Bread Loaf Mountain Campus in Ripton, Vermont

The Bread Loaf Inn is at the center of a large tract of mountainous land owned by Middlebury College benefactor Joseph Battell in the early twentieth century. Battell managed the Inn for many years at a loss, and eventually bequeathed it, along with thousands of acres of property in Ripton, Vermont, to Middlebury College. The college has used the Inn buildings to host the Bread Loaf School of English each summer since 1920, as well as the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. The Bread Loaf School’s faculty has included such famous authors as Katherine Lee Bates, Willa Cather, Louis Untermeyer, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and especially Robert Frost, who visited Bread Loaf nearly every summer from 1921–1962.

Fields on the Bread Loaf campus of Middlebury College. Photo by R.J. O’Hara.

Pileated Woodpecker workings (left) and a bracket fungus (right) in the woods of the Bread Loaf campus of Middlebury College. Photos by R.J. O’Hara.

Front porch of the Bread Loaf Inn on the Bread Loaf campus of Middlebury College in Ripton, Vermont. Photo by R.J. O’Hara.