Overview
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Imagery: USGS The National Map · Terrain: Mapzen, USGS and others
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Windham College was a liberal arts college in Putney. It began in 1951 as the Vermont Institute for Special Studies, added its first two dorms on the hill where Landmark College now stands in 1961, and closed abruptly in December 1978 as enrollment fell.3,4
Read the whole historyTimeline
4 events · swipe
Photos
Memories
Skied Windham College, or worked there?
Tell us what you remember, or what this page has wrong. Memories show here, credited to you, after we read them; facts are checked against a source before they change a figure.
Lost near Windham College
The closest other lost ski areas, as the crow flies.
- 1963–2000 · 5.8 mi away · VermontA chairlift ski area on Route 30 in Dummerston, northwest of Brattleboro, that opened in 1963 and last ran in the 1999–2000 season.
- Years not yet collected · 14.6 mi away · VermontA small rope tow ski area at East Jamaica, built by Larry and Mary Weir, that ran from about the 1940s until at least 1953.
- 1946–1986 · 16.9 mi away · VermontA small ski area on Mount Olga off Route 9 in Marlboro, Vermont, open from the 1946–47 season until insurance costs closed it in 1986.
History
Written by aurora.ski from the 6 pages below, each sentence numbered to its sources.
Windham College was a liberal arts college in Putney. It began in 1951 as the Vermont Institute for Special Studies, added its first two dorms on the hill where Landmark College now stands in 1961, and closed abruptly in December 1978 as enrollment fell.3,4
A student who arrived in September 1965 recalls, in a Putney Historical Society post, that the college's athletic department gave skiing lessons in winter on the hill running down to the site of the village's present sewer plant. NELSAP's list of closed Vermont ski areas, drawn from The Colorado Skier, Vermont Life and a 1970 Vermont ski area survey, includes Windham College in Putney, and its Vermont index names it with a page still to come. Skimap.org has a record but no maps.1,2,5,6
No source found says whether a lift served the hill or gives the years skiing was taught there. The tie between Skimap.org's record and this hill rests on the shared name and town.1,6
Sources for this history (6)
- 1Putney Historical Society · 1965: Memories of Putney and Windham College (Barbara Taylor, July 17, 2023)
- 2New England Lost Ski Areas Project · History of Vermont Skiing
- 3Wikipedia · Windham College
- 4The Commons · An educational landmark remembered (Wendy M. Levy, September 23, 2015)
- 5New England Lost Ski Areas Project · Lost Vermont Ski Areas
- 6Skimap.org · Windham College
Photos
No photographs of Windham College we may republish yet
Its old photos and trail maps live on the sites that collected them, and Google finds the rest.
Memories
What skiers remember of Windham College, in their own words.
Facts
Location
42.9761° N · 72.5114° W · Vermont · Green Mountains
OpenSkiMap lists it as abandoned.
Years operated
not yet collected
Closed for good; the year it closed is not yet collected. It stays here as part of the record of U.S. ski areas.
No figures from its operating years are collected yet.
Terrain contours: USGS 3D Elevation Program, public domain