The community camp should become something more than a mere ‘playground’: it should stimulate every line of outdoor non-industrial endeavor. Summer schools or seasonal field courses could be established and scientific travel courses organized and accommodated in the different communities along the trail…
Why not raise food, as well as consume it, on the cooperative plan? Food and farm camps should come about as a natural sequence… Here in the same spirit of cooperation and well-ordered action, the food and crops consumed in the outdoor living would as far as practicably be sown and harvested.
—Benton MacKaye, An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning, Journal of the American Institute of Architects, Oct. 1921

Since the late 1980s, Sandwich Mountain Farm1 in Sandwich Notch has served as a basecamp for trail crews and a site for study and international cultural exchange. Visitors have always had the opportunity to help out in a food-producing garden on the farm. In 2006, we began sharing a community garden space with neighbors and trail crews alike, under the name Curious Gourds, in memory and honor of Margret and H.A. Rey. What were once informal discussions around the fire have evolved into a college semester field course, and occasional visits from international colleagues have become a formal Pan American Trails Fellowship program. This integration of trails, cooperative living, study, and food production that we have practiced for nearly 40 years is directly inspired by Benton MacKaye, the visionary founder of the Appalachian Trail.
Benton MacKaye’s Vision for Living Differently

In his 1921 landmark article An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning, Benton MacKaye laid out a sweeping vision—not just for a footpath along the Appalachian Mountains, but for an entirely new model of community life grounded in cooperation, outdoor living, and restorative labor. Central to this vision were what he called community camps—intentional, non-industrial settlements located near the proposed trail, including a specific variant: food and farm camps.
What Are Community Camps?
MacKaye envisioned community camps as small, cooperatively managed communities nestled within the Appalachian landscape, serving as sanctuaries from urban industrial life. These camps were not designed as temporary recreation sites, but as permanent, self-governing communities organized around shared values of cooperation, education, recuperation, and outdoor work.
Each camp would:
- Occupy a fixed site (with no land speculation or private real estate development),
- Offer simple dwellings and shared amenities,
- Be accessible to people of modest means—without profit motive,
- Host field schools, study programs, and restorative retreats for workers, educators, and families.
These communities were to be intentionally limited in size to prevent overcrowding and preserve the surrounding landscape. MacKaye emphasized that rather than build ever-larger camps, more camps should be created across the region.
The Role of Food and Farm Camps
More than recreational retreats, food and farm camps were part of a broader solution to what MacKaye called “the problem of living”— shaped by economic hardship, crowded cities, and growing disconnection from the land.
In food and farm camps people could grow food, harvest timber, and meet the material needs of the trail and community. These were not romantic throwbacks to subsistence farming, but practical, communal responses to economic insecurity and social fragmentation of the time.
Food and timber production would:
- Support trail users and nearby communities directly,
- Provide new models of dignified, land-based employment,
- Foster stewardship of soil, water, and forest rather than extraction.
MacKaye pointed to early examples like the Hudson Guild Farm in New Jersey and Camp Tamiment in Pennsylvania, both rooted in cooperative labor and rural revitalization.
A Broader Vision
MacKaye imagined these community and farm camps, as well as what he called shelter camps, forming an archipelago of outdoor, democratic spaces connected by the Appalachian Trail—a “strategic camping base” stretching the length of the Eastern United States. These rural communities would serve as a counterweight to industrial cities, offering fresh air, intellectual renewal, and a new model of collective living grounded in mutual aid. It was an invitation to reimagine life in the United States through cooperation, shared purpose, and creative use of leisure.
In today’s world—marked by climate change, inequality, and discord—MacKaye’s vision feels prescient. While the community and farm camp vision remains an underdeveloped idea in the trails world, it offers a compelling model of resilient, cooperative living grounded in land, purpose, and care.

Sandwich Mountain Farm and Pan American Trails
Today, Sandwich Mountain Farm hosts a small seasonal community of trail stewards, undergraduate and graduate students, Pan American Trails Fellows, and other visiting trails professionals—who tend trails, grow food together, study and share in a rhythm of daily life. In spirit and practice, this echoes MacKaye’s vision for farm camps—rooted in companionship, labor, and stewardship.
This vision now extends far beyond the Appalachian Mountains. As a designated Pan American Trails Center, the White Mountains connect to a larger hemispheric movement. For many years WTN Americas has organized trails programs in rural Costa Rica. In 2025, the Pan American Trails Network is launching a new field school in the Tropical Andes of Ecuador, linking highland communities and biodiversity corridors through trail-based capacity building. These field schools, rooted in local culture and ecology, are part of a growing network of place-based learning sites inspired by MacKaye’s original vision and adapted to the diverse landscapes of the Americas.
Seen is this light, Sandwich Mountain Farm, the White Mountain Environmental Field School, and the Pan American Trails Fellowship program are more than local experiments. They are nodes in a continental system of learning and stewardship, demonstrating how trails can be corridors of both ecological and social restoration—where, alongside recreation and conservation, people grow food, share knowledge, and rebuild community.
A century after MacKaye’s call, we hope that through examples like Sandwich Mountain Farm and networks like Pan American Trails, community and farm camps will be more than a historical footnote—they will become a real and shared project of ecological and social renewal, from the mountains of New Hampshire to the highlands of the Andes, and beyond.
- In 1992, Nevin and Mary Scrimshaw donated a conservation easement on this property to the United States Forest Service. The easement prohibits subdivision and real estate development, and dedicates the land to farming, forestry, recreation, education, and renewable energy. Jenny Rowe and Nat Scrimshaw homesteaded here in the late 1980s and named their project Sandwich Mountain Farm. The property, held in trust, is surrounded by the White Mountain National Forest and is close to the Sandwich Range Wilderness, part of the National Wilderness Preservation System.. ↩︎

About the artwork and artist featured in this essay

Herbert Ogden Waters was born in Shantou, China on November 15, 1903, the son of Baptist missionaries. He attended high school in Shanghai and then came to America where he graduated from Denison University in 1926. His post-graduate work includes study at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Harvard University. He received honorary doctorates in fine arts from Plymouth State College (1984) and Alderson-Broaddus College (1985). In 1932 he married Bertha Adams, a childhood friend from China.
Since 1933, except for a brief period of war service in a Providence shipyard, Herbert and Bertha Waters made their home in New Hampshire. Waters lived in Warner, NH as an artist and art teacher from 1936 to 1941 in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. Later, he taught at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, at Holderness School in Plymouth, and at Alderson-Broaddus College in Phillipi, West Virginia.
Throughout a long career, Waters continued to refine his printmaking techniques, especially in wood engraving, and to explore the intimate and grand landscapes of New Hampshire from his home in Campton, NH. He completed his last engravings from 1992 to 1993. Waters died in Campton, New Hampshire, in 1996.
