The Von Trapp Family and Their Vermont Mountain

The story of the von Trapp family and Stowe, Vermont begins in the Alps and ends on a hillside above a New England village, which is more improbable than any retelling can quite capture. Georg von Trapp was an Austrian naval commander who had become famous for his service in the First World War. He and his second wife Maria, a former aspiring nun from a Salzburg convent, led a family singing group that had built a reputation across Europe. When Germany annexed Austria in nineteen thirty-eight in the event known as the Anschluss, the family departed and eventually made their way to the United States.

They toured as the Trapp Family Singers across the country for several years. In nineteen forty-two they purchased farmland in Stowe and began building a life here, naming their property Cor Unum, a Latin phrase meaning one heart. Georg von Trapp died in Stowe in nineteen forty-seven, before the family's story would be adapted into a nineteen fifty-nine Broadway musical and then one of the most successful Hollywood films ever made.

In nineteen fifty, the family began operating their expanded home as a twenty-seven-room ski lodge. Today the Trapp Family Lodge covers more than two thousand acres in the hills above the village, still owned and operated by members of the family. The Sound of Music, the film released in nineteen sixty-five, was shot in Salzburg and the Austrian countryside, not in Vermont. But the real family lived out the rest of their lives in these hills, and the lodge they built stands as the physical evidence of the life they made here after everything else was lost.