Towns:
Woodford, Glastenbury, Sunderland

Acreage:
35,000

Topography:
3,748 feet
Glastenbury Mountain

Water:
Beebe Pond, Little Pond, Bolles Brook, Hell Hollow Brook

Natural Features:
Critical bear habitat, breeding habitat for forest-dependent birds

Points of Interest:
Appalachian Trail, Long Trail, fire tower on Glastenbury Mountain

The proposed Glastenbury Wilderness is northeast of Bennington, beginning just north of Route 9 and extending to Kelley Stand Road to the north. Most of its 35,000 acres are in Glastenbury (pop. 6), one of only two unorganized towns in southern Vermont. Seen from Route 7, Glastenbury Mountain possesses a massive and beautifully wild ridgeline that dominates the landscape to the east.

To this day the watershed remains undeveloped, due to a combination of: high elevations, deep snowfalls, long winters, and its lack of suitability for agriculture. Despite the area’s proximity to Bennington, it is quiet and remote. The forestland and extensive stands of mature beech trees provide critical black bear habitat in the proposed Glastenbury Wilderness, and claw-marked beech trees are a common sight demonstrating the presence of bears throughout the area. The Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department has identified Glastenbury as a region “supporting relatively high densities of cub-producing females, and an area containing critical habitats necessary to bear survival.”

The rich forest habitat of the Glastenbury area is home to a wide variety of birds. The presence of Bicknell's thrush (designated in Vermont as rare and of special concern) has been documented as well as Swainson's thrush, yellow-rumped warbler, Cape May warbler, winter wren, dark-eyed junco, and white-throated sparrow.

Glastenbury offers extensive opportunities for backcountry recreation. The hilly terrain of the area includes several summits surpassing 2,000 feet, with Glastenbury Mountain the tallest at 3,748 feet.

More than fifteen miles of trails offer access to hikers, snowshoers, and cross-country skiers.

The Long Trail/Appalachian Trail crosses the entire area from north to south by an old fire tower on the top of Glastenbury Mountain. The Green Mountain Club describes the view from the tower as “more wilderness than is to be seen from any other point on the Long Trail.” Hell Hollow Brook, in the southern edge of the area, contributes to the public water supply of Bennington.

The township of Glastenbury is almost entirely National Forest, but for much of the last one hundred years it was owned by one family. The timber magnate Trenor W. Park passed Glastenbury along to his grandson, Hall Park McCullough, whose grandson, Trenor Scott, sold most of his holdings to the Forest Service. Scott still retains substantial acreage today. Fayville, a logging community in the northwest corner of Gastenbury, is the only area of the town that was ever thickly settled. Fayville is now abandoned and all that remains is a clearing of some fifty acres. A logging railroad known as the Bennington & Glastenbury briefly became a tourist attraction near the turn of the century, taking people to an inn converted from a boarding house used by loggers. The railroad tracks were washed out in the 1898 flood and were never replaced. A cellar hole is all that remains of the inn.

A century ago, Glastenbury was completely clearcut to supply vast quantities of charcoal to the iron industry in nearby Shaftsbury and Troy, New York. Glastenbury is now a rich mosaic of balsam fir, red spruce, white and yellow birch, beech, and mountain ash. It is interspersed with patches of ferns, raspberries, blackberries, bluebead lily, and dwarf dogwood. It now supports mature forest.