Perry Merrill of the Vermont Department of Forests and Parks oversaw many Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) projects in Vermont, including state parks and forests. Developing a ski area on Mount Mansfield, Vermont's highest mountain, was one of his pet projects. Beginning about 1933 the CCC improved the old route to the Summit House, now Toll Road, and began cutting what today are the Lord and Nosedive ski trails on the east side of the mountain. Around 1935 they built this gabled, 18 × 25–foot cobblestone hut with a massive interior fireplace to replace a wood-frame warming hut used by skiers hiking to the mountain summit. Robert Simon of the National Park Service may have designed the hut, as he was responsible for many of the smaller structures the CCC built nationally. Unlike similar CCC improvements at Shrewsbury Peak, the Mount Mansfield ski area quickly attracted skiers and development, rapidly becoming “The Ski Capital of the East.” The mountain's first ski lifts, built in 1938 and 1940, rendered the warming hut obsolete. What had been a necessity for skiers hiking to the summit became a quaint amenity and then a curiosity unrecognized by the thousands of skiers who visit on a busy winter day.