Benton MacKaye’s 1900 Hike Inspires Appalachian Trail

by Larry Anderson

The Long Trail “is a project that will be logically extended,” forester and conservationist Benton MacKaye prophesied in his pathbreaking October 1921 article, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” which appeared in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. “What the Green Mountains are to Vermont the Appalachians are to the eastern United States. What is suggested, therefore, is a ‘long trail’ over the full length of the Appalachian skyline.” When MacKaye first publicly broached his idea for the Appalachian Trail, he thus offered the then-uncompleted Long Trail as a model for his vision of “a series of recreational communities throughout the Appalachian chain of mountains from New England to Georgia, these to be connected by a walking trail.”

MacKaye’s knowledge of the terrain traversed by the Long Trail was gained firsthand. In the summer of 1900, the 21-year-old MacKaye and a close friend, Horace Hildreth, set out for a Vermont adventure. Their mountain excursion cemented a lifetime friendship and helped to inspire the 2,184-mile Appalachian Trail (AT) from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine.

The two young men had been close during the three years they shared at Harvard College: Hildreth had graduated in 1899, MacKaye in 1900. They enjoyed many of the same enthusiasms, including cross-country tramping, railroads, geol- ogy, and the works of Gilbert and Sullivan. Their two-week ramble during the summer of 1900 allowed them to indulge some of these interests. Forty-one years later, Hildreth remembered their journey as “our Classic of the Green Mountains.”

By Back Road, Cart Path, and Bushwacking

On the morning of July 14, 1900, MacKaye and his older brother Percy met Hildreth at the depot at Shirley, Massachusetts, the MacKayes’ hometown, where they caught a westbound train. Headed for Vermont, their goal was to climb many of the state’s highest mountains, beginning in the south and working their way north. At the turn of the nineteenth century, trails led to the summits of many of these mountains. Today’s hiker on a similar mission would stick to the 272-mile Long Trail. In 1900 though, no trail existed to connect Vermont’s summits. The idea for the Long Trail
was not proposed until 1910 by James
P. Taylor, and the Green Mountain Club did not complete the footpath until 1930. So the route of the MacKaye-Hildreth expedition, by “back road, cart path, and sheer bushwhacking,” as MacKaye later wrote, would be devised by the trampers themselves along the way.
They journeyed through the state from the Massachusetts border north as far as Morrisville, exploring a rural landscape on the brink of dramatic change. In 1900, only 8,000 motor vehicles were registered in the entire United States; twenty years later, 9 million cars and trucks were traveling America’s roads.

The documented details of the southern leg of their trip are sketchy. They apparently rode the train west as far as the Hoosac Tunnel, where they caught the Hoosac Tunnel and Wilmington Railroad, which followed the Deerfield River north to the Vermont towns of Readsboro and Wilmington. During the next week, the trio reached the summits of Haystack, Stratton, and Bromley. In
an era of growing concern about the rate at which northern New England’s forests were being harvested, MacKaye and Hildreth visited “Grout’s Job,” a short- lived logging settlement south of Stratton Mountain.

On July 21, in Dorset, the hikers boarded the Rutland Railroad north- bound. Percy MacKaye departed at Rutland, presenting his younger brother with a small notebook, inscribed with the exhortation: “Benton – record your details – and ‘Keep a-peggin’ away.’” MacKaye’s detailed account of the trip from Rutland to Morrisville provides a lively portrait of Vermont’s turn-of-the- century physical and social landscape.

MacKaye and Hildreth walked east on the “Notch Road” towards 4,235-
foot Killington Peak. “Stopped to get drink; thug came along in wagon,” MacKaye recorded. “I left the axe which he took. Met another old buck Irish going other way, said thief was called ‘Henkley.’ Probably lied.” They found lodging that night at the rustic home of a French-Canadian woman. After a night’s sleep next to a flea-infested dog and a “greasey” breakfast in the company of chickens that roamed freely through the house, MacKaye and Hildreth made for Killington. Near the summit, they were offered a drink by raucous hikers who had hauled a keg of spirits up the mountain the previous night.

