The Story of the Dartmouth Outing Club’s cabin & trail system

By David Hooke, Vershire, Vermont

[Editors note: To me, this story demonstrates how an excited group of young people can inspire others to join them in establishing an extensive trail and cabin system. The Dartmouth Outdoor Club (DOC) was an expression of the amazing conservation movement in the USA in the early 20th century. This outbreak of environmental fervor — led by John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and many others — inspired the development of the National Parks System of the U.S. and fostered greater environmental activism and consciousness in the U.S. population. This conservation movement also inspired a large-scale collegiate Outing Club movement that started at Dartmouth. In one generation the DOC developed a system of over 35 huts on trails leading from the Connecticut River in Hanover, N.H. into the heart of the White Mountains. I am grateful to David Hooke, author of Reaching That Peak: 75 Years of the Dartmouth Outing Club (1987), for kindly agreeing to write a brief summary of the origins and development of this collegiate cabin and trail system. — Sam Demas]

Dartmouth College, in Hanover New Hampshire, was a successful but quiet and remote outpost of North American higher education by the first decade of the 1900s. All-male from its founding in 1769, the college of 1909 was a lonely, even unhealthy place. Fall and spring dances were the only times that women were invited on campus; as result, winter was dismal, characterized buy “stuffy rooms, hot stoves, card games and general sluggishness resulting from lack of exercise.” Students and faculty alike were bored and looking for new possibilities.

The College of 1909 was astonishingly remote and isolated compared with the present day. The Connecticut River Valley has seen a number of booms of settlement, but with the opening of the Midwest and West in the latter parts of the 19th century the “Upper Valley” had seen a vast and steady depopulation. By 1909 the college was surrounded with thousands of square miles of abandoned and under-utilized farms, rapidly returning to woods. The Dartmouth Hospital was in its infancy, and apart from the remaining hill farms there was an astonishing lack of economy and things to do.

And yet the place was spectacularly beautiful. To the west a tangle of ridges and valleys led to the spine of the Green Mountains, some 30 miles away, and the old farm clearings and hilltop pastures had distant views. To the north and east, the Connecticut River Mountains led toward Moosilauke, anchoring the southwest corner of the White Mountains. In short the College of 1909 was surrounded by region nearly empty of humanity, achingly beautiful, and exceptional ripe for exploration.

While occasional students and faculty had been out on individual skiing and snowshoeing forays before 1909, nothing had gelled, until Fred Harris, Class of 1911, came on the scene. Growing up in Brattleboro Vermont he had been introduced to skiing at the age of 14 by a family friend, and became immediately hooked, soon learning to make and equip his own skis, and creating general mayhem among family and friends. He brought his passion to Dartmouth and soon was skiing with a few other hardy souls. Then in 1908 his father took him to the Montreal Winter Carnival, with thousands on hand to watch the ski jumping contests. In the winter of 1909 he learned about the scheme of James Taylor, later founder of the Green Mountain Club and Long Trail, then head of Vermont Academy, to “get the boys going…” – a winter field day of ski and snowshoe events.

So it was that in the late fall of 1909 Harris wrote his famous letter to The Dartmouth suggested the founding of a “ski and snowshoe club” to promote weekly outings and a longer trip “to Mooselac,” hold ski jumping contests, and organize a winter field day. He suggested “By taking the initiative in this matter Dartmouth might well become the originator of a branch of college organized sport hitherto undeveloped by American Colleges.” The faculty pounced on this idea and Harris was able to enlist the support of the captain of the football team and other student leaders. Skis and snowshoes were found or made, weekly excursions happened, and a huge field day was held. Already success seemed assured – but when the new Dartmouth Outing Club proposed that the two days after winter exams in 1911 be “given over to a Winter Carnival” and that this carnival invite women to the first Carnival Dance – then the concept took off like wildfire.

It was a faculty member, Prof. J. W. Goldthwait, who in the fall of 1910 first suggested a chain of cabins leading northward from Hanover. A prominent local doctor gave the club use of a tiny lumber shanty on the slope of Moose Mountain, a short ski from Hanover. In the spring of 1913, Carl Shumway ’13 and his father set about raising funds to build a larger cabin at Moose. Harris wrote an article for the Boston Herald titled “Dartmouth Men Plan Line of Camps in the White Mountains” – and it was this article that the Rev John E. Johnson, class of 1866, chanced to read.

