Might not be bad at that, you know.... The Christianias and the stemming and the plotzing and the schussing. Hot buttered rum—light on the butter. And snow.
—Bing Crosby in White Christmas (1954)
Before Bing Crosby invented New England in the popular mind as a countryside of farmhouse inns operated by pipe-smoking baritones, there already was a growing claque of aficionados of Vermont and New Hampshire winters.
Mostly it was wealthy Bostonians and New Yorkers who were in on the secret. They had been to Saint-Moritz. But instead of five days crossing the Atlantic on the S.S. Normandie they had only to drive five hours by Packard or Pierce-Arrow to find reliable snow in places such as Farnams-in-the-Berkshires, in Massachusetts, and Sugar Hill, New Hampshire.
If the inns were closed for the winter, the bemused natives were happy enough to take their dollar and a half for a room and give them permission to strap planks to their feet and trample and sitzmark the snow in sidehill pastures.
The main drawback of New England skiing wasn’t the vertical drop or the fickle weather; it was that there were too many trees. A visitor from England in 1932 pointed out in a letter to the British Ski Year Book that the skiing in the northeastern United States would be fine if the farming weren’t so poor.
There simply wasn’t enough pasture, which made the best kind of ski terrain. In the Alps, in Norway, the Jura, the Black Forest, anywhere people were likely to ski in Europe, farmers obliged by pasturing cows on even the steepest hillsides. Where the cows wouldn’t go, goats would. The grass was neatly cropped, the hay harvested, and cow paths traversed the groves of trees.
In mountainous New England, meanwhile, the most attractive topography was left almost entirely to maples. The American fondness for pancakes and syrup for breakfast probably slowed the growth of New England skiing by decades.
There were exceptions to the rule, and one of these was the town of Woodstock, Vermont, where farmers had been profitably keeping cows in hill pastures for a couple of centuries, while peeling rocks away as soon as they breasted the surface. This was perfect ski country. Nice velvety turf underneath the snow made for better early-season skiing.
The hills around the town were of a good size, hikeable by even the least ambitious skier but with enough pitch for speed on the run down. For diversion there was ice-skating at Pogue Hole up at Mount Tom, or on the mill pond. Where there had been a toboggan chute in earlier years a couple of local boys home from Dartmouth had built a small ski jump on the bluff overlooking the country club. Most of the people who came to Woodstock to ski kept to the gentler day tours among the low-slung hills and stayed at the White Cupboard, the Tavern, or the Woodstock Inn at night.
Besides the general traffic of New Yorkers and Bostonians, the coldest weeks of January brought a regular migration of Canadians south to the warmer sunshine of Woodstock. With them, in the winter of 1934, came rumors about something called a ski tow being used to hoist skiers to the top of a hill outside Shawbridge, near Montreal.
The American fondness for pancakes and syrup for breakfast probably slowed the growth of New England skiing by decades.
Other things were afoot up in Canada. Among the Laurentian Mountains between Shawbridge and Mont-Tremblant a skier could lash on his skis and tour for 90 miles or more among small Alouette villages, eating lunch in the open, spending the night at inns with picturesque names such as Chanticler and Chalet Cochand, dining on the native pea soup and brown bread, washed down with Canadian beer. It only took a very small leap to imagine the same kind of trail network knitting up the landscape around Woodstock.
The most intriguing element was the ski tow. Bob and Betty Royce, who owned the White Cupboard Inn, obtained plans for a tow from Alexander Foster, who ran the one in Shawbridge. Before the winter was out they had strung a thousand feet of rope in a loop up a hill on Clinton Gilbert’s farm two miles north of town.
The slope was fairly easy, with a couple of hundred feet of vertical, but it was ungroomed and punctuated with hazards. It was dotted with trees, for a start. Two fencerows slanted across it. As in the Alps, the skiers simply opened up sections of the fence to ski through. The rope tow was primitive and had a way of twisting while you held on for dear life. A day-long ticket cost a dollar. The “Ski-Way,” as it became known, was an overnight success.
Soon one out of every three houses along the main street of Woodstock had a sign hung out in front welcoming skiers at so much a head, with or without breakfast. Some weekends might find skiers sleeping four and five to a room, with the overflow in the kitchen.
The Model T that was used to run the Ski-Way on Gilbert’s Hill burned out and was replaced with a Buick. The following winter Bunny Bertram took over its operation, and it began running on electricity. Other tows started opening up among the slopes outside town.
