The last von Trapp child is 86

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. 

Chadwick Estey

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.