Stowe: Vermont's Alpine Town

Stowe is Vermont's mountain town in the fullest sense. It sits in the valley of the Little River at the foot of Mount Mansfield, the highest peak in the state, and it has shaped itself around the mountain for nearly two centuries. The surrounding landscape is pure northern New England: deep forests of birch and maple and spruce, stone walls threading across old fields, church steeples rising from village greens, and above it all the long ridge of the Green Mountains cutting across the sky.

The town was established in seventeen ninety-four when Oliver Luce and his family carved out a homestead in the valley. The town was chartered by the New Hampshire governor before Vermont achieved statehood, and its name is generally traced to a place called Stow. For its first century the town was an agricultural community, its people raising sheep and dairy cattle and making maple sugar in the spring.

Then winter discovered Stowe. Skiers began arriving in the nineteen thirties, drawn by the mountain and helped along by the Civilian Conservation Corps, whose workers cut the first formal trails through the forest on the slopes above town. An Austrian ski instructor named Sepp Ruschp arrived and built one of the finest ski schools in the East. Over the decades that followed, Stowe developed a reputation as the Ski Capital of the East, a title it still claims.

The town also acquired one of its most remarkable resident families by accident of history. Georg and Maria von Trapp, who had fled Austria after its annexation by Nazi Germany in nineteen thirty-eight, eventually settled in Stowe and built a lodge that grew into one of the most distinctive hotels in New England. Their story, far better known through the stage and screen adaptations of it, played out in real life in these hills.

Today Stowe draws visitors in every season: skiers in winter, leaf-peepers in October, hikers in summer, and a year-round community of people who simply find the valley too beautiful to leave.