Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park mansion
— — the house conservation history kept warm.
Not only on a wall.
“The mansion sits on the lower slope of Mount Tom, just above Woodstock village. Three families lived here in turn — George Perkins Marsh, Frederick Billings, the Rockefellers — and each left the forest behind it more carefully tended than they found it. The only unit of the National Park Service built around the idea of conservation itself. Tours leave from the carriage barn, by reservation. from the studio
Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park mansion, 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.
Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park sits on roughly 643 acres on the lower slope of Mount Tom, on the north edge of Woodstock village in central Vermont. Authorized by Congress in 1992 and opened to the public in 1998, it is the only unit of the National Park Service devoted to the history of conservation in America. The Queen Anne mansion at the center was the boyhood home of George Perkins Marsh, later owned by railroad financier Frederick Billings, and finally by Mary and Laurance Rockefeller, who gifted the property to the nation.
The mansion began in 1805 as a brick Federal house and was enlarged by Frederick Billings in the 1880s into the Queen Anne form it carries today, with a wraparound porch, mansard roofs over the dormers, and detailed woodwork associated with the firm of Henry Hudson Holly. Interior rooms hold the Hudson River School paintings the Billings family collected — works attributed to Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole among them — alongside furnishings the Rockefellers added through the twentieth century during their tenure on the property.
The mansion is open seasonally, typically late May through October, by guided tour only; timed tickets are reserved through the park visitor center next to the Billings Farm & Museum. The grounds, carriage roads, and roughly twenty miles of trails on Mount Tom remain open year-round at no charge. The forest above the house was planted under Frederick Billings beginning in 1874 and is among the oldest professionally managed woodlands in the United States. Pogue Pond sits a short walk above the mansion.