The Park That Three Families Made

The farm at the heart of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Woodstock passed through three remarkable families over a hundred and fifty years, and each left it better than they found it. George Perkins Marsh grew up on the property in the early nineteenth century and went on to argue, in Man and Nature, that human beings were damaging the natural world in ways that required conscious correction.

Frederick Billings, who had made his fortune as an attorney in California and then as president of the Northern Pacific Railroad, bought the farm in eighteen sixty-nine and transformed it. He practiced systematic reforestation of the hillsides, planted thousands of trees on the slopes of Mount Tom above the property, and ran a progressive dairy operation regarded as a model in the region. He was applying on his own land the conservation ideas that Marsh had written about.

Billings's granddaughter Mary French married Laurance Rockefeller in nineteen forty. In nineteen fifty-four the Rockefellers took ownership of the farm and continued what Billings had started, managing the forest carefully and maintaining the dairy herd. In nineteen eighty-three, Laurance and Mary French Rockefeller established Billings Farm and Museum on the property, a working dairy and living museum of Vermont agricultural history. In nineteen ninety-two they donated the mansion and five hundred fifty acres of managed forest on Mount Tom to the United States government.

The result was Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, which opened in nineteen ninety-eight as Vermont's only unit of the national park system. The park interprets not just the three families but the idea they shared: that careful stewardship of land is something that can be practiced and demonstrated rather than simply discussed.