Green Sugar Shack, c.1940

Old sugarhouses like this one were often far off the beaten path, miles deep into the sugarbush, with nothing else close by. Nowadays, sugarhouses tend to be closer to a road or homestead.

One of the stories his friend and biographer John Cooley told about Aldro Hibbard’s winters in Vermont was his penchant for hitching rides with workers headed to a logging site deep into the woods so that he could spend the day there. Cooley wrote that Hibbard had to “rise before dawn and make his rendezvous with the men to catch a ride on their sled, but it was worth the bite of the early cold.”

Cooley noted that Hibbard wore “heavy woolen underwear, two and sometimes three layers of outer clothes, shoes liberally padded with felt, and loose cotton gloves that could be easily shed and reapplied, especially to the right hand.” And, that snowshoes “were essential.” He would paint, Cooley wrote, and then if he got too cold standing still, he would work with the loggers to warm up.