approaches. In the 1947 edition the description had changed slightly: the shelter was now described as "½ mile below Halfway House," suggesting it had been moved or that an earlier description had been imprecise.

The Sunset Ridge Trail — the "best route to Summit and Taft Lodge from the west side of the mountain," according to the Guide Books — began just above this shelter, ascending three miles over a high, open ridge to join the Long Trail just south of the Chin. For hikers who drove to the end of the mountain road, the state-maintained shelter served as the natural staging point before the climb began.

The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Creation of the Park, 1933–1940

Vermont established Underhill State Park in 1933, the same year that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal launched the Civilian Conservation Corps nationwide. Between December 1933 and August 1940, Camp S-60 of the CCC — comprising Companies 1291 and 1135 — operated from Underhill State Park as its base of operations. The CCC’s work here was substantial and left an indelible physical mark on the landscape.

The Corps’ primary mission was road construction. The Mountain Road, which winds up the western flanks of Mansfield along the Browns River drainage, was upgraded and extended by the CCC, who also built at least 24 stone culverts along its length, ranging from small drainage crossings to structures spanning twelve feet in width. These culverts, laid in mortared fieldstone with concrete bases, remain in place today. The CCC also constructed a concrete dam across the Browns River as part of a water supply system, still visible though no longer operable.

In the lower camping and picnic area that became the heart of the park, Camp S-60 built four log lean-tos using a standardized rustic design. Named "Maple," "Birch," "Beech," and "Pine," the lean-tos were framed in logs ten to fourteen inches in diameter, assembled with half-lapped corner joints on concrete footers. Their roofs were decked in one-by-four boards and originally covered in wood shingles. The floors were painted gray enamel plank. Each measured ten by fourteen feet. Accompanying the lean-tos were twelve fieldstone cooking fireplaces, each approximately five feet wide, four feet deep, and three feet high, with a steel-framed and fire-bricked arch.

The Camp also built the ranger’s quarters, a one-story clapboard building with an exterior fieldstone fireplace that served as park headquarters; a men’s and women’s toilet facility; and a large picnic shelter on a cleared knoll above the parking area, constructed in the same log-and-fieldstone idiom. The picnic shelter, thirty by twenty feet, featured a western end wall with a massive uncoursed fieldstone fireplace spanning ten feet wide. Together these buildings represent the "Rustic" style promoted by the National Park Service in the 1930s — truth in materials, sensitivity to landscape, and visible craftsmanship that blended construction with the natural setting.

The CCC also cut and improved hiking and ski trails on the west face of Mansfield. The Butler Lodge Trail, one of the primary climbing routes on the mountain, was "originally built by State Forestry Department" (as noted in multiple editions of the Long Trail Guide Book) — a construction directly tied to CCC-era state forestry work. During this period there were ambitions to develop the west side of Mansfield as a downhill ski resort to rival what was emerging at Stowe on the east side. An unfinished CCC road extending roughly three miles northward from the park toward Nebraska Notch was part of this vision. World War II ended the effort, and the ski area idea was abandoned in the postwar era, leaving the road as the foundation of the present CCC Mountain Road.

The Halfway House was demolished in 1939, one year before the CCC’s work at the park concluded. The original building, rebuilt after the 1879 fire, had stood for eighty-odd years; its clearing and foundation now occupy the upper end of the Mountain Road within the park.

The State Shelter and the Long Trail Guide Books, circa 1940–1964
The open-front lean-to maintained by the Vermont Forestry Department on the mountain road below the Halfway House site appeared in successive editions of the Long Trail Guide Book through the late 1950s. In the 1951 edition (fourteenth), the entry for the Sunset Ridge Trail read:

"Vermont Forestry Department maintains large open-front shelter on road ½ mile below Halfway House Site. Trail ascends over high bare ridge with fine views, turns right at fork near top and joins Long Trail a short distance south of the summit of the Chin. Best route to Summit and Taft Lodge from west side of mountain."

A 1958 photograph of the shelter carries the caption "Mount Mansfield Shelter Underhill State Park" — revealing another name by which it was known. The structure is a traditional open-front lean-to of the type common to Vermont forestry operations of the era.

