Woodstock: Where Three Great Minds Left Their Mark
Near Woodstock, Vermont
Woodstock is often described as one of the prettiest villages in New England, and the description is almost unfair in its understatement. The town green is ringed by Federal and Georgian houses, several covered bridges cross the Ottauquechee River within the township, and the forested ridges of Mount Tom and Mount Peg rise on either side of the village. It is a place that looks as though it were designed by someone with strong feelings about how small towns ought to appear.
What is less immediately visible is the intellectual history layered into the landscape. Three men, each remarkable in his own right and each connected to this place, shaped American ideas about land, conservation, and the relationship between human civilization and the natural world.
George Perkins Marsh was born here in eighteen oh one. He grew up exploring the forests and fields around Woodstock and became one of the most learned men of his generation. In eighteen sixty-four, he published a book called Man and Nature that changed how educated people on two continents thought about the environment. It is now recognized as one of the founding texts of the modern conservation movement.
Frederick Billings, a California railroad executive who made his fortune building the Northern Pacific Railroad, bought Marsh's childhood farm in the eighteen seventies and turned it into a model of scientific forestry and progressive dairy farming. His granddaughter married Laurance Rockefeller, who with his wife continued Billings's conservation practice into the late twentieth century and eventually donated the property to the nation. That farm is now Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, Vermont's only national park.
Beyond the park, Woodstock is also the site of the first mechanically powered ski tow in the United States, an innovation of January nineteen thirty-four that launched modern recreational skiing. And its covered bridges, the oldest dating to eighteen thirty-six, are among the finest in New England. Layered is the right word for this place.
