History Space: Tale of two VT ghost towns

American history is ripe with stories of abandoned and forgotten ghost towns — from small villages established in remote and harsh climes that never quite seemed to thrive despite the best efforts of headstrong settlers to townships built on the periphery ravaged by illness, famine, and violence.

Throughout our nation’s saga of conquest and settlement, attempts to conquer wild and uninhabitable tracts of land have at times ended in misfortune, and on occasion, human suffering. Two such places deserve further investigation, where in the case of Kelley Stand in Sunderland, we have attempted to settle a land at the peril of the land itself via deforestation, and in the case of South Glastenbury, at the peril of both the land and the people who attempted to occupy it.

Kindred foundations

From the outset, Sunderland (the town in which Kelley Stand is formally located) and South Glastenbury shared a similar history. Both towns were chartered and granted by Gov. Bennington Wentworth of New Hampshire in July and August of 1761 respectively as Wentworth attempted to fill what he perceived to be a jurisdictional void in the uninhabited territory West of the Connecticut River. During the 1760s, this vast expanse of land that we know today as Bennington County was a dangerous and remote wilderness. It was here that the French and Indian Wars played out in a geographical area defined by rugged mountain peaks cut through by snaking streams and plunging hollows. Any attempt to settle this area must have felt like a scene from the movie “Final Destination:” If the war didn’t kill you, the landscape would find a way.

Further complicating early settlement of this region was the haphazard establishment of town boundaries which were arbitrarily assigned by Gov. Wentworth despite having no familiarity with the topography. Random square lines were thrust onto a map without consideration of geographical landmarks that might make such a division untenable. The result of this slipshod approach to town planning was an almost complete lack of flat land ideal for laying stable foundations in both the towns of Sunderland and Glastenbury. In Sunderland, “the eastern and central portions of the town are mountainous, and the settlement therefore is all in the western section” surrounding what is now U.S. 7. In Glastenbury, however, nearly all the land is now part of the Green Mountain National Forest and contains 12 mountain peaks exceeding 3,000 feet in elevation, making all of the land within its boundaries unsuitable for settlement.

Though these realities were impediments to the original proprietors of the towns, this certainly did not stifle their ambitions. Land speculators generally purchased land sight unseen, and in the cases of Sunderland and Glastenbury, these early proprietors would have been completely unaware that the spine of the Green Mountains ran straight through the arbitrary boundaries of these bordering towns. Once they became apprised of the situation, however, the process of dividing the land into sellable plots languished, especially in Glastenbury, as the potential for profit seemed dubious. Sunderland, however, having at least one sliver of tillable land surrounding Roaring Branch and Mill Brook, developed more rapidly, likely helped along by the appeal of the fact that both Ethan and Ira Allen called Sunderland home for a time.

Kelley Stand

In the correspondence of Mary Greene Nye who served as editor of State Papers between 1927 and 1950, I was surprised to stumble upon a reference to “Kelley Stand, a famous ghost town east of Arlington.” It was included on a list entitled “Vermont Oddities” sent to John D. Lippey at the Greyhound Lines in 1938, ostensibly for the purpose of drumming up tourism in Vermont’s lesser-known towns. A quick Google search will reveal that today, Kelley Stand is a road previously chartered as the “Stratton Turnpike” that runs from Arlington to Stratton and was recently explored in a podcast episode of Brave Little State entitled A Brief History of Vermont Road Names.

But before it was a desolate mountain road connecting two sleepy towns, Kelley Stand was a bustling hotel settlement infamous for hosting extravagant and patriotic parties attended by Vermont’s social elite who were eager to frolic uninhibited in the wilds of the Green Mountains. One of the earliest mentions of Kelley’s hotel appears in a local newspaper, Argus and Patriot, on July 30, 1863 announcing a commemorative ball for Stark’s victory at the Battle of Bennington, to be held at the hotel of J.W. Kelley. The paper states that “Kelley is noted for having everything as it should be on such occasions and all those attending this ‘Commemoration Ball’ will go home feeling that they have enjoyed themselves hugely

During this time, it appears the hotel became a frequent venue for the Manchester District of the Probate Court to convene for meetings in the settlement of local estate cases. However, this more formal function did not seem to have harmed its reputation as a premier party destination. On December 22, 1864, the newspaper Argus and Patriot again proudly announced another party, this time to ring in a new year: “There is to be a New Years’ Ball at the hotel of J.W. Kelley, in Sunderland. Kelley never allows any one visiting his house to go away dissatisfied, and has become so noted for the superiority of his entertainments that it needs but the announcement that there is to be any doings at ‘Bill Kelley’s’ to draw the biggest kind of crowd of the best people in all the region thereabouts.”

