A group of hikers tries to form the first Appalachian Trail Museum.

Story by Christine Woodside / Sept. 6, 2002

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Former A.T. "through-hiker" Larry Luxenberg and his dream. (Beau Bushor)

You wouldn’t think that people who leave their jobs to trudge more than 2,000 miles on the mountainous Appalachian Trail would be attached to material objects. Yet dozens of former A.T. hikers, as they are called, are planning to open a museum in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., that will display relics from their brief flight from civilization.

Museum organizer Larry Luxenberg is a married father of three who works as a financial analyst in Manhattan. But he also hiked the entire length of the trail, from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mt. Katahdin in Maine, in 1980. He made lifelong friends on the A.T. and met his wife, Frieda, hiking. "It’s definitely had a big influence on my life," he says.

Luxenberg, who saved his backpack and stove, first thought of forming a museum when he was doing research for his 1994 book, Hiking the Appalachian Trail. At the annual meeting of the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers’ Association four years ago, Luxenberg proposed that the 1,000-member group open a museum. "I thought it was a critical time," he says, "because a lot of the early hikers were getting older."

 

Myron Avery, with the measuring wheel, on Mount Katahdin, Maine (Appalachian Trail Conference)

Some people call the Appalachian Trail the longest, skinniest national park in the country. Luxenberg says the museum will be devoted to the experiences of the roughly 6,000 people who have hiked the whole trail since it was completed in 1937—something no museum has attempted before.

Luxenberg and four others formed a nonprofit this summer and are now working with Harpers Ferry officials to secure space in the town’s 100-year-old Victorian train station. The National Park Service, which owns the building, is removing asbestos and lead paint and plans to lease the building to the town for administrative offices. After the renovation, Mayor James Addy says, the town will give space to Luxenberg’s group in exchange for a donation.

Until the museum moves into a permanent location, Luxenberg is storing some of the collection in his bedroom closet in New City, N.Y. Others are holding onto their items until there is a place to send them. "It’s definitely not a museum-sized collection yet," Luxenberg says, "but it grows every other day. I keep getting stuff in the mail."

In addition to financial donations, the group welcomes any objects related to hiking the trail. The collection will include standard gear such as tents and packs, and strange items like the Army pith helmet worn by the late Earl Shaffer, the first person to hike the entire trail alone, in 1948.

 

Gene Espy, 1951 (Appalachian Trail Conference)

It also will preserve items that would otherwise be thrown away. The group wants boots, frayed backpacks, tents, pots, water bottles, and mousetraps. They welcome letters, pictures, and the informal notebooks called trail registers, which are customarily left in trail shelters along the way. (In these, hikers write about their experiences for those behind them and read entries by hikers ahead. When the notebook is full, the last writer mails it to the person who first placed the notebook there.)

Odd items are fine as long as they were used on the Appalachian Trail. For example, a hiker known as "Jump Start" donated a parachute similar to the one he had used to reach the remote summit of Springer Mountain, the southern end of the trail. (Most people just hike in on the approach trails.)

The group wants items that people pitched out of their packs on Springer Mountain when they realized they couldn’t carry them. They want old newspaper or magazine articles, aging maps, walking sticks, even chainsaws.

Basically, they want the mundane. "Gene Espy has the original socks he used in 1951," Luxenberg says. "They were ordinary white hiking socks of the time. They’re perfectly preserved."

Chris Woodside, a freelance writer living in Connecticut, hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in 1987.

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