 

On the road again toward North Sherburne, they “Guffed with [an] Irishman who said three things he would not change, ‘his name, his religion, and his politics.’ He would vote for Bryan, tho’ he ‘might get beat again.’” After a night in another bug-infested house, MacKaye and Hildreth were glad to be on their way the next morning. “We are anxious to get into the Conn. R. valley again,” MacKaye wrote. A height of land not 200 yards from their lodgings, he observed, marked the divide between Otter Creek and the Tweed River, a tributary of the White (and thereby of the Connecticut), which they followed by way of Pitts- field (“had a moxie”) to Gaysville. They caught a freight train to Bethel, and another to Roxbury.

Hiking west along the steep road leading over the Northfield Range, the trampers secured lodging at a hill farm. “An old buck, his wife apparently, an aged man and a young man, made up the family. They had no horse on the place; used oxen; raise cattle; had just begun haying. Said wolves have been seen further north within 2 yrs…. Best night’s rest on trip. Had sheets.”

The next day, the 24th, Hildreth and MacKaye ambled along hot and unshaded roads through East Warren and Warren, and north along the Mad River to Irasville. The next summit on their route was 4,083-foot Camel’s Hump. They headed west along a back road toward North Fayston to begin their approach to the mountain. They spent the night at the farm of J. B. Thompson, who directed them to a Mr. Johnson up the road, “a fat genial old cuss…. He puts up barns. Says a close barn gives cattle tuberculosis.” The barnbuilder also offered his disapproval of local forestry practices. “Lumbering is done by cutting clean,” noted MacKaye, who in 1903 would earn a Harvard master’s degree in forestry. “He thinks[,] poor thing.”

Johnson gave the two young men directions across the rugged terrain to Camel’s Hump. To reach a good trail from a sawmill at the base of the mountain, they first had to cross “a blow down, swamp & general damnation on top” of an intervening mountain. Not far from Camel’s Hump’s rocky, cold, and windy summit they built a “lead-to” [sic] for the night. It took two hours to start a fire for their oatmeal supper, but they spent a comfortable night. “The only sound which startled us was a weird cooing.”

The next morning, MacKaye and Hildreth descended the north slope of the mountain, and walked along the Winooski River to North Duxbury and Waterbury, meeting a young worker
at an electric plant on the river. “He asked us if we were ‘jack tars,’ seeing
the U.S.N. on our knapsacks. Offered us
a drink of whiskey. Quite upset that we refused & in general dismayed at our conduct and walking apparently with
no end in view.” Walking for its own sake, of course, was the whole point of the excursion. But after stocking up on provisions in Waterbury, they rode the electric trolley to Stowe, a town whose prosperous appearance and atmosphere seemed to unsettle MacKaye. “[A] strange air prevaded [sic] everything.”

On the road toward Mount Mans- field, they spent the night at another ramshackle farmstead. The place “was
in a sorry condition: loose boards, stray chickens, naked kids, slouchy mother, stinks, etc. etc.,” MacKaye noted. “In this we had breakfast. The slush to go on the potatoes was the worst yet.”

The final objective of the MacKaye/Hildreth peak-bagging expedition was 4,393-foot Mount Mansfield, Vermont’s highest point. Following the carriage road, the trampers reached the “Nose” of the mountain, the southern peak of its long ridgeline. Lake Champlain’s islands, he noted, “showed up distinctly & reminded me of the Isles of Greece”
– islands he had never seen except in his mind’s eye. They roamed around the mountaintop until sunset, then scrambled down the carriage road. At the home of Mrs. Luce, a “funny, fat, old few teethed thing,” they were provided a late supper of crackers and milk. The next day, a Sunday, MacKaye and Hildreth stopped for services at Stowe’s Methodist church. The sermon lasted almost an hour, and MacKaye escaped being recruited for Sunday school, “a feat which an urgent stomach ache of the time did not allow.”

