Mansion_rev8.qxd - National Park Service

“
Another perfectly beautiful day—the green of the
landscape is something wonderful.” So confided
Frederick Billings to his diary on May 29, 1877 as
he looked out from the Mansion, his cherished home in
Woodstock Vermont, to the surrounding gardens, fields,
and forest. Billings often reflected on the beauty of the
landscape at his country place, a farm that he purchased in
1869 and over the course of a quarter century transformed
into a model of progressive agriculture, forestry, and landscape
design. In his stewardship of the land, Billings followed
many of the same conservation principles advocated
by the conservationist George Perkins Marsh, who was
born and raised on the same property earlier in the century.
Improvement of rural society, protection and proper
use of natural resources, and cultivation of landscape
beauty were fundamental to Frederick Billings’s stewardship
practices and imparted to the landscape a feeling of
harmony with nature. Through the late twentieth century,
Billings’s children and grandchildren continued to manage
the property in much the same manner, helping to ensure
its legacy as one of Woodstock’s most significant cultural
landscapes.
Today, the historic core of the Billings Estate is preserved
within the boundaries of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller
Figure 0.1: Location of the Mansion grounds and relationship to
the rest of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park.
SUNY-ESF.
INTRODUCTION
National Historical Park, the first national park to focus on
conservation history and the evolving nature of land stewardship
in America. The park, established by Congress in
1992 based on a gift by Laurance S. and Mary F.
Rockefeller, consists of the estate’s three main components:
Mansion grounds, forest, and farm. The Mansion
grounds and forest comprise 555 acres gifted by the
Rockefellers to the people of the United States and administered
by the National Park Service. Across Elm Street
from the Mansion grounds is the farm, which opened to
the public in 1983 as the Billings Farm & Museum. Eightyeight
acres of the farm were included within park boundaries,
but remain under the private ownership and operation
of The Woodstock Foundation, Inc.
This history of the Mansion grounds was prepared in
order to assist the National Park Service to steward the
landscape with the same level of care that it was given by
the Marsh, Billings, and Rockefeller families. It is one component
of a larger project, known as a Cultural Landscape
Report (CLR), the purpose of which is to document the
history and significance of the Mansion grounds and to
provide a strategy for the short- and long-term management
of its historic landscape. 1
The Mansion grounds CLR is
divided into two parts: this Site
History; and a technical landscape
management document that will
provide park staff with information
necessary to understand the history
of individual landscape features, to
determine whether they contribute
to the historic significance of the
property, and to decide the measures
needed to preserve them. As
identified in the park’s General
Management Plan (National Park
Service and Billings Farm &
Museum, 1998), the landscape will
be managed to convey a sense of the
site’s evolution through the occupancy
of the Marsh, Billings, and
Rockefeller families, rather than
1