Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s eyes were playing tricks on him. Perched atop Mount Mansfield one day in 1868, the famed poet and transcendentalist saw that “Lake Champlain lay below us, but was a perpetual illusion, as it would appear a piece of yellow sky, until careful examination of the islands in it and the Adirondac (sic) summits beyond brought it to earth for a moment.” He exalted in exploring the mountain’s caves, which he was told were sometimes homes to catamounts or bears, and crawled on his belly to the edge of a cliff to glance over into the abyss.
Emerson was doing what numerous visitors to Vermont did during the mid-1800s — immersing himself in the state’s natural beauty and wildness.
Nature lovers like Emerson represented a second wave of tourists to Vermont. The 1840s and ’50s had seen an influx of visitors drawn by the medical fad of “water cures” that swept the nation. Towns like Brattleboro, Highgate and Middletown, many of which added the word “springs” to their names, did a brisk business in these water-based therapies.
The arrival of railroads and the public’s expanding appreciation of the natural world set the stage for the development of mountain resorts centered around such prominent peaks as Mount Mansfield, Camel’s Hump, Killington, Equinox and Ascutney.
The idea of developing Stowe as a mountain resort belonged to a Stowe resident named Stillman Churchill. In 1850, Churchill converted his home in the village into the “Mansfield House” and began placing advertisements that promised visitors “one of the pleasantest country villages in the state” and a chance to see “old Mansfield Mountain.”
Churchill may have been ahead of his time, but soon he was behind on his payments. So his hotel passed into the hands of his creditor William Henry Harrison Bingham, who had a vision similar to Churchill’s, but was more business savvy. Bingham in 1858 oversaw completion of a carriage road, which led to a spot near Mount Mansfield’s summit. With the road complete, Bingham was able to tap investors from southern New England to finance construction of what would become known as the Summit House.
Construction of the building took five years. In 1864, the hotel opened its doors to adventurous travelers, including Emerson. These tourists were after more than pretty views. Many wanted a spiritual experience, an encounter with “the sublime,” a term in vogue at the time. Defining the sublime is difficult. It is something best experienced. Intellectuals of the day felt they encountered it in dramatic locations that emphasized the power of nature, by which they meant God, and the comparative insignificance of humanity. Such experiences were said to remind people of their own mortality.
As English poet Thomas Gray explained: “There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument. … One need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits there at noon-day; you have Death perpetually before your eyes, only so far removed, as to compose the mind without frighting it.”
As the state’s tallest peak, and one studded with cliffs, Mount Mansfield seemed a likely spot for Vermont visitors to experience the sublime.
Members of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, who everywhere sought out sublime scenes to present to the city-dwelling public, largely ignored Vermont. Instead, they focused on the New York’s Catskills and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. To them, Vermont’s sprinkling of villages made the state too civilized to invoke the sublime.
But William Bingham, creator of Mansfield’s Summit House, managed to find an ally in New Hampshire publisher H.P. Moore. Even before the Summit House was complete, Moore published a short book, “Mount Mansfield and Environs: Views and Sketches,” extolling Stowe’s sublime qualities. The booklet, which goes into extreme detail about the topography of the area, is fawning in its admiration.
The unnamed writer suggests that a visitor to Mansfield’s summit would experience something akin to vertigo: “(T)urning to the east, you look down shelf to shelf and ridge to ridge, over the dark, shaggy forests, rapidly falling away in confused perspective from your feet, until your eyes, gladly escaping from the wildering maze of wooded cliffs, disjointed hills, and intersecting gorges, gratefully rests on the smooth, cultivated farms below…”
The unnamed writer argued that the juxtaposition of rugged mountain landscape and domesticated farmland below made Mansfield exceptional. No mountain in the United States, the writer claimed, “exhibit(s) views and prospects which, in the various combinations of the picturesque, the beautiful, and the sublime, surpass, if they equal, those of Mount Mansfield.”
Guidebooks like the one published by Moore, and other books that soon followed, offered travelers everything from the best order to take in the views to tips on the vocabulary with which to describe them. They aimed to create a sort of “scenic connoisseurship,” according to University of Vermont professor Dona Brown.
Visiting places like the top of Mansfield was a way to attain status for some, because it showed that the traveler was a member of an elite who could appreciate the splendor that nature had to offer. “Appreciation of scenery was an enterprise heavily freighted with class consciousness,” Brown explains in a 1997 essay for Vermont History, the journal of the Vermont Historical Society.
While Mount Mansfield might be inferior in “loftiness, grandeur and majesty” to Mount Washington, a writer declared in Harper’s Magazine in the 1870s that at least on Mansfield the visitor would be spared “the intrusion of unsympathetic Philistines,” who apparently populated the more crowded New Hampshire peak.
The snobbish comment suggests the writer would have preferred to have encountered only Victorian gentlemen and ladies clustered together on the mountain’s various high points, reciting Lord Byron’s poetry and rhapsodizing about the sublime view. Such scenes no doubt took place, but those poetry-loving Victorians had company. About half the visitors to the top of Mansfield were Vermonters, as Brown determined by examining the Summit House’s register books.
Visits by the likes of Emerson make the history books. Those by everyday Vermonters do not. That doesn’t mean they didn’t enjoy the view just as much, even if they didn’t call it sublime.
