Mansion_rev8.qxd - National Park Service

of the present Mansion) built in a prominent position at
the head of Elm Street, overlooking the intervale and the
village and set within an orthogonal set of lanes. It was here
that the statesman and conservationist George Perkins
Marsh grew up and gained his earliest experience with the
landscape, although he did not spend his adult life here.
Years later, he wrote Man and Nature, considered to be the
fountainhead of the American conservation movement. In
1848, Charles Marsh left the three hundred acres of the
farm to his youngest son, Charles. For the next two
decades, the junior Charles Marsh ran the farm, but made
few improvements.
Frederick Billings Era, 1869–1890
Between 1869 and 1890, Frederick Billings transformed the
Marsh Place into a fashionable country place, establishing
the character of the Mansion grounds that would endure
for generations. Following his return from the West where
he had become a successful real estate lawyer and businessman,
Frederick Billings purchased the Marsh Place
from Charles Marsh (Junior) in 1869, and established there
his family’s year-round home, where he and his wife Julia
would raise seven children. Billings was not only returning
to his hometown, but also following an increasing trend
among the elite to establish pastoral homes outside
growing industrial cities. In the New England tradition of
gentleman farming and through progressive conservation
practices such as those of George Perkins Marsh,
Frederick Billings sought to make his country place a
catalyst for improving the languishing rural countryside.
He revived the farm based on scientific farming principles,
rebuilt the Marsh house in the fashionable Stick style, and
soon began a series of landscape improvements for the
surrounding grounds according to the 1869 conceptual
plan by Robert Morris Copeland. Copeland’s plan provided
the direction for Billings to transform the orthogonal
organization of the Marsh Place into a stylized rural
landscape based on the popular Natural or English style of
landscape gardening, with winding drives, expansive
lawns, and informal groupings of trees, as well as a rustic
summerhouse, greenhouses, fashionable carpet bedding,
and a kitchen garden. At the back of the Mansion, Billings
began an innovative reforestation program on the worn-out
hill pastures at the back of the Mansion. He continued to
refine the landscape over the course of his twenty-five
years on the property; however, aside from a major reconstruction
of the Mansion in 1885–1886, he made few
substantial alterations from what he initially established
during the 1870s.
Estate Era, 1890–1914
Following Frederick Billings’s death in 1890, the affairs of
his Woodstock estate were managed by trustees, family
members, and the farm manager. In his will, Billings
specified that the estate, including the Mansion grounds,
would remain intact through the lifetime of his wife, Julia,
and should continue to be updated and expanded. His
daughters, Laura, Mary Montagu, and Elizabeth, made a
series of improvements over the course of the next quarter
century that incorporated new responses to the industrial
age, although they carefully preserved the overall character
of the landscape that their father had established.
Following the addition of “old-fashioned” plantings in the
early 1890s, the grounds were updated from 1894 through
1899 with fashionable Neoclassical Revival-style gardens
designed by Charles A. Platt—one of his earliest landscape
commissions. At the turn of the century, the main entrance
drive and plantings around the Mansion were redesigned
in a neoclassical manner according to the 1902 design of
Martha Brookes Brown Hutcheson, one of the earliest
known commissions for this pioneering female landscape
architect. Under Elizabeth’s lead between 1912 and 1913,
Ellen Biddle Shipman, another first generation female
landscape architect, redesigned the flowerbeds in the
Terrace Gardens, a project that was also one of her earliest
commissions. In keeping with the family’s conservation
sensibilities, Elizabeth also developed a series of rustic and
botanical gardens on the hillside, including a fernery, water
gardens, and an arboretum. Here, she collected ferns and
other plants as part of her effort to document the native
plants of the Woodstock area.
French-Billings Era, 1914–1954
INTRODUCTION
Following the death of Julia Billings in 1914, the estate was
divided among the Billings children, with the Mansion
grounds under the ownership of Mary Montagu (by then
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