Vermont State Ski Dorm

About a half-mile below the entrance to what is now Stowe Mountain Resort, set back from the north side of the Mountain Road (Vermont Route 108), stands a long, two-story, wood-shingled building that looks more like a remote forestry camp than a ski lodge — because that is exactly what it began as. The Vermont State Ski Dorm is the oldest continuously operating ski accommodation on Mount Mansfield, the only state-operated ski lodge ever built in the United States, and a structure listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its story is, in a real sense, the story of how downhill skiing came to the Green Mountains.

The building was put up in 1934 by Company 1210 of the Civilian Conservation Corps, which established a "side camp" — a satellite work camp tied to a parent CCC camp elsewhere in the state — designated Camp S-53. The site was chosen by Perry H. Merrill, Vermont’s Commissioner of Forestry and the state director of CCC operations. Merrill had taken up skiing in 1924 as a forestry student in Sweden, and he came back to Vermont with the conviction that the new sport had a future on Mansfield’s broad, glaciated flank. The location he picked at the foot of the Toll Road put the camp’s labor force exactly where he wanted them: at the base of the mountain whose ski trails he intended to have cut.

The building itself was designed for institutional housing. It is roughly seventy feet long, finished in brown cedar shingles, and laid out with an austere, rustic interior of exposed wood — sturdy, plain, and built to last. It quartered fifty men, with a further twenty-five and the resident state forester housed in smaller camps behind it. From this base, between 1934 and the United States’ entry into the Second World War, the CCC crews under Merrill and his engineer Charlie Lord cut the ski trails that made Stowe a household name in American skiing: the Nose Dive, Teardrop, Bruce, Ski Meister, the Perry Merrill, and the Charlie Lord, among others. These were the first true downhill trails in Vermont and remain among the most storied runs in New England.

The CCC program wound down with the war, and Camp S-53 ceased to operate as a forestry camp. But Merrill, who continued to direct Vermont’s forests for decades, recognized that the lodging market growing up around the new ski area was already pricing out the very young, working-class skiers he wanted the sport to reach. Rather than let the building stand empty, he had state crews remodel it; by 1940 it was being used informally as a ski lodge, and after a more thorough conversion it reopened as the Vermont State Ski Dorm — the first, and so far the only, state-operated ski lodge in the country. The model was deliberately spartan: bunk rooms, shared bathrooms, a common dining area, and rates kept low enough that schoolchildren, college ski clubs, and budget-minded weekend skiers could afford a winter on Mansfield.

That mission has carried into the present. The state still owns the building, and it still operates seasonally as an inexpensive hostel-style ski dorm — bunk beds, shared meals, communal common rooms — preserving in its day-to-day function the original CCC ethos of simple, accessible mountain lodging. In summer, the building serves as a base camp for AmeriCorps trail and forestry crews working in Mount Mansfield State Forest, an unforced echo of its origins as the home of the CCC trail cutters. The Stowe CCC Side Camp was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002, recognized both as a rare surviving example of CCC institutional architecture and as the literal birthplace of New England commercial downhill skiing.

A note on the other "historic ski dorm" most often associated with Stowe: the Round Hearth, on Edson Hill Road off the Mountain Road, is sometimes mistaken for the Vermont State Ski Dorm because both have called themselves "Vermont’s most famous ski dorm" at one point or another. The Round Hearth was built in 1947 by Charlie Blauvelt and Graham "Gil" Gilcrest as the first ski dorm on the Mountain Road; it burned in 1968, was rebuilt by Don and Nan Leveille the following year, and operated as a youth ski dorm under Grady and Merry Vigneau from 1988 until early 2020, when it was reinvented as the Round Hearth Café and Marketplace. It is a historic Stowe institution in its own right — but it is a separate, post-war, privately built establishment, and not the CCC-era state dorm at the foot of the Toll Road.

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