Shelburne Farms

South Burlington, VT

Note: I've been taking advantage of spare time to do tourist things in Vermont that I never did when I lived here. (Typical huh?) Button Bay Park, Shelburne Museum, tomorrow The Maritime Museum.

Shelburne Farms was created in 1886 by Dr. William Seward Webb and Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb as a model agricultural estate.  There is a familial relationship to Electra Havemeyer Webb who was the collectress behind neighboring Shelburne Museum.   Needless to say there was a lot of family money around.  Today, Shelburne Farms is a nonprofit education center for sustainability, and a 1,400 acre working farm.   It included the Inn at Shelburne that we blogged about before.   

This time I toured the "farm barn."   Some barn.  Look at the picture below.   It is hard to imagine a structure as elegant as this.   I did not visit the coach barn, the dairy barn and the breeding barn, each of which is comparably elegant.   

The Farm Barn, built Circa 1866

The Breeding Barn

The Old Dairy Barn

The Coach Barn

The only thing one can say is, "hats off to 19th century billionaires."   The Vanderbilts, Flaglers, Rockerfellers, Carnegies, Morgans and more.  They left wonderful legacies that all of us enjoy still today.