1 Timeline of Vermont Skiing Ca. 1853: “At Some Time in His Middle Years
Timeline of Vermont Skiing New England Ski Museum In preparation for 2014 Annual Exhibit Ca. 1853: “At some time in his middle years he (Joseph Seavey Hall) built a trail up Burke Mountain, near East Burke, Vermont, and later enlarged it into a bridle path. He claimed that it was he who transformed the Crawford Path from a blazed and cairned trial into a bridle path. He built the first summit house that was anything more than an emergency shelter. He completed the Carriage Road from just above the Halfway House to the summit…In his early forties he marched through Pennsylvania with the 11 th regiment, Vermont Volunteers, and fought in the Battle of Gettysburg. …After the Civil War he went west, mined silver in Nevada, and then moved on to California, where, according to family tradition, he once more indulged his passion for building roads up mountains and houses on mountains by constructing another carriage road, this one up Mt. Diablo.” Bradford F. Swan, “Joseph Seavey Hall, White Mountain Guide,” Appalachia, Magazine number 130 (June 15, 1960), 57-58. 1860: “Mountain recreation at Burke dates back to 1860 when Lt. Joseph Seaver (sic) Hall of East Burke cut a trail to the mountain’s summit and erected a cabin there. Picnickers and hikers used the trail to climb to the mountaintop which was a popular pastime in Vermont in the late 1880s.” Karen D. Lorentz, The Great Vermont Ski Chase . (Shrewsbury, Vermont: Mountain Publishing, Inc., 2005), 54 1892: “Winter sport was organized on a permanent commercial basis under the direction of the Woodstock Inn as early as 1892, when the inn opened its doors for the first time.
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