Imagine buying a house and finding the garden bare: cracked mud, no grass, no trees. Would you spend the rest of your life fixing it, tree by tree, for people you will never meet? That is exactly what one man did in Vermont in 1869, and the forest he planted is still standing more than 150 years later. His name was Frederick Billings, and the estate was Mount Tom. According to a forest condition monitoring report published by the Northeast Temperate Network of the National Park Service, the 550-acre tract of forest land that he revived is considered the oldest continuously and professionally managed forest in the U.S.
A hillside stripped bare
Before Europeans arrived, most of Vermont was covered in forest. However, the axes soon followed. The settlers started clearing land to create fields for agricultural purposes, cutting down trees to build their houses and fences, and burning them to extract potash. By the mid-1800s, sheep farming exploded across the state, sending wool to textile mills in southern New England. At its peak, Vermont had almost 1.7 million sheep grazing on land that had once been forest. However, the system couldn’t last forever. Once tariffs fell and grazing shifted farther west, wool became less profitable for Vermont farmers. These farmers were left with land that had already been stripped of its trees and topsoil. With nothing to anchor the land in place, rains caused erosion on hillsides and flooding of streams. Many just packed up and left Vermont. This was the degraded land Frederick Billings bought with the Woodstock farm in 1869.
