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Marsh-Billings National Historical Park, encompassing the historic Billings/Rockefeller
Farm and Estate in Woodstock, Vermont, is the first unit of the National
Park System to focus on the theme of conservation history and the changing
nature of land stewardship in America. The Park is a gift to the people
of the United States from Laurance S. and Mary F. Rockefeller.
Mary French Rockefeller was the granddaughter of Frederick Billings who
created the estate in the late 19th century. Frederick Billings' estate
included a progressive dairy farm and professionally managed forest, improvements
which were significant in a region severely depleted by deforestation
and overgrazing. Billings' efforts were influenced by the writer and conservationist,
George Perkins Marsh, who earlier had grown up on the property. In his
landmark book Man and Nature, first published in 1864, Marsh described
the spreading ecological destruction of the American countryside and argued
for a new ethic of responsible stewardship.
Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park is the only national
park to focus on conservation history and the evolving nature of land stewardship
in America. Opened in June 1998, Vermont's first national park preserves
and interprets the historic Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller property.
The Park is named for George Perkins Marsh, one of the nation's first global
environmental thinkers, who grew up on the property, and for Frederick Billings,
an early conservationist who established a progressive dairy farm and professionally
managed forest on the former Marsh farm. Frederick Billings's granddaughter,
Mary French Rockefeller, and her husband, conservationist Laurance S. Rockefeller,
sustained Billings's mindful practices in forestry and farming on the property
over the latter half of the 20th century. In 1983, they established the
Billings Farm & Museum to continue the farm's working dairy and to interpret
rural Vermont life and agricultural history.
The park was created in 1992, when the Rockefellers gifted the estate's
residential and forest lands to the people of the United States. Today,
the Park interprets the history of conservation with tours of the mansion
and the surrounding 550-acre forest.
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