Glastenbury
If a tree falls in Glastenbury , does it make a sound ? The town , all 44.4 mostly mountainous square miles of it , had a population of 8 at last count , all in the ghost town of Fayville at the western base of the mountain . People do pass through , though , on Vermont ’ s Long Trail ( part of the AT ), which runs along the Green Mountain ridgeline and over the 3,748-ft . summit of Glastenbury Mountain . If you become one of those hikers , don ’ t hesitate to climb the fire tower – it was reconditioned in 2006 . You will see nothing but forest and mountaintops for miles around .
The pop . went all the way up to 241 during the logging boom of the 1880s , when Glastenbury ’ s vast stands of timber were felled to make boards and burned to make charcoal for the iron industry – until not a tree was left . All that remained were the logging camps , the company store , the charcoal ovens , and the railroad line that had been built to an improbable height on the mountainside (“ South Glastenbury ”) to bring down the wood and charcoal .
Then someone – it seems to have been an unassuming Bennington pharmacist – had the idea of a magnificent mountain resort that would turn the store and camp into a casino and hotel , served by an electric trolley that would run along the existing rail line half-way up the mountain . The shocking thing is that a group of enterprising dreamers brought it all into being for one brief summer in 1898 . The tracks were washed out beyond repair by a “ freshet ” the following spring . Eventually , the grand buildings collapsed . Only a series of superb photographs of the insubstantial pageant of that summer remains .
Ripley ’ s Believe It or Not profiled Glastenbury in 1936 (“ The Mattison Family is the whole town of Glastenbury , Vt . Ira Mattison and his wife and mother hold every town office ”). The Vermont legislature disincorporated the town and adjacent Somerset in 1937 .
Then came the disappearances . If you go into a ghost town , do you become a ghost ? Middie Rivers never emerged from Bickford Hollow in 1945 . Bennington College student Paula Welden went hiking toward Glastenbury in 1946 and was never seen again . There are the three large stone cairns near the summit of the mountain . Who made them and why ? It seems that Glastenbury has acquired a certain reputation in paranormal circles . Someone has placed a geocache in Fayville , by the way .
Who owns Glastenbury now ? You do ( 96 % of it ), if you ’ re a U . S . citizen . Most of Glastenbury belongs to the Green Mountain National Forest , which manages a portion of it for recreational use and sustainable timber harvesting . The greater part of the Federal land – 22,330 acres – was designated as the Glastenbury Wilderness in 2006 by an Act of Congress and is off-limits to chain saws and snowmobiles . The Long Trail is well marked , but if you leave it , bring map and compass . Cell service may not be available . And your battery could die .
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