Drive. Pray. Scream?: Day 57: marathon

Tonight's post is for our personal benefit months from now...the complicated day of names and facts is already fuzzy in our memories, and we're only hours from the experience! So here's your fair warning...this post is quite long :-)

New Hampshire's only national park site is dedicated to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, perhaps the most well-known American sculptor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The son of Irish and French parents, he developed a great love for his adopted country, the United States, where his parents settled their young family in the mid-1800s. His natural talent was discovered early, and he was apprenticed at 14 to a cameo carver. By 17, he was creating enormous statues that rivaled the work of artists many times his age and experience. He began receiving large commissions soon after. His most well-known works include the double-eagle gold coin and the Standing Lincoln, a piece finished 13 years after the President's assassination; it stands in Chicago's Lincoln Park.

Saint-Gaudens and his wife, Augusta (they were known as Gus and Gussie!), residents of New York City, were led to the quiet village of Cornish, in far-western New Hampshire, in 1885 on the recommendation of a friend, who knew they were in search of a vacation spot from which he could continue work with his many assistants on numerous commissions. The home, built decades before, was run-down, but they saw its potential. Following extensive renovations, it became their summer home for 15 years; and after Gus was diagnosed with cancer in 1900, they made it their year-round residence for the final seven years of his life. He and Gussie had a wide circle of friends who adored them and spent great amounts of time in their home. Many of them bought their own summer residences in Cornish; so many, in fact, that it became known as the Cornish Colony, a reference to the enclave of artists. Saint-Gaudens' work can speak much better to his ability than I, so I'll let our photos of his sculptures do the talking.

Our second stop was to Vermont's only national park site, the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Woodstock. Opened in 1998, it's unique in the park system, emphasizing not one particular person or even a specific landmark, but a cause: conservation and sustainable use of land and resources. In presenting its message, the park details the remarkable influence of three men who, at various times in the last two centuries, lived in a mansion on what is now park property. The first, George Marsh, was a brilliant man (he spoke 20 languages!) who worked as a lawyer, politician and ambassador over the course of his professional life. But as a child, in 1807, he suffered from damaged eyesight, which forced him out-of-doors and away from his father's extensive library. From the family property in Woodstock, he was witness to the deforestation of Vermont. By 1840, 80% of its trees had been clear-cut, the land stripped of timber to supply the newly laid railroad lines, as well as create pastureland for 1.4 million sheep, the base of the Vermont economy at the time. Those troubling views never left his mind, and decades later when he served as Ambassador to Turkey, he understood that his homestate was headed for a landscape similar to what he saw in that country: a man-made desert, brought about by hundreds of years of overuse and abuse of the land. His observations lead him to write "Man and Nature", an internationally-known book in which he explored the new concepts of land conservation and restoration.

Frederick Billings, who read Marsh's book in 1884, was a self-made man whose fortune grew from a successful law practice in San Francisco, dealing with land claims during the gold rush; his own land investments; and partial ownership in the Northern Pacific Railroad. Billings bought the Marsh home in Woodstock (from George's brother) and soon realized that he could apply the principles in "Man and Nature" to the treeless landscape in Vermont. He and his family replanted thousands of trees and created what is now the country's oldest managed forest. He also developed techniques in sustainable use, facilitating the planting of trees along the Northern Pacific lines through the Dakotas and Montana, which had seen heavy deforestation due to the demand for railroad ties. The town of Billings was named in his honor.

Billings' family carried out much of his work on the home property, especially his three daughters and his wife, who outlived him by many decades. One of his granddaughters, Mary French, married Laurance Rockefeller, grandson of John D. Rockefeller. Together, they made many additional improvements to the estate's forest management and bought up pieces of adjoining land which at one time had been a part of the Marsh and Billings estates. Laurance was active in conservation efforts around the world and played a key role in many pieces of national legislation. I find that particularly interesting in light of the source of his family's original fortune: Standard Oil. (Perhaps to balance that fact, his father donated the land for 20 of our national parks, including Rocky Mountain and Acadia.) Laurance and Mary Rockefeller gave their estate, which had become their summer home, to the country in 1992. The wooded acres surrounding the mansion are an active forestry site, with a wood recycling center, a sustainable logging operation, a tree nursery, an enormous compost pile that supports the mansion's magnificent gardens, and an extensive education effort. It's operated in cooperation with the town of Woodstock, and is considered the new model for national park management.

Whew! If you made it through all of that, I invite you to join me in a glass of Vermont wine. And in case you're wondering if the girls were going berzerk during these park visits today, think again: the junior ranger booklets had them engaged and excited about all we were learning.

The Shaw Memorial, the original of which is installed on Boston Common in 1897, commemorates Col. Robert Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first volunteer unit of African-Americans in the north during the Civil War.

The Adams Memorial, commissioned by one Henry Adams to memorialize his wife, was called "The Mystery of the Hereafter...beyond pain and beyond joy" by Saint-Gaudens. He used both male and female models for this sculpture. Below is a detail of the head.