How is Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park related to the Billings Farm & Museum?
The park is named for George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and Nature (1864) and one of the nation’s first environmental thinkers. It is also named for Frederick Billings, a 19th-century lawyer and railroad entrepreneur who bought the property from the Marsh family and who was deeply influenced by Marsh’s conservation thinking. Billings established a progressive dairy farm and professionally managed forest on the property. His granddaughter Mary French Rockefeller and her husband Laurance Spelman Rockefeller sustained Billings’ practices in forestry and farming during the latter half of the twentieth century. Continuing the property’s agricultural legacy, the Billings Farm & Museum was opened in 1983 as an operating dairy farm and a living museum of Vermont’s rural past. Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, which includes the property’s residential core and 550-acre forest, was created in 1992 as a gift to the American people by Mary and Laurance Rockefeller. Today the n
