The Fascinating Life of Marion Davis

Appalachia, Winter/Spring 2006

On July 29, 1993, an electrical storm ignited a vacant house on Routes 123/124 in New Ipswich, New Hampshire, leaving it a shell of blackened siding reaching toward the sky. Arsonists had previously vandalized the building, but its final destruction was a shock. This empty house had once been the Wapack Lodge, the former home of Marion Buck Robbins Davis, who hosted hikers and skiers there between 1925 and 1958 while they were traversing the 21-mile Wapack Trail. The Wapack was the first interstate hiking path of the twentieth century, and Davis may well have been the first female trail builder, maintainer, and hiking lodge caretaker.

Neighbor Al Jenks, who had bought land from Marion many years before, told a newspaper reporter after the fire, “My loss is thinking about her and missing her. Marion was the Wapack Lodge.”

In a way, too, Davis was the Wapack Trail. Some of the guests stayed for days or weeks on end to enjoy her home cooking. Not to mention her company. This most unusual woman had scouted the trail in the early 1920s with Frank Robbins (whom she later married). She named the trail, joining the “Wa” from its starting point, Mount Watatic in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, with the “Pack” of its end point, North Pack Monadnock in Greenfield, New Hampshire. Davis also chose the triangular-shaped blazes as a symbol of friendship.

The 1993 lodge fire, which occurred seven years after Davis’s death, resulted in more than the loss of the building. It was also the destruction of Davis’s brilliant project, which made hiking and skiing convenient for city people. It would be fair to suggest that in the lodge’s busiest seasons, Davis’s hospitality drew people to the trail as much as the open ridges, pine forests, and quiet ponds did.

Marion and Frank ran the lodge starting in 1925, when the Appalachian Trail was still mostly a concept. In fact, one frequent guest at the lodge was Benton MacKaye, the landscape architect who had conceived the idea of the Appalachian Trail. For a few Octobers running, MacKaye stayed at the Wapack Lodge for two weeks at a time.

These were the early years of the backcountry trail movement that grabbed the northeastern United States in the 1920s and 1930s. So many adventurers were traversing the low ridges between Mount Watatic and North Pack Monadnock that, on one February weekend, the Peterborough Transcript reported that there was no room left to park at the trail crossings and that more than 1,000 people were on the trail. Hikers and skiers could break up the trip — and avoid having to get off the trail at the end of a long day — by staying at the trailside lodge, which stood at roughly the halfway point. Davis served fresh meat, homegrown vegetables, and homemade baked goods to hundreds of hikers each season.

Davis’s trailside hospitality might suggest a method of maintaining interest today in the many quiet trails of the Northeast, like the Wapack. Fewer hikers enjoy the full lengths of these trails today, because camping areas and trailside lodges are rare. Hikers who yearn to follow a pilgrimage from Point A to Point B must often patch together section hikes, asking relatives or friends to pick them up or doubling back over the same terrain. Today on the Wapack, Al Jenks rents out lean-tos north of the summit of Barrett Mountain on his Windblown Ski Touring Center land, providing the only opportunity to stay overnight.

The story of Marion Davis’s long life has never been told completely. She was born Marion Buck in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, on February 8, 1894, in a house her carpenter father built. She was the second of six children. When she was young, the family moved to North Carolina to follow her father’s building projects. A year and a half later, they returned to Massachusetts. “Dad had lost so much money on that job in North Carolina that we had to sell the little cottage, and we went back into the tenement house, only in the upstairs instead of the middle tenement,” Davis recalled on a tape of her memories made in the 1980s, near the end of her life.

Despite her father’s money troubles, Marion and her brothers and sisters seemed to enjoy an ordinary and happy childhood. Nothing about her early life suggested the unusually independent woman she would become. She played outside, picked blueberries, went to church and school, and at thirteen, helped organize a sewing club, the Zig-Zag Club. That year, 1907, they all moved briefly to Panama, where her father constructed housing for the Panama Canal builders. Marion recalled having to cut up 4-foot log lengths for cooking. “The man who delivered the wood said, ‘Do you have to cut this up?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll give you a few pointers.’”

During her early teen years back in Fitchburg, Marion wanted to study drawing, but her mother objected. She soon left school and started working for a neighbor, who briefly fired her in a dispute over whether the stair risers were clean. That summer, she spent two weeks on a farm in Rindge, New Hampshire, where her mother had grown up. The couple who ran the farm, the Robbinses, had no children and took in orphans. They had never formally adopted Marion’s mother, Helen, but they considered her their daughter. When life got awkward for eighteen-year-old Marion at home, her mother’s adoptive family welcomed her to the farm. It was a life-altering trip from which she never returned.

“There was more or less friction between Mother and me and I was saucy to her one time,” Marion recounts on the tape. “She gave me three days to apologize or to move out.” By one account, she had scratches from her altercation. She asked advice of her employer, a dentist in town, and he advised her to go to the farm if she could. “So I left home,” Marion said. “November 19, 1912, to go to the farm. I had a good nervous breakdown.”

At the farm she met Frank Robbins, her mother’s half-brother by adoption. Frank’s mother was one of the adopted children, and his father was the farm owner. By the time Marion met him he was in his thirties and had a wife, Mabel...

The full text of this story may be found in the Winter/Spring 2006 issue of Appalachia.

- Christine Woodside is a writer who lives in Deep River, a hiker who discovered the Wapack Trail in August 2004, and, beginning in December, will be the new Editor-in-Chief of Appalachia.