(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[A]lden Partridge had an astounding idea: He would hike two of Vermont’s highest peaks, Mount Mansfield and Camel’s Hump. That might not sound like such a revolutionary notion to us. After all, thousands of people hike those mountains each year. But this was 1818, and two centuries ago hiking wasn’t exactly a popular sport. Just saying you wanted to climb a tall mountain might have made you seem eccentric.
The other remarkable thing about Partridge’s idea is that he planned to get to and from the mountains by foot. Though this was still three decades before the arrival of railroads, Partridge could have traveled there largely by a combination of horse and boat. Instead he opted to make the trek, all 150-plus miles roundtrip from his home in Norwich, entirely on foot.
He made the whole journey in a week, mostly in the rain.
Looking at Partridge’s lifetime of hikes, however, this trek hardly stands out. Partridge would become New England’s first long-distance hiker. He wrote widely circulated newspaper columns about his wilderness walks and in so doing helped popularize the sport of hiking.
Later, in the early 1900s, reports of his exploits inspired schoolteacher James P. Taylor to create the Long Trail, which runs the length of Vermont. The Long Trail, in turn, helped inspire Benton MacKaye’s vision for an Appalachian Trail, which now runs from Georgia to Maine.
As heartened as Partridge would be to know what his hiking habit has helped spawn, he was pursuing his passion for another purpose. He was trying to craft hardy citizen soldiers and give them what he termed a “physical education” to complement their book learning. The son of a Revolutionary War veteran, Partridge was a career Army officer. He was born in Norwich and attended nearby Dartmouth College, before transferring to West Point.
After graduating, Partridge taught mathematics and engineering at West Point. In 1814, he was named superintendent of the school. But his tenure was short-lived. His changes to the curriculum and administration of the school proved unpopular with superiors, who dismissed him. Partridge’s response showed a stubborn streak. He returned to work as if nothing had changed.
His superiors had a different opinion of what Partridge’s duty was and decided he was derelict in fulfilling it. So they court-martialed him, and he was cashiered from the Army, a dishonorable form of discharge. But President James Monroe interceded, allowing Partridge to resign instead.
Partridge’s experience at West Point left him disillusioned about the role of the military in American society. He worried that West Point was creating a professional officer class in control of a standing army, which he saw as a danger to the republic.
Partridge put his faith in local militias run by citizens. He returned to Norwich and soon founded The American Literary, Scientific and Military Academy, a private school to teach young men to become citizen soldiers. It was the first school of its kind in the United States. Partridge would found similar schools in Delaware, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.
His Vermont school would eventually become known as Norwich University, though it would move briefly to Connecticut before returning to Vermont in the town of Northfield.
It was shortly after resigning from the Army, and while his military academy was still just a dream, that Partridge set out on his expedition to Camel’s Hump and Mount Mansfield. Trails in the wilderness were essentially nonexistent, so he had to bushwhack up Camel’s Hump, and do it in a driving rain.
At the summit, he pulled the barometer he’d been carrying from his pack and measured the barometric pressure, using it to estimate Camel’s Hump’s height. He came up with 4,088 feet, only 5 feet higher than the peak’s accepted height today.
It had been a hard day, he noted that night in his journal: “Not a dry thread in my clothes, and somewhat fatigued, having ate nothing nor drunk anything but water during the day.” The next day Partridge walked to Stowe, where he met an old friend. Together, they bushwhacked to the summit of Mansfield the following day. They were back down by 5 p.m. – “as usual, drenched with the water which fell from the bushes in passing through the woods.”
Partridge bid his friend adieu and walked on to Waterbury, reaching it at 10 p.m. In the course of the day, he had hiked 34 miles, a rather pedestrian total for Partridge.
This trek had been mostly a solitary experience. At Norwich, he made group hikes a regular part of the program. In August 1821, he led a group of eight 13- and 14-year-old cadets from the Norwich school, as well as a number of Dartmouth professors and students on the more than 75-mile trip to Crawford Notch in the White Mountains. From there they scaled Mount Washington, where they slept near the summit before returning home.
Two months later, he led the entire cadet corps, roughly 100 students, on a hike to Woodstock and back. The next year, the corps hiked to Montpelier, where the governor watched them drill.
Then in September 1823, Partridge marched his cadets to Manchester, where 20 local residents joined them in climbing a local mountain. Lacking a trail, they chose a steep route. Later, one of the cadets would recall having to hold onto trees or anything that came to hand “to prevent our falling backward.” The hike, during which Partridge measured the mountain’s height, took place near the fall equinox. Some suggest that’s how Mount Equinox got its name. On this four-day expedition, the cadets hiked more than 150 miles, covering 45 miles on one of the days.
During his life, Partridge would climb many if not most of the high peaks of New England. He advised others to do likewise: “Walk about 10 miles per day at the rate of 4 mph; about 3 or 4 times each year shoulder your knapsack and with your barometer, etc., ascend to the summits of our principal mountains and determine the altitudes, walking from 30 to 80 miles per day, according as you can bear the fatigue.”
Partridge’s love of hiking and also his endurance seem only to have grown as he aged. In his 45th year, he hiked 152 miles in three days in order to climb Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire, and then hiked 220 in four days to climb mountains in western Massachusetts. On another Massachusetts excursion that year, he walked 300 miles roundtrip, including 64 miles on the final day.
Guy and Laura Waterman in “Forest and Crag,” their 1989 history of hiking in the Northeast, relate a story told about Partridge. He was setting out from Concord, New Hampshire, heading to Hanover, when a stagecoach driver offered him a ride. Partridge declined, noting that the coachman would have to change horses 3 or 4 miles up the road. He’d see him then. By the time the new horses had been harnessed, Partridge had already passed the spot. The stage passed Partridge along the road, before making another scheduled stop. When the stagecoach finally reached the hotel in Hanover, the driver spied Partridge sitting on the porch, reading.
The story is no doubt apocryphal. Nobody could walk that far, that fast. Or could they?