Bertram ran a rope up the steep side of Hill Six and renamed it Suicide Six. It dropped 600 feet so steeply you couldn’t see the bottom from the top. The town, which had always been fairly sleepy in the winter, was suddenly wide awake. Local boys painted TAXI on the door of the family Dodge and took up the lucrative business of ferrying skiers around to the various ski playgrounds. In different years there would be as many as a half-dozen rival operations, including Mount Tom, Cloudland, Pulcifers, Gilbert’s Hill, and Prosper Hill.
A Home Away from Home
By the time the first tow went up on Gilbert’s Hill, in 1934, the first ski school in America had been holding classes on the lawn in front of Peckett’s on Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, for five years.
For a hundred years the New Hampshire mountains had been a neighborhood of elaborate wedding-cake hotels jigsawed out of wood. Every few years one or another of them caught fire and burned to the ground. Before the ashes were cold another, bigger hotel would be built in its place. Daniel Webster and Franklin Pierce stayed at the Mt. Crawford House when trout fishing. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, and the English novelist Anthony Trollope all vacationed among the picturesque, air-conditioned hills in the summer.
Peckett’s was the first of the New Hampshire hotels to stay open year-round. Coolidge slept there. Two chief justices were regular guests, as were Otis Skinner (actor), Helen Keller, Booth Tarkington, and Alexander Woollcott on sabbatical from the famous Algonquin Round Table.
The New York train deposited guests at the Franconia station, and a sleigh brought them the five miles in the dark up Sugar Hill. Out of the gloom the inn would come into view, lamps lit on the low-slung porch, skis, sleds, toboggans, and snowshoes racked in front. The inn had once been a farmhouse, big but ordinary, with a gambrel roof and dormer windows, but with the influx of visitors it had grown like Topsy. Picture Bing Crosby’s Holiday Inn from the movie, a home away from home, a good old-fashioned grandmother’s house, like in the song, for people whose grandmothers lived on Park Avenue.
People would come to Peckett’s to curl up with a book, to slouch around in comfortable clothes. In the summer there was croquet on the lawn and golf nearby. On winter days there were organized snowshoe hikes or sleigh rides to Butternut Lodge and Coppermine Camp for picnics, with bobsled rides down Three Mile Hill afterward. Ski outings explored logging roads and rambled the golf courses of the closed-up summer hotels. By the 30s there were other winter inns in the area of Franconia—McKenzies’, Caramat Terrace, Lovett’s, the Willows, Thorner’s Swiss Chalet—with hearty food and warm beds. None were as expensive or as exclusive as Peckett’s. Peckett’s had lobster on the menu.
A good old-fashioned grandmother’s house for people whose grandmothers lived on Park Avenue.
In 1928, Katharine, the youngest of the three Peckett children, went to Europe to study at the Cuisine de Paris cooking school. It was while spending Christmas at Engelberg, in the Swiss Alps, that she first saw the larger possibilities of skiing. That spring, back home, she helped clear the wooded sidehill next to the inn to serve as a ski slope. In the winter of 1929–30 the first American ski school opened at Peckett’s-on-Sugar Hill, with German instructors teaching the complexities of the kick turn, how to walk on skis, how to sit down and how to get up, all on the broad croquet lawn, and stemming and schussing on the hill.
The less athletic watched from the windows of the inn. Nelson Rockefeller learned to ski at Peckett’s. Broadcaster Lowell Thomas, who had been introduced to skiing by the Italian Alpini ski troops while covering the Great War, got away as often as he could on the night train from New York. Skiing quickly moved from being a hobby of woodsy types to becoming the newest lark among café society.
The roster of instructors had a conspicuous level of class, beginning with Duke Dmitre von Leuchtenberg in the winter of 1930. Nobody asked how much vertical drop there was back in Leuchtenberg; the man had a pedigree and nice manners. The Marquis degli Albizzi taught skiing in the winter and riding in the summer and later helped design the Taft Racing Trail on Cannon Mountain.
Kate Peckett hired Sig Buchmayr away from the Alex Taylor Sporting Goods Store in 1931, which was something of a coup. Sig was by all accounts a superb skier, but his true métier was in generating publicity for the inn. He wrote stories for the New York papers, planted notices in influential columns, and generated an atmosphere of fun back at the inn, telling stories, romancing the female guests, and doing acrobatic feats on skis and on the backs of chairs in the evening. Most of the instructing was left in the capable hands of Kurt Thalhammer, but it was the Buchmayr Ski School all through the 30s.
Good for the Soul
Sugar Hill dates from a time when New England towns were built on hilltops. The idea was that the air was healthier and the views were good for the soul. The winter winds, supposedly, had an improving effect, too. The views of the Presidential Range were magnificent from the east windows at Peckett’s, especially at sunset, when the low sun caught the reddening buds on the tips of the maples. Today, as you drive from the west, the road burrows among the maple woods, delivering you suddenly among the small fields and white clapboard cottages of the town—village, really. There is a church and a library (dedicated to the memory of a favorite instructor at Peckett’s), but otherwise the unity of the place is in its clapboard and white paint.
New England is full of similar sleepy towns whose neighboring farms have gone back to woods. Most are off the main road or, like Sugar Hill, on the inconvenient side of the larger mountains where people go to ski. But the fashion in ski slopes was different then. Nobody thought it was possible, much less wise, to ski the 2,200 feet of Cannon Mountain. It would need to be cleared first, which to shrewd Yankee logic, would require a much larger traffic of skiers to pay for it.
In a way, Pa Peckett helped make his own slopes obsolete by having his guests properly taught in the Arlberg method, and later by inviting the kids from town to take lessons, too. Once you’d learned the stem turn and the snowplow, you could control your speed without falling down or stopping. This sent skiers in search of longer and steeper slopes than the ones on Sugar Hill.
The Marquis degli Albizzi taught skiing in the winter and riding in the summer.
Roland Peabody, who had escaped Boston by buying the Parker Store in Franconia, was inveigled by Peckett into learning to ski in 1930. Thus hooked, he went on to organize the Franconia Ski Club, the locals’ answer to the fancy-pants Hochgebirge Ski Club with its membership of Boston Brahmins.
When it got too crowded at Peckett’s, they cleared hills of their own and strung up tows. When the Sugar Hill slopes began to seem tame, Katharine Peckett helped organize the fund drive to carve out the Taft Racing Trail, the first tailor-made ski run in America, on a shoulder of the mountains visible from the inn. The tramway began running on Cannon Mountain in 1939.
Following that year, the famous inn closed for the winter months. There were too many better slopes closer to the big cities, on the longer slopes of the Presidential Range and over in Vermont, closer to points along the Boston and Maine and the New Haven rail lines for skiers taking the weekend snow trains.
Roland Palmedo and his Wall Street friends in the Amateur Ski Club of New York set their sights on Mount Mansfield, near Stowe, Vermont, which was reachable by taking the train to Waterbury and the small electric trolley the rest of the way. They may have deplored what Roosevelt was doing in the White House, but they had the good sense to invite his Civilian Conservation Corps to cut the Nose Dive, the Chin Clip, and the Bruce Trail for them.
There was also the Toll Road, the old carriageway to the top of the mountain, which wandered down among the maple woods to the Toll House on the Mountain Road. It was here that Minnie Dole, ruminating over a badly broken ankle while waiting for help to arrive, thought up the National Ski Patrol.
Places such as Jug End Barn, a converted dairy farm in the Berkshires, were drawing weekend guests with indoor tennis and bowling as well as skiing. Whitney’s, in Jackson, New Hampshire (“the inn run by skiers for skiers”), advertised good food, good beds, good books, and a lighted hill for $3 a day.
North Conway native Harvey Gibson, who had become a prominent banker in New York, hankered after a ski resort for his hometown, one to rival others up the road in the Presidential Range. When he heard that Hannes Schneider, the Austrian inventor of the Arlberg method, had been imprisoned by the Nazis in 1938—he was an outspoken critic of the regime—Gibson sent one of his London associates to Berlin to put the squeeze on them. (Gibson headed the bank consortium holding German debt.) The Nazis caved, and Schneider arrived in New Hampshire under an archway of upraised ski poles.
The new Mount Cranmore ski slope, where Schneider would teach American novices, was wider than a football field. Crowds of skiers needed plenty of elbow room, so higher mountains and wider slopes were suddenly the thing. Fred Pabst, the Milwaukee beer heir and owner of a whole string of ski areas, arrived at Big Bromley, Vermont, in 1939, and began to groom the trails the way Midwestern farmers tilled their fields. “We farm snow,” he was overheard saying. Skiing was no longer a rich man’s pastime; it was getting popular. It still is.
Eric Hanson has written for The Atlantic, Smithsonian, McSweeney’s, Hemispheres, The Paris Review, and Snow magazine. He was a contributing editor and feature writer at Skiing magazine for 20 years. This piece is adapted from his yet-to-be-published book, Winter Playgrounds