Billings Farm Woodstock dairy barn
— — the red barn the Jerseys come home to.
Not only on a wall.
“A working Jersey dairy across the river from Woodstock, with the long red barn set against the hills of the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller park. Frederick Billings built the herd in 1871, importing Jerseys from the Isle of Jersey to teach Vermont how to farm well after the wool collapse. The barn still runs as a museum and a real farm at once. Cows come in for the afternoon milking the way they have for one hundred and fifty years, slow and unhurried, and the air smells of hay and warm milk.
Billings Farm Woodstock dairy barn, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Billings Farm sits on River Road in Woodstock, Vermont, opposite the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, the only national park telling the story of American conservation. Frederick Billings founded the dairy in 1871, importing prize Jersey cattle from the English Channel island to model good husbandry for hill-country Vermont. The farm has run continuously since, and was opened as a museum in 1983 by Laurance and Mary Rockefeller. It is still a working Jersey herd, calving every spring on site.
The farm year is the draw. Spring brings calving and the maple sugarhouse running; summer brings hay wagons and the heirloom kitchen garden; autumn brings the harvest weekends and quilt show; winter brings sleigh rides on the meadow and a wood-fired sugar-on-snow. The Jerseys are milked twice a day every day, around 4:00 PM in the open parlour where visitors can watch. The shop sells the farm's own cheddar and ice cream made from that morning's milk.
Open daily late February through December, closed January and most of February. Admission covers the dairy barn, the 1890 farmhouse, the gardens, and the changing daily programs. The adjacent Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller park, with its 550-acre forest and twenty miles of carriage roads, shares a parking lot. Woodstock village is half a mile across the Ottauquechee River, with its green and its covered bridge. Foliage week, usually the first ten days of October, is the busiest of the year.