The scale and notoriety of these parties, especially the more patriotic elements, seem to have been fueled partly by the Civil War as Vermonters sought social outlets to mitigate the stresses of a country at war. Just prior to Juneteenth, Bill Kelley advertised yet another party to be held on the 4th of July, 1865 as he believed there were “peculiar reasons, the return of peace being among them, why the coming anniversary of American Independence should be celebrated with unusual Éclat.” He rounded out the year 1865 with a Thanksgiving ball with “music by Loomis,” before announcing his retirement in July of 1866. But Bill Kelley did not go gentle into that good night without one more Bennington Battle Day bash announced to the public in a more personal signed missive: “To the generous public who have so long been the patrons of the subscriber, he would here take occasion to say that after thirty-one years residence at the ‘Old Stand’ he has agreed to surrender the same to Thurston, Pierce & Co,…and as the anniversary day of John Stark’s famous victory is near at hand we propose to have a social gathering on the 16th day of August next, and as we are about to retire to private life, we hope to see you all with your friends and cousins and several other people, where good music will be furnished for dancing, and such arrangements made for your comfort that we trust all may go away satisfied.”

Despite Bill Kelley’s departure, the party continued, but with a bit less zeal. According to town records, Thurston, Pierce, & Co. purchased the 100 acres from John and Lucy Kelley for $2,800.00, or about $45,000 in today’s dollars. The new owners appointed a man by the name of Liberty Wilder as landlord and efforts were made to keep the spirit of Kelley Hotel alive and thriving. Despite high expectations, Wilder’s vision did not stick and he was quickly replaced as proprietor by a Chandler Pratt of Wardsboro in 1873. From the limited accounts of his tenure, we can assume that Pratt was more selective in his marketing approach, likely in an attempt to attract wealthier clientele. One reviewer writes a downright mawkish endorsement of Pratt’s recent upgrades in a May 1873 article in The Manchester Journal, “In order that his patrons may have positive assurance in advance that he means business in the way of trout dinners, he has secured the services of Elan and Lucy Ann. At the mention of Elan, these spotted beauties leave their native element and find themselves in the hands of Lucy Ann who knows just how to cook them to suit the most fastidious taste.”

However delightful Lucy Ann’s “spotted beauty” trout entrée may have been, it did not prevent Kelley Stand from exchanging hands yet again. In 1875, P. G. Wilder of East Arlington attempted to rebrand the Old Stand as a high-class wedding venue called “The Summit House.” Over the next several years, guests praised “Mr. P. G. Wilder’s white linen weddings” and “bountiful suppers” as a succession of proprietors failed to make a sustainable transition from Wild Bill Kelley’s Hotel to a high-class resort catering to a more aristocratic milieu. Ultimately, the Old Stand could not survive the absence of its patriarch and namesake Bill Kelley, and the small settlement fell into decline. By 1950, the once glorious hotel was so dilapidated, the town of Sunderland had it bulldozed to the ground where only remnants of cellar holes now remain.

South Glastenbury

As Kelley Stand stumbled its way into the 20th century, the result of a decades long hangover triggered by the slow cessation of Bill Kelley’s ardent spirits, the remote settlement of South Glastenbury just 8 miles to the South limped across the centennial line debilitated by a seemingly endless fusillade of misfortunate events. Just a decade before the new century, Lewis Cass Aldrich wrote of Glastenbury in his “History of Bennington County:” “But with all its disadvantages the town of Glastenbury enjoys benefits such as are afforded to but one or two other towns in this county; it is the northern terminus of what is known as the Bennington and Glastenbury Railroad – not a ‘trunk line’ by any means, but a short road over which is carried every year a vast quantity of lumber, charcoal and other manufactures, the great bulk of which comes from this town.” This brief description goes a long way in summing up the challenges early settlers faced in making Glastenbury profitable.

