Nonprofit Shelburne Farms is VT’s top free attraction
HGTV recently reported that Shelburne Farms, 20 minutes south of its home city, is Vermont’s top free attraction.
An “About the Farm” sign, posted at the Shelburne Farms entrance, explains it’s “an education nonprofit offering transformative learning experiences to help build a sustainable future.
“Explore the idea of sustainability on our ‘working’ farm and National Historic Landmark,” it continues. “These 1,400 acres are a living classroom for learning, located on the homelands of the Winooskik band of the Abenaki. We grow and craft cheddar, maple syrup and vegetables using regenerative farming practices … See what more sustainable food systems can look like.
“We design, deliver and host programs for learners of all ages, and our Institute for Sustainable Schools works with educators and students to help inspire an emerging generation of changemakers.
“Thanks to supporting members, the Farms remains open to the public at no charge, offering a place for you to learn, grow and be inspired.”
The Farm Barn, a five-story shingle and locally quarried redstone barn that has a spacious two-acre courtyard, serves as the nonprofit’s nerve center. Most visitors see it as Shelburne Farms’ “anchor stop” – its most iconic structure and the easiest place in which to absorb the excitement of education in action, including animals, demonstrations and cheesemaking.
A tractor shuttle runs daily from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m., May – October, from the Welcome Center to the Farm Barn or it’s a walk of less than a mile. The Children’s Farmyard posts a busy daily schedule. In mid-August, they included hand milking Jeannette, one of 120 Brown Swiss cows, at 10:30; meet a cheesemaker at 11; visit a sheep pasture at 11:30; get in the garden at noon; meet a rabbit at 12:30 and a goat at 1; hand milk a cow at 2; do farm chores at 3; lead lambs to pasture at 3:30; machine milking at 4; and bottle-feeding calves at 4:30.
Staff members pack information into their talks, and children can try milking and petting animals. Two- and three-generation families are the norm, and recent renovations include accessible bathrooms and water fountains.
Shelburne Farms has a remarkable history. From 1886 to 1902, both Lila Vanderbilt Webb, who had recently inherited $10 million from her railroad magnate father, and her husband, Dr. William Seward Webb, first conceived and then created Shelburne Farms as a model agricultural estate. The couple acquired 32 existing farms which they reshaped into a single Gilded Age manor on Lake Champlain. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead was engaged to develop a balanced conceptual plan, dividing its acreage into three areas: working farms, managed forests and open parklands and pastures. Robert H. Robinson was retained as the building architect.
Research historians now believe it unlikely that the Webb enterprise, including its barns, a 110-room mansion and many other buildings, was ever intended be profitable. Within a decade or two, expenses outpaced income, first as automobiles replaced horses, and then as the Depression and WWII created massive, deferred maintenance.
Grandson Derek Vanderbilt Webb, born in 1913, was “the first member of his illustrious family truly to farm the land at Shelburne Farms; he became a popular legislator and chair of the Vermont Republican Party … He, his wife and their six children lived ascetically in Orchard House, an old colonial on the grounds, while the Brown Swiss herd dozed under the vaulted ceilings of some of the most magnificent barns ever built on American soil,” wrote Prof. Dan Chiasson in his 2026 biography, “Bernie for Burlington.” “By the early 1970s, those structures were collapsing into the landscape.
“The 1970 census showed that for the first time (in a century) more people, including hippies, had moved to Vermont than had left,” Chiasson wrote. “The Webbs’ six children, heirs to the Farms and the dwindling Vanderbilt fortune, now sported long hair, beards, headbands, bell bottoms. In their own ways, the Webb children had joined their generation and become back-to-the-landers.”
Derek’s son, Alec Webb, born in 1956, dropped out of a boarding school before graduating and spurned Yale. His older brother, Marshall, dropped out of college to work on the family farm.
When Burlington’s population boomed, real estate developers offered Derek Webb serious sums of money to divide Shelburne Farms into small lots to sell for suburban-style housing. Unusual for the time, he asked his six children what they’d like to do.
“Alec and Marshall’s mission was to convert the property from the values of what (these co-founders) called the ