by VDC Staff

Climb to the summit of Burke Mountain in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and you’ll find a rusting steel skeleton rising above the trees, its ladders zigzagging toward a small cab that once held a single person, a pair of binoculars, and a telephone line to the outside world. It is Vermont’s oldest surviving fire tower, and it tells a story that stretches back more than a century, to a time when the state’s forests were burning and nobody quite knew what to do about it.

A State on Fire

The story begins with the land itself. When European settlers arrived in Vermont, they cleared enormous swaths of forest to build farms. Later, logging companies moved in, and railroads built out of wood hauled the timber to market. The result was a landscape littered with dry slash and sawdust, crisscrossed by wood-burning locomotives that threw off sparks. It was, in effect, kindling waiting for a match.

That match came again and again in the early 1900s. A string of major wildfires tore through Vermont’s woodlands, and 1903 alone saw devastating fires burn over 5,000 acres of the state. These weren’t the small brush fires that occasionally still crop up today; they were large enough to threaten farms, towns, and the timber industry’s bottom line. The fires got the attention of state lawmakers, who appointed a Commissioner of Forestry in 1904 to oversee a new system of local fire wardens.

Five years later, Vermont’s first state forester, Austin Hawes, pushed the effort further. Hawes had studied how neighboring Maine handled its own fire problem, where private timberland owners had begun building wooden lookout towers on their mountains, connecting them by telephone so a spotted fire could be reported and located quickly. Hawes wrote to a Maine timberland owner asking whether the system actually worked. The response was enthusiastic: the towers, the landowner said, offered the best protection against forest fires that money could buy. Hawes was convinced, and he began pushing the Vermont legislature to encourage the same approach at home.

Built by Loggers, Not the State

What’s easy to forget now is that Vermont’s earliest fire towers weren’t built by the government at all. They were built by wealthy landowners and timber companies who had the most to lose if their forests burned. The first tower in the state went up on Burke Mountain around 1912 and 1913, financed by Elmer Darling, a Vermont native who had made his fortune running New York City’s Fifth Avenue Hotel. Darling had bought up large tracts of land on Burke Mountain, and a fire tower was simply good business: a way to protect the timber he owned.

Around the same time, a lookout was posted on Camel’s Hump, working through the 1911 fire season with nothing more than a cement table, a county map, a compass, and a telephone line for company. Over the following years, other large landowners across the state pooled their money to build more towers, stretching from Bromley and Stratton Mountains in southern Vermont to Mount Carmel and Pico Peak in the west, and up into the Northeast Kingdom at Burke, Gore, and West Pond Mountains. By the 1930s, dozens of towers dotted the state’s high peaks.

The system these lookouts used was refined but decidedly low-tech. An observer would sight a smoke plume through a device called an alidade, a rotating tool that measured the angle between true north and the fire’s location. That single bearing wasn’t enough on its own; it took a second tower, sighting the same smoke from a different angle, to triangulate roughly where the fire actually was. A state forester would collect the reported angles by telephone, plot them on a map, and mark the fire wherever the lines crossed.

The CCC Era and the Peak of the Network

Vermont’s patchwork system of privately funded towers became a fully public one in the 1930s, thanks largely to the Great Depression. When President Franklin Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933 to put unemployed young men to work, Vermont’s state forester, Perry Merrill, seized the opportunity. Merrill directed CCC crews across the state not only to cut ski trails and build roads, but to expand Vermont’s fire protection network. Seven new steel towers went up under the CCC, along with three wooden towers, eight lookout cabins, and miles of new telephone line and fire roads.

By the time the CCC’s building spree wound down, Vermont’s fire tower network had reached its peak, with 38 towers keeping watch across the state’s mountains between the 1930s and the 1940s. Across the wider Northeast, from New York to Maine, similar networks meant that roughly 270 towers were staffed during fire season at any given time, with dozens more further south in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Fire season ran from April through October, and the men and women posted in the small cabs above the treeline lived a strange, solitary kind of work. Some found the isolation nearly unbearable. Others grew to love the quiet, spending long days in a room barely larger than a king-size bed, watching the horizon for the first curl of smoke.

Not every tower survived the era on its own terms, either. The Great Hurricane of 1938 tore through New England and knocked down a number of Vermont’s original wooden towers, including the first one on Burke Mountain, which had to be rebuilt afterward as a taller steel structure.

The Towers Fall Silent

The system that had taken decades to build began unraveling by the 1960s. Small airplanes turned out to be a cheaper and more effective way to spot fires than a fixed lookout on a single mountain, and states across the Northeast stopped building new towers and let the old telephone lines and equipment fall into disrepair. Changing logging practices and the decline of wood-burning railroads had also simply made forest fires less common than they’d been at the turn of the century, further undercutting the case for staffing towers year after year.

Vermont moved faster than its neighbors. As budgets tightened through the 1970s, the state became the first in the Northeast to shut down its entire fire tower network. That left Vermont with a peculiar problem: what to do with three dozen steel and wood structures scattered across remote mountaintops, many of them nowhere near a road. The state’s solution was to offer the towers for sale at a dollar apiece, on the condition that buyers dismantle and haul the structures out themselves. It proved a tough sell, and many towers were simply abandoned where they stood, left to rust or rot.

What’s Left Today

Roughly twenty of Vermont’s fire towers are still standing, in varying states of repair, though online lists of them are notoriously inconsistent. Most that remain are steel, a legacy of the CCC-era rebuilding push; only a small handful of stone towers exist, at Ethan Allen Park in Burlington and Hubbard Park in Montpelier, and just one known wooden tower survives, at Bolton Valley. Six towers, including those on Bald Mountain, Burke Mountain, Elmore Mountain, Mount Olga, Spruce Mountain, and Stratton Mountain, have been recognized on the National Historic Lookout Register.

The towers have found a second life as hiking destinations. Bald Mountain, near Burke in the Northeast Kingdom, rewards a roughly two-mile climb with a restored tower offering views north into Canada; nearby, a lookout cabin has been converted into a backcountry shelter. At Elmore State Park, a short hike leads to a tower with sightlines stretching from Jay Peak to Mount Mansfield. The tower atop Spruce Mountain, east of Barre, has an especially well-traveled history of its own: built near St. Albans in 1919, it was physically moved to its current mountaintop in 1944.

In 2026, the state began a fresh round of restoration on several of its surviving towers, using federal and state funding to repair and add safety railings to structures at Bear Hill, Burke Mountain, Spruce Mountain, Elmore Mountain, Okemo Mountain, Bald Mountain, and Mount Olga. Vermont officials have described the towers as an important piece of the state’s forest management history, one that lets modern visitors experience a bit of that legacy firsthand.

The fires that once threatened to consume Vermont’s woodlands have, for the most part, stayed away. Where nearly 150 fires burned close to 17,000 acres over a four-year stretch in the early 1900s, the state now sees only a small fraction of that damage in a comparable span. The dry, slash-covered landscape of the logging era gave way to healthier second-growth forest, and better land management closed the fire season down to a narrow window each spring. But on the summits of Burke, Elmore, and Bald Mountain, the steel towers still stand, a reminder of the decades when Vermonters climbed into the clouds each morning, scanning the tree line for smoke.