We spend a lot of time in our magazine pointing out how the past is reflected in nature, sometimes in subtle ways, like a stand of chestnut oak where once there’d been a forest fire, sometimes more obviously: old stone walls where there once was a hill farm.
Then there’s the history that requires no imagination to picture, like the spooky, gloriously decrepit, abandoned Cold War radar station that still sits on top of East Mountain in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
I went there last weekend with my brother – we’d stared up at it for years and finally had the time to make the journey. Old logging roads wind up from the towns of Victory and East Haven and intersect with an out of place asphalt path – formerly a road – that runs along the ridge top. You follow this onyx stripe east until you hit the old Lyndonville air force barracks, and just in time for Halloween, the creepiness begins.
Understand that this is out in the middle of nowhere – 6 or 7 miles up in the woods in an area that’s as empty and unsettled as Vermont gets. Amidst the yellow birch and balsam fir rises a complex that once housed almost 200 people: bunk halls and a huge mess hall and a machine shop and a post office and a bowling alley and basketball court. The beds and tables are gone, the hardwood floor has been ripped out of the basketball court, but the husks of everything are still there. According to an old news clipping, many urban airmen looked at a stint at the base as they might have looked at a stint in Siberia. (When they were stationed there, in the late 1950s/early 1960s, the nearby towns of Victory and Granby still didn’t have electricity.) One entire wall of the mess hall contained a mural of Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive – an artistic nod to the civilized world.
Continue past the barracks, another couple miles up to the summit, and you'll reach radar installations that still tower above the treeline – you’ll see from the pictures below that our visit coincided with the year’s first snow. The buildings are just carcasses, but the floors and walls are a foot thick, the steel still strong. As we toured the buildings the wind howled around us – loose sheet metal clanging. We ascended the tallest building and scanned the horizon for Soviet bombers.
The whole thing serves as a testament to America’s can-do spirit and penchant for excess. The complex sprung up overnight in 1956 – which considering the harsh conditions and lack of local infrastructure is hard to believe –and was promptly abandoned only 7 years later. You can check out this website to learn a little more, and see pictures of the base in operation.
If any of you reading this were associated with the station, I’d love to hear stories. And I’m sure there are similar cold war relics in other areas of New England and New York – I’d love to learn more about them, too.
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