GMC records place the shelter’s active period from approximately 1951 to 1964, though guide book references appear as early as 1940. The discrepancy likely reflects the date at which GMC volunteers began formally tracking state-maintained shelters adjacent to the trail network, rather than a construction date. By the early 1960s, guide book language had shifted from describing a specific shelter at the trailhead to directing hikers to the "Mt. Mansfield (Underhill) State Camping Area" — a formalization of the park’s facilities that appears in the 1963 and 1966 editions. By 1968, the guide described the approach routes beginning "From the Camping Area" rather than referencing the individual shelter. This transition marks the moment when the state shelter ceased to function as a discrete overnight waypoint and was absorbed, in effect, into the larger park facility.

The 1961 Long Trail News offers a glimpse of how the park and its grounds were used during this period. The Burlington Section of the GMC reported:

"Our last event before this report was a trip to the famed Cantilever Rock and a Corn Roast at the Underhill State Park after the hike, Sept. 16th. Forty tramped in to the rock and sixty-eight gathered to gnaw sweet corn after the trip up the trail."

The Cantilever Rock, a remarkable geological feature on Sunset Ridge accessible from the park, had become a standard GMC objective; gathering afterward at the park picnic area was clearly a tradition by the early 1960s.

From Shelter to Trailhead: The Park’s Role After 1964

When the state shelter ceased to appear in GMC records, the park did not disappear from the hiking community’s landscape. Rather it evolved from a site with a discrete Long Trail–adjacent shelter into something broader: the primary western trailhead complex for the Mount Mansfield summit ridge and the Long Trail.

By 1968, the Long Trail Guide Book described four numbered side trails leaving from the state camping area toward the Long Trail. The 1985 edition explicitly listed the "Underhill State Park Youth Camping Area" alongside Smuggler’s Notch State Park and the State Ski Dorm as group facilities available to hiking parties planning trips to the Mount Mansfield area. For organized groups unable to use the GMC lodges — which were, as the Guide noted, "heavily used and not designed to accommodate large groups" — Underhill State Park offered an alternative base.

Burlington Section newsletters (Ridgelines) through the 1990s document dozens of GMC outings that began or ended at Underhill State Park: moonlight hikes, snowshoe trips to Nebraska Notch, ski tours on the CCC road, bushwhacks to Sunset Knob, loops via Butler Lodge and the Maple Ridge. A January 1996 issue recorded trips starting at the park to access winter beaver pond terrain; a January 1997 issue noted a snowshoe to Taylor Lodge via Nebraska Notch beginning from Underhill. The park was a reliable assembly point for the Burlington Section’s calendar across all seasons.

The Green Mountain Club itself maintains the approach trails from the park — the Nebraska Notch Trail, Butler Lodge Trail, and others — as blue-blazed side trails in the Mount Mansfield Region. These are the connective tissue between the park’s trailhead and the Long Trail, which they join at Nebraska Notch, the ridge above Butler Lodge, and various points along the Sunset Ridge.

A Lasting Legacy: National Register of Historic Places, 2002

In 1999, Christopher Quinn of the UVM Graduate Program in Historic Preservation prepared a National Register of Historic Places nomination for Underhill State Park. The nomination emphasized the integrity of the CCC-era construction — the four log lean-tos, the ranger’s quarters, the picnic shelter, the toilet building, the stone culverts, the dam, and the road — as a cohesive ensemble representing the goals and craftsmanship of Camp S-60. The period of significance was defined as 1932–1942, encompassing the Depression-era New Deal context.

The nomination was accepted, and the CCC facilities at Underhill State Park were entered in the National Register of Historic Places in 2002. The listing recognized the park under Criteria A (significance in patterns of social and economic history — the Depression, the New Deal, the CCC) and Criteria C (significant architecture — the Rustic style, log construction, and landscape integration that define CCC state park work in Vermont).

The Halfway House site, the CCC road, and the log lean-tos named Maple, Birch, Beech, and Pine all contribute to the historic district. The more recently built lean-tos in the upper group camping area — constructed by the state parks system in the 1980s and following the same dimensional lumber design used across Vermont state parks — are non-contributing elements, lacking the age and craftsmanship of their CCC predecessors but maintaining the visual character of the setting.

Today the park encompasses 250 acres within the 39,837-acre Mount Mansfield State Forest. It operates seasonally between Memorial Day weekend and Columbus Day, though the main gate remains accessible for cross-country skiing after the first snowfall. Facilities include ten tent sites, six lean-to sites, a group camping area with seven additional lean-tos and two tent sites, and the CCC-built picnic shelter. All campsites require a short walk from the parking area.

Sources