The first proposal for such a mountain passage was the Glastenbury Plank Road chartered by an act of legislature in 1849 for the purpose of hauling timber. Luckily the road was never built. One can only imagine how long it would have lasted given that it was supposed to have been constructed from actual wooden planks which would have rotted quickly and become too slippery to traverse. After a failed attempt in 1855, the Bennington and Glastenbury Railroad, Mining and Manufacturing Company was successful in securing a charter in 1864 to build a railroad that would be able to surmount 1,300 feet of vertical elevation in less than nine miles from Bennington through Woodford Hollow.

It was the terminus of this unlikely railroad that would become home to a small settlement known as South Glastenbury, a community that would try its hand at a number of enterprises including logging timber, harvesting ferns, firing charcoal, hosting tourists, and eventually, committing murder, before settling into its present condition as a ghost town.

With railroad construction complete in 1872, logging operations began at a breakneck pace. But with the railroad itself also relying on wood to power its engines, most of the trees were denuded by 1889. At this point the railroad was converted into an electric trolley used primarily by seasonal visitors. This constant shifting of commercial interests meant that the local population was in flux due to a variable flow of itinerant workers, or “jobbers” as they were called, who offered up seasonal labor at the mills, kilns, summer camps, and railroad. One such jobber was 38-year-old Englishman William Conroy, alias Henry McDowell, who murdered fellow laborer John Crowley with a sled stake at a lumber camp in April of 1892. According to newspaper accounts and court records, McDowell was provoked by Crowley after becoming involved in a rather drunken tête-à-tête when Crowley claimed to be “the boss of this place.”

When the scene escalated from drunken machisimo into full-blown violence, Crowley was bludgeoned to death and McDowell fled the scene. He was captured in South Norwalk, Connecticut, 10 months later in relation to another crime of which he was suspected. Declaring a guilty conscious, McDowell confessed his crimes and was indicted by a grand jury in Bennington County before he was extradited back to Vermont. McDowell was sentenced to life imprisonment but was ordered to serve out his sentence at the Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury after complaining of hearing voices in his head. Ultimately, McDowell absconded from the hospital by hiding in a railroad car filled with coal, ironically or not, and was never seen again.

Out of the shadow of murder emerged a brief glint of hope for the settlement of South Glastenbury between 1897 and 1898. With the electric trolley rebranded as “Bennington & Woodford Electric Railroad” carrying passengers up the mountain daily, investors attempted to recoup their losses by converting old loggers’ quarters and worksites into a summer resort for wealthy vacationers. Many fine structures were built including a clubhouse with a dance hall and dining room, the Glastenbury Inn, a casino with an attractive clock tower, and even a hatchery stocked with plentiful trout. Despite these grand furnishings, this valiant effort was doomed to fail after a freshet washed away the railroad tracks in 1898 after just one season of hosting guests. Attempts were made to reconnect “Camp Comfort” to civilization by repairing the tracks, but these efforts failed due to both flagging interest and yet more misfortune, this time in the form of a smallpox outbreak at a Glastenbury lumber camp in 1903 affecting men working on the railroad.

Curse or Coincidence?

Though both Kelley Stand and Glastenbury were on their way out by 1900, Glastenbury continued to be plagued by bad publicity including several critical hunting accidents, bigfoot sightings, and five missing persons cases between 1945 and 1950. Kelley Stand was largely forgotten. Some insist that the land in Glastenbury is cursed. Others reasonably point out that building a settlement on the peak of a treacherous mountain after deforesting the entire area is, well, unwise. If the town is cursed, it was likely done so by Gov.r Benning Wentworth himself when he drew those arbitrary yet fateful boundaries for the town around the spine of the Green Mountains. But how then was Kelley Stand able to enjoy almost a century of success, despite sharing that same curse? There is at least still one curious Archivist at the Vermont State Archives eager to know.

Bethany Fair is an archivist at the Vermont State Archives. She has an M.A. in history and an M.S. in library and information science from Simmons College and a B.A. in English literature from the University of Florida.