Outing Club Cabins Cube
(old) Cube Cabin

Johnson had been an Episcopalian rector and later itinerant preacher, but he also dabbled in real estate. He became ill and out of contact for “a long time” and when he resurfaced, found that one of his little investments was the keystone parcel of a major Canadian harbor development. He sold, and made a tidy fortune in the process. Loving the New England hills, he had bought Skyline Farm north of Littleton NH with an enormous view of the entire Whites. And then he read the article…he was there for the dedication of the new Moose cabin, and at the peak of the moment, produced the deed to his farm in Littleton and gave it to the College president on the spot.

With Hanover at the south, Littleton at the north, miles of nearly vacant land in between, and Johnson’s phenomenal wind at their backs, the Outing Club realized its dream in astonishingly short order. Johnson funded four cabins between Hanover and Littleton by 1916. The Club was given the old Moosilauke Summit hotel in 1920 and soon turned it into a hugely successful hostel, the favored destination of the legion of summer camps that sprung up in the region in 1900-1930. The club extended west into Vermont, and by 1926, had 15 cabins and a fully developed trail from north of Woodstock Vermont to Littleton. And apart from the Moosilauke summit, these cabins were all but exclusively used by Dartmouth students; the prize of entering the inner circle of the DOC was now the #1 contest on campus, and the currency was in large part miles hiked and cabins visited. Students and faculty worked shoulder to shoulder to maintain the cabins, and this further increased that student-faculty bond that was so critical to rapid expansion of the club. With few vehicles, excursions often used the two railroads to get north or westward, and then hike back to campus along the trail.

Outing Club – Cabins Skyline
Post Card
Littleton, N.H.
Donatd by Rev. J.G. Johnson in 1913

When the Appalachian Trail was conceived, it was evident that the organizers would look to the DOC’s Mainline Trail as the obvious link between the Green and White Mountain. But it was not an easy sell at first. DOC had no particular interest in opening its preserve to the outside world, could see no particular gain in doing so, and indeed some unfortunate misuse and vandalism by outsiders considerably soured the club on opening its route to the larger community. It was not until a delegate of the new Appalachian Trail Conference came to Hanover in 1929 and invited the DOC to send a delegate to the Conference, that DOC finally relented – but with the provision that the cabins were closed.

As it happened this was not a tremendous impediment to the ATC since the trail elsewhere scarcely existed and it would be decades (1948) before the trail was complete and first through-hiker traversed the entire 2000+ mile route. In the meantime it was providential that the DOC, seized by a desire to get into the more remote parts of its terrain and feeling that the students of that era were growing soft, that in the late 1920s the DOC started its “Shelter” project, building simple open log lean-tos in various locations. By the end of the 30s this group of shelters had become, in effect, a chain unto itself, overlapping but separate from the cabin chain – the approximately 35 cabins fully equipped but locked, the shelters completely Spartan but open. It was this chain that became the overnight facilities for the DOC’s section of the Appalachian Trail.

Dartmouth Outing Club Cabins
Ravine Camp

The DOC’s trail and shelter system significantly languished in the 1950s and 60s in concert with the general trend to early marriages and suburbanization that followed World War II. But with the birth of the new outdoor movement in the late 1960s, and the passage of the National Scenic Trails Act on 1968, the DOC’s system experienced a rebirth. Faculty who had long guided the club retired and left the scene, to be replaced by paid administrators, but the student vigor was as great as ever, and so when it became clear that large portions of the DOC section should be relocated to more remote terrain in anticipation of permanent protection, the DOC leaped to the cause, and from 1974 to 1990 built nearly 50 miles of replacement trail and 5 new shelters to augment the old ones.

Thus by the early 1990s the transformation was complete – a modern hiking trail, in remote terrain, with regularly spaced shelters, with a completely separate group of cabins, nearby but no longer tied to the Appalachian Trail itself.   And a human landscape dramatically different from that of 1909 – crisscrossed with roads, connecting bustling towns and businesses anchored by a thriving College, Hospital and Medical school complex. Harris and Johnson would scarcely recognize the systems they had helped create. But the landscape – spectacular in all seasons – endures, as it will, long after the current denizens and economy have disappeared from the scene. And we suspect that in that evolution the desire to hike and connect these places will be one of those things that will endure longest.