On Environmental History with a Human Face: Experiences from a new national park

Rolf Diamant

IN 1998, A NEW national park opened to "interpret the history and evolution of conservation stewardship in America." The inspiration came from Mary F. and Laurance S. Rockefeller, who generously gave their 550-acre estate in Woodstock, Vermont including lands, buildings, and collections, to become Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park (MBRNHP).1	1
This essay is intended to provoke thought and reflection on the management of historic places and the challenge of making them exciting, relevant centers of learning. It is not intended as an administrative or comprehensive history, but rather a personal perspective of a work in progress—the making of a national park. Several events and programs are described in detail, others are mentioned in passing, and some may have been neglected inadvertently.	2
The property that is today Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park was originally the home of Woodstock native George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and Nature (1864)—considered one of the seminal texts of environmental thinking. In Man and Nature, Marsh wrote about the essential interrelationship between the health and integrity of human communities and the everyday landscapes that sustain them. Marsh's work, particularly his writings on forest and watershed management, had a profound influence on the nascent conservation movement in the United States and in many countries around the world.	3
The park also is named for Frederick Billings, a lawyer and president of the Northern Pacific Railroad (1879-1881) who was involved in the early efforts to create Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks. After years in the West (1849-1864), Billings returned from San Francisco to Woodstock to build his estate on several eroded hill farms including the property where Marsh had grown up. Billings, a believer in material progress, social engineering, experimentation, and education, committed himself to establishing a model farm on the Marsh property, and a scientific forest on the worn-out and deforested slopes of Mount Tom. Billings began his forestry work in 1874. He thus created one of the earliest planned and scientifically managed forests in the United States.	4
Figure 1. Carriage Barn Visitors Center Barbara Slaiby/Conservation Study Institute
In 1983, Frederick Billings's granddaughter, Mary French Rockefeller, and her husband, conservationist Laurance Rockefeller, established the Billings Farm & Museum on historic agricultural lands of the Billings estate. The Billings Farm & Museum is a living museum of Vermont's rural past, as well as a working dairy farm.2 MBRNHP was established by legislation in 1992, when the Rockefellers conveyed the estate's upland residential and forest land to the people of the United States. The park includes the 550-acre working forest, as well as formal and woodland gardens, sixteen structures (most prominent is the 1805 Marsh family residence, significantly remodeled and enlarged by Frederick Billings), and a large and diverse museum collection with more than 23,000 inventoried objects associated with the Billings and Rockefeller families. The collection features American landscape paintings by such nineteenth-century artists as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, John Frederick Kensett, and Asher B. Durand—who had a powerful influence on the conservation movement.	. . .