James P. Taylor was the father of the Long Trail. That’s how the story usually starts, and ends. It’s true, in a sense, but it is also simplistic. In truth, Taylor may have come up with the idea, but others were just as important in making it a reality.
One version of how he conceived of it begins with him getting lost while hiking from Mount Mansfield to the nearby Lake of the Clouds and being forced to spend the night outdoors. Another version has Taylor sitting in his tent atop Stratton Mountain, waiting for the clouds to clear. Either way, while Taylor was biding his time in the woods, he struck upon the idea of creating a footpath that would run along the spine of the Green Mountains from the Massachusetts border to Quebec.
Taylor was an outdoor enthusiast before such a thing was trendy in America. As assistant principal of Vermont Academy in Saxtons River starting in 1908, he regularly took students on long hikes through the state’s wilderness. He grew frustrated, however, that Vermont had few hiking trails to its highest peaks — eight by his count.
“Should the Green Mountain Range continue to be sacrosanct to the spirits of the first ‘Green Mountain Boys,’ and to hedgehogs, and untouchable to everybody else?” he asked during a speech promoting the trail.
At the time, Vermont actually had about 40 trails to its mountain summits, hiking historians point out. But even if Taylor overlooked a few dozen trails and seemed to think hedgehogs were wild to Vermont, his point was clear: Vermonters should get to know the peaks that define their state.
Like perhaps no other state, Vermont is dominated by mountains, he liked to say. Relying on a bit of hyperbole, Taylor claimed that every Vermonter either has a mountain out their front door or out their back.
Taylor promoted his idea to every influential person he met. On March 11, 1910, he gathered a group of nearly two dozen people at the Van Ness Hotel in Burlington for the founding meeting of the Green Mountain Club. Among those attending that night were lawyers, judges, professors, school principals, and other leaders in the state.
The club had such august founders that it would later face charges of elitism in the group. If the organization’s founders represented the elite, at least they were an elite that would get things done. The club’s goal, Taylor said, would be to create “a long trail” through the heart of the state that would make “the Vermont mountains play a larger part in the life of the people.”
Not much to start with
Taylor would leave the physically demanding creation of the Long Trail to others, but as the Green Mountain Club’s first president, he remained the trail’s lead promoter. Taylor was a natural marketer. Indeed, in 1912, he became president of the Greater Vermont Association, precursor to the state Chamber of Commerce, and would serve in that position for 37 years.
The job of building the trail fell to people like Dr. Lewis J. Paris of Burlington; Craig Burt, the owner of Stowe Lumber Co., who would later help bring skiing to the town; and lawyer, and later judge, Clarence P. Cowles.
They didn’t have much to start with. In Paris’ words, the land through which they would be cutting a trail was then “a trackless wilderness, surrounded by an indifferent people.” Except for a brief infatuation with hiking sparked by Romantic literature during the 1860s, Vermonters were not much interested in laboring to reach their state’s highest peaks.
In the second half of the 19th century, Vermont boasted mountainside hotels on Camel’s Hump, Killington Peak, Mount Mansfield and Mount Equinox, all reachable by horse. By the early 1900s, only the latter two remained.
Work on the Long Trail began on Oct. 1, 1910, when Burt and Cowles scouted a route for the first leg of the trail. They set off from the Summit House hotel on Mansfield and in three days settled on the easiest path to Nebraska Notch to the south. Taylor and others donned hiking boots to help survey the landscape for possible routes. It was late enough in the season that work on actually clearing a trail was postponed until the next year.
When work started in 1911, club members planned to clear a route from Camel’s Hump north to Smugglers Notch, a distance of 29 miles. By fall, they had done it. In his early history of the trail, Paris seemed disappointed by the mileage cleared that summer, but added that “the first step in opening up the Green Mountains had been made.”
Summer rains slowed work in 1912, and organizers and volunteers found they had to camp for weeks at a time to get the job done. As Paris put it, “the building of the Long Trail by volunteer work of its members would become a rather desultory occupation.” So they decided to call in the professionals.
Green Mountain Club members raised money to hire woodsmen to cut trails in some of the more remote sections. Fortunately, the Vermont Forestry Department was looking to create a fire patrol trail along the state’s peaks at the time. The department could locate trail routes and oversee the work, but it had no money to do the actual construction. If the GMC would front the money, the Forestry Department would supervise the work. A team of six woodsmen led by a trail-making expert with the Forestry Service started north in late May 1913 from Killington Peak. They were shooting for Mount Horrid at Rochester Pass.
A breakthrough in Rochester
The club’s annual meeting in 1913, held that year on June 14 in Brandon, turned into a celebration when word arrived that the trail team had just broken through to Rochester Pass. The team then moved on to Camel’s Hump and cut a trail south to the Lincoln-Warren pass, a distance of 28 miles.
That still left a missing link of 35 miles from Rochester Pass to the Lincoln-Warren Pass — they had saved the worst for last. Paris said that the state trail-making expert, R.M. Ross, described this stretch as “the queerest jumble of peaks, valleys, cross ridges he had encountered in Vermont.” It would be slow, and therefore expensive, work, and the GMC didn’t have the money.
Fortunately, another group, the Appalachian Mountain Club, did. A group of hikers from the Boston-based club was eager to hike the trail south from Camel’s Hump. If the GMC could guarantee that the route would be ready by Sept. 5, their club would donate $100 toward the effort. The trail crew finished the work with 10 days to spare.
During that first decade, workers cleared 209 miles of trail and built 44 sleeping shelters. The remaining 60-odd miles of the route took another decade to complete, but the GMC continued to pick away at the job, drawing on more and new volunteers as the years passed.
Finally, in 1930, with the clearing of a small section leading north to the border with Quebec, the 270-mile-long Long Trail was complete. Vermont was home to what was dubbed the nation’s first long-distance hiking trail — all thanks to James Taylor and many others.
In fact, their work on the Long Trail helped inspire Benton MacKaye, the driving force behind the Appalachian Trail, to create his own hiking route. MacKaye created a very long trail indeed. The Appalachian Trail runs 2,200 miles between Mount Katahdin in Maine and Springer Mountain in Georgia.
In a sad postscript to the Long Trail’s story, Taylor’s life began to unravel at the end. In retirement during the late 1940s, he ran low on money and began showing up at Judge Cowles’ home most nights around dinnertime. The family would always invite him in for a meal.
Then one night in 1949, Taylor chose to dine in North Hero. He stopped at an inn there and ordered a fancy dinner, which he concluded by smoking a cigar. Then he climbed aboard a small boat and rowed out onto Lake Champlain, never to be seen again.
Cowles’ life ended more fittingly. When he died of a heart attack in 1963 at age 87, he did so while hiking along a trail near Camel’s Hump, enjoying the sport he had helped bring to Vermont.
Correction: The date of Clarence Cowles’ death has been corrected.
