Born in 1801, Marsh grew up on the land that, 200 years later, would become a national park that bears his name. He put into practice ideas set forth by George Perkins Marsh in his influential 1864 book Man and Nature. A Vermonter raised in Woodstock, Billings was a lawyer, railroad magnate and the grandfather of Mary French Rockefeller. The park features a 20-mile network of trails that winds through forests established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Frederick H. "This one had to have felt extremely personal," Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller curator Ryan Polk said.
The Woodstock park, which includes the mansion and its objects and artwork, opened to the public in 1998. In 1992, owners Laurance and Mary French Rockefeller granted the house and property to the park service - carrying on a Rockefeller family tradition of donating land for the creation and expansion of national parks. The only national historic park in Vermont, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller is linked by and named for three families who lived in a brick mansion at the Elm Street property at the base of Mount Tom, over the course of two centuries. The site is a living laboratory of land stewardship and environmental conservation characterized by forest plantations that date back to 1880. The 550-acre park encompasses one of the oldest planned and scientifically managed forests in the nation, possibly the oldest, according to the National Park Service. A Jersey heifer at Billings Farm & Museum, photo courtesy Seven Days/Sally Pollak
0 kommentar(er)
