Cooper Lodge

  • A stone and wood building with bunks for 12.
  • Construction began in the summer of 1938 but was delayed by a hurricane that September.
  • The lodge was completed the following summer and fall in 1939 by the CCC Plymouth camp under the direction of the Vermont State Forestry Department.
  • It was formally dedicated as Charles P. Cooper Memorial Lodge on June 2, 1940.
  • It is the highest shelter on the Long Trail.
  • The building was extensively repaired in 1969 by the Vermont Dept. of Forests and Parks.

Sources: Paul Woodward, Long Trail System Shelter History, 1999; Rutland Herald June 3, 1940, GMC Guide books 1983, 2017.

“Winter vandalism became so frequent that the Killington Section stopped maintaining [Cooper  Lodge] around 2000, later adopters eventually gave up, and the GMC stopped maintaining it at  all. The GMC Trail Management Committee voted several years ago to remove all but a  couple feet of the stone walls, so it would be nothing more than a memorial, but then a  Killington group proposed to take it over, and it!s in limbo.”
-Herb Ogden, President Killington Section, 2020

Charles P. Cooper
Charles Paine Cooper was born in Michigan on January 10,1868 to Peter and Emiline Cooper.  Charles spent much of his early life in the Midwest moving numerous times with his parents  and three siblings to wherever his father was working in the railroad industry at the time.  In 1899 Charles married Juliet Brooks in Redwood, Minnesota. The couple moved to Albany,  New York where Cooper worked as a farmer. By 1907 Charles and Juliet had moved to  Rutland, Vermont. Together they raised 6 children.

While living in Rutland, Cooper worked as the Silo Manager for the Creamery Package Manufacturing Company. He was active in a number of local community organizations  including: Rutland Rotary, Rutland Chamber of Commerce, Rutland Playground Committee,  the Congregational Church, and the Vermont Boy Scout Council. Mr. Cooper also served for  many years on the Rutland Board of Aldermen.

An outdoorsman, C. P. Cooper was vice-president of the Green Mountain Club in the club’s  early years and became the third president of the club in 1917. He continued as president until  moving back to the Midwest in December 1925. Cooper was an active trail builder for the  GMC and helped to clear many miles of the Long Trail. He was described in the 1985 book  Green Mountain Adventure, Vermont’s Long Trail by Jane & Will Curtis and Frank Lieberman,  as the “painter of signs whose paint-spattered jacket was known the length of the trail.”

C.P. Cooper passed away on March 15,1936 at the age of 68 while hiking with his daughter  Frances, in Maywood, Illinois.

Sources: Rutland Herald Archives; ancestry.com; Green Mountain Adventure, Vermont’s Long  Trail by Jane & Will Curtis and Frank Lieberman, Green Mountain Club, 1985