150 Years of the Appalachian Mountain Club

Drew Bush, MWOBS Executive Director, left, celebrates the AMC’s 150th anniversary on July 31, 2026, with Nicole Zussman, AMC President and Chief Executive Officer, second from left, and many AMC staff, Trustees, and partners.

By Peter Crane

This year marks the 150th birthday of one of the Observatory’s summit partners, the Appalachian Mountain Club.

AMC (or as it used to be known, the A.M.C) was founded in 1876, and is still going strong, a century and a half later.

As revealed in the earliest pages of the Club’s principal publication, Appalachia Journal (a near-complete run of which is in the Observatory’s library), we read in Volume I, Number I, (June 1876) that the Club was organized early in that year “for the advancement of the interests of those who visit the mountains of New England and adjacent regions, whether for the purpose of scientific research or summer recreation.” The Club initially had five departments, each of which focused on a particular activity which interested the Club’s founders. Those departments, each with its own Councillor, were Natural History, Topography, Art, Exploration, and Improvements.

The first President of the Club was Edward Pickering, an astronomer and physicist, with ties to Harvard and MIT. (Mount Pickering, north of Attitash ski area, in named in his honor.) Councillor of Topography was C.H. Hitchcock, a professor of Geology at Dartmouth and a principal of the Huntington-Hitchcock expedition, which had occupied the summit of Mount Washington to establish a weather station in the winter of 1870-1871.

Membership dues were two dollars. The membership roster indicates that women were as welcome to become members as were men. A few of the new members, in addition to Pickering and Hitchcock, were J. Rayner Edmands, trail builder for whom the Edmands Path and Edmands Col are named, E.B. Bigelow, inventor and carpet manufacturer, whose North Conway estate is operated today as Stonehurst Manor, S.A. Bemis, dentist, photographer, and resident of the stone house in Crawford Notch now known as the Notchland Inn, Daniel Merriman, whose wife, Helen Bigelow Merriman, was a founder of Memorial Hospital, entomologist and paleontologist Samuel Scudder, George Vose, engineer and professor at Bowdoin and later at MIT (for whom Vose Spur on Mount Carrigain is named), and Professor Elihu T. Quimby of Dartmouth, geographer, mathematician, and cartographer.

The first issue of Appalachia included various administrative notes, plus articles on a visit to the Tripyramids, on an exploration of the East Branch of the Pemigewasset, an article about two types of mountain barometer, and a sketch map of the White Mountains.

It took a few years for some of the activities which we associate today with AMC to appear. It was not until 1888 that the first hut, at Madison Spring, was built. It was not until 1907 that the first AMC hiking guide was published, titled “Guide to the Paths and Camps in the White Mountains.” And it was not until 1919 that the first AMC trail crew was fielded.

AMC and the Observatory have a long shared history, perhaps the most noteworthy facet of which is that the longtime AMC Huts Manager Joe Dodge also was a founder of the Observatory in 1932, and remained in service to the Observatory for more than 40 years.

Congratulations to AMC for their first 150 years of activity and service!