Marsh - Billings - Rockefeller National Historical Park

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.