The last living von Trapp child still helps run the family resort in the mountains of New England – a little piece of Austria inspired by The Sound of Music.
In the rolling meadows and snow-dusted peaks of Stowe, Vermont, 86-year-old Johannes von Trapp child still helps run the lodge his mother, Maria von Trapp, founded 75 years ago after the family fled Nazi-occupied Salzburg.
As his daughter Kristina von Trapp Frame recalls, Maria spotted a dilapidated farmhouse with a “For Sale” sign in 1942. “We can’t replicate the views, but we can fix the house,” Kristina says her grandmother told the family. That view, stretching across Vermont’s Green Mountains, reminded them of the Austrian Alps they’d left behind.
This year, the von Trapp Family Lodge & Resort celebrates its 75th anniversary – and the last living von Trapp child still lives part-time on the property. Johannes splits his days between the Green Mountains and his cattle ranch in New Mexico, while Kristina and her husband manage the sprawling 2,600-acre estate. Guests can hike through wildflower fields dotted with Highland cows, sip maple syrup made in the lodge’s sugar shack or sample Austrian-style lagers brewed on site. In winter, skiers glide along the trails of North America’s first commercial cross-country ski centre, which Johannes established in 1968.
A slice of Austria in Vermont
The von Trapps immigrated to the US in 1942 – five years before Maria’s husband Georg passed away – and purchased the Stowe farmhouse with their meagre earnings from their family’s famous singing group, the Trapp Family Singers. By 1950, Maria had converted the farmhouse into a 27-room lodge, which Johannes took over in 1969, expanding the property after a fire in 1983.
Chadwick EsteyMaria infused the lodge with gemütlichkeit – that uniquely Austrian spirit of warmth, friendliness and good cheer. In fact, the main building, with its steeply pitched roofs, flower-box balconies and endless mountain views, feels more Austrian than New England. Inside, visitors linger over coffee and strudel at the Austrian-themed Kaffeehaus, or settle in at the von Trapp Brewing Bierhall, where sausages and Bavarian pretzels pair with the family’s Jubilee Grüner Veltliner, produced to mark the anniversary.
Despite its fame, little at the resort hints that this family inspired one of the most-watched musicals of all time, based on the 1949 autobiography of Maria von Trapp. Because Disney holds the rights, no official imagery from The Sound of Music can be found here. Instead, the family honours its real legacy: the story of the Trapp Family Singers, who toured internationally for two decades.
“I call the movie my sci-fi parallel universe family,” says Kristina. “It helps people realise how different the movie was from my family’s life. It was filmed in different locations than where my family lived and the children had different names and sang different songs.”
Still, she loves meeting nostalgic Sound of Music fans at the Vermont lodge. “Someone once told me how their family member passed away and all they wanted to do was listen to the Sound of Music soundtrack on a loop,” she said. “One woman told me just this week how she had named her three children, and even her dog, after the kids in the movie. Sometimes they just start crying.”
An Alpine-style ski village
It wasn’t by chance that Maria and Georg fell in love with Stowe’s rolling hills and meandering streams. In this quaint 18th-Century town, often called “The Ski Capital of the East”, Austrian influences run deep.
A few years before the von Trapps arrived, Austrian ski instructor Sepp Ruschp – known for helping develop skiing as a US sport – had become the first director of the ski school at what is now Stowe Mountain Resort, home to Vermont’s highest peak. Top ski instructors and others from Austria followed. “Back in 1952, Ruschp took Maria von Trapp on as a ski student,” remembered Peigi Guerra, who has worked for decades at the von Trapp lodge.
Stowe’s resemblance to Austria is more than mountain views; it’s also in its hearty food and rustic ski chalets. A classic A-frame decorated with elaborately carved wooden balconies, the Innsbruck Inn at Stowe was originally built by Austrian architect Karl Schwanzer as the Austrian Pavilion at Montreal’s 1967 Expo before it was moved to Stowe. Between the town’s farmhouses are restaurants rooted in Alpine heritage, like the Swiss Fondue Restaurant By Heinz, opened by Swiss hotelier Heinz Remmel; and Edelweiss Mountain Deli, once owned by Austrian ski instructors Aldi and Ingeborg Yoerg, which operates inside what was an 1830s one-room schoolhouse.
A homecoming in Salzburg
Earlier this year, Kristina returned to her grandmother’s hometown of Salzburg for the 60th anniversary of The Sound of Music, helping with an exhibit at the city’s famous Schloss Leopoldskron hotel, where scenes from the film were shot. Family photos from both Salzburg and Stowe, as well as memorabilia like the green curtains Maria famously sewed into play clothes, will appear in 2026 at Salzburg’s first museum dedicated to The Sound of Music at Schloss Hellbrunn, now home to the gazebo where Liesl and Rolf sing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”.
“When you’re a kid, the movie is fun. As a teen, you relate to the themes of love, and when you get older you understand the movie is about a country and its values,” Kristina said. “They did a brilliant job and it’s an honour that the Sound of Music is still relevant to people.”
During that trip, she met Texan traveller Kathleen Ditter, who fell in love with the Sound of Music as an eight-year-old girl. Salzburg – a city of 157,000 residents – draws more than 300,000 Sound of Music fans each year to film sites like the 1913 Salzburg Marionette Theatre. During a chance encounter on Salzburg streets, standing between buses wrapped in movie posters featuring Julie Andrews (who played Maria von Trapp) and Christopher Plummer (Georg von Trapp), Kristina convinced Ditter to visit the family lodge in Vermont.
“While walking back to our bus [in Salzburg] with our tour guide, we realised we were standing next to a lovely woman dressed in a pretty dirndl,” Ditter recalled. “Our tour guide began talking to her and that’s when the woman introduced herself as Kristina von Trapp.”
At the Vermont lodge, Ditter toured the small stone chapel built by Werner von Trapp, the second oldest von Trapp son, in the 1950s before he left to fight in WWII with his brother as American soldiers in the elite 10th Mountain Division. “What they’ve built over the years is amazing,” she says. “I felt like I was in a European Austrian lodge. What a wise visionary Maria von Trapp was.”
The real von Trapp story
The family’s true history is quieter than Hollywood’s version but no less remarkable, starting withthe orphaned girl who found comfort with the nuns of Salzburg’s Nonnberg Abbey. On the Trapp Family Lodge & Resort tour, visitors learn that after somewhat reluctantly marrying Georg, Maria and the family fled Villa Trapp in Austria not by foot over the mountains – that would have taken them to Germany, not Switzerland – but by train to Italy (formerly Croatia), where Georg had grown up and earned a military pension. From there they sailed to the US.
Guests also discover that Maria was “strict, not as cosy as you see in the movie, but that’s kind of the German and Austrian way – very black and white and right or wrong”, said Kristina. “She was also very gracious and giving. As a kid, my brother and I called her Grandmother with a capital ‘G’.” And, she adds, it was her grandfather Georg who, despite his portrayal in the movie, “was actually really warm and loving”.
As for the singing von Trapp children later raised in Stowe – her aunts and uncles – Kristina remembers them as a doctor, a dairy farmer, a music teacher, the owner of Vermont’s von Trapp Farmstead cheese-making business and even a missionary in New Guinea living with no electricity. The youngest, one of three born to Maria and Georg, is her father Johannes, who helps keep their Austrian heritage alive in the hills of Vermont.
“We’re excited to go home and watch the entire movie again. It’ll be in a new light after visiting Stowe, I’m sure,” said Ditter. “I bought a copy of Maria’s book.”
Sourse: BBC
