Hotel Tyrol Patch, Stratton Mountain — c. 1960s-70s

A vintage Hotel Tyrol patch from Stratton Mountain, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, featuring the red eagle of Tyrol — wings spread, crowned, taken straight from the Austrian coat of arms — with HOTEL in small black caps across its body and tyrol in black blackletter beneath. Round, white twill, white merrowed border, STRATTON MOUNTAIN, VT. arched around the bottom.

That eagle is not decoration. It is the actual arms of Tyrol, lifted whole and stitched onto a patch for a lodge in southern Vermont, in a decade when half of New England skiing was busy pretending to be Austria. Carved balconies, schnitzel on the menu, instructors with real accents and instructors with acquired ones. Nobody found it strange at the time.

Stratton was built with an Austrian accent on purpose. Tyrolean rooflines at the base, a village laid out to look like somewhere in the Alps, and a hotel named after the province it was all borrowed from. In the early sixties that was the shorthand for serious skiing — the instructors had accents, the architecture had overhangs, and you were meant to understand that this was not a rope tow behind a church.

What makes this one unusual is that it is not a ski patch at all. It is a hotel patch. Nobody collects hotels. There was no category for it, no shoebox it belonged in, and when the hotel changed hands or changed names the whole run of them simply went in the bin.

Which is exactly why so few exist. The things nobody thought to save are the things nobody has.

Nobody set out to preserve this. It survived because one person put it in a drawer instead of a bin, which is how almost everything here survived.

Embroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.