The last leg of their hike followed the road to Morrisville, where they spent an unsettled night sleeping in a box car. “A freight train came along about 11 o’clock. We were afraid of discovery & lighted out. Got back again; heard ‘noises’ all night till 1.00 a.m.”

The next morning, July 30, they
rose early, had breakfast at the railroad station, and boarded a 6:15 train home- ward bound. MacKaye calculated their expenses for food, lodging, and train fare since leaving Rutland ten days earlier at $12.01, which the two explorers split – one of them apparently picking up the extra penny.

A Conservation Survey of the Long Trail

Soon after publication of his 1921 article proposing the Appalachian Trail, MacKaye turned to his old hiking companion Horace Hildreth for advice about promoting the project. In July 1922,
the two revisited some of the south-
ern Vermont terrain they had tramped more than two decades earlier. MacKaye wanted to feature the Stratton Mountain area as a case study for what he called
a “conservation survey,” the grassroots method by which he hoped the AT would be created. He planned to include the material in an AT handbook, to be titled “Making Geography,” he was then writing (but which was never published).

The reform-minded MacKaye originally conceived of the AT as a “camp community” and “a retreat from profit,” encompassing “food and farm camps” and “community camps” that provided opportunities for education, recreation, recuperation, and employment. But the AT that eventually evolved resembled the more spartan Long Trail MacKaye and Hildreth followed during their 1922 hike – “a camping proposition where one must carry food, blankets and equipment,” according to the 1921 Guide Book of the Long Trail MacKaye apparently carried with him (recently identified in GMC’s archives by club member Bruce Post).

Their three-day hike followed the Long Trail from near Bennington north about twenty miles over Stratton Mountain. They observed the methods of trail construction, blazing, and system of overnight shelters, all of which would later be employed on the AT. They saw dramatic changes from the trail. The headwaters of the Deerfield River had been dammed for the production of hydroelectric power, creating substantial new bodies of water – the Somerset and Harriman Reservoirs. Grout’s Job, the logging camp they had visited in 1900, was now abandoned. But they spent a night in Camp Webster, a small shack at Grout’s Job that the Bennington Section of GMC maintained as a trail shelter.

MacKaye often remembered his 1900 and 1922 Vermont expeditions with Horace Hildreth, “a pioneer in the reverse art of leading civilization to the wilderness,” as experiences that significantly influenced his vision of the Appalachian Trail.

In a message to the 1964 Appalachian Trail Conference, which met at Stratton that year, he recalled his 1900 mountain- top revelation: “We walked up through the trailless woods to the top of Stratton Mountain and climbed trees in order to see the view. It was a clear day with a brisk breeze blowing. North and south sharp peaks etched the horizon. I
felt as if atop the world, with a
sort of ‘planetary feeling.’ I
 seemed to perceive peaks 
far southward, hid
den by old Earth’s
 curvature. Would
a footpath someday reach them from where I was then perched?”

By 1937, almost four decades after MacKaye and Hildreth completed their Vermont hike, trailmakers had cleared
a continuous footpath along the mountains from Maine to Georgia. The young explorers’ 1900 “Classic of the Green Mountains” has become part of the folk- lore of the Appalachian Trail.

MacKaye’s Long Trail Guide Book and original map of AT, 1921

 

 

 

 

 

 

This article is adapted from a longer version that appears in Larry Anderson’s 2012 book, Peculiar Work: Writing about Benton MacKaye, Conservation, Com- munity (Quicksand Chronicles), available at amazon.com. A Rhode Island resident and long-time GMC member, Anderson
is also the author of Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator
of the Appalachian Trail (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002; paperback edition, 2008). The quoted passages from MacKaye’s journal are used by courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library.  Photographs courtesy Dartmouth College Library. 

Reprinted here from Long Trail News, Spring 2013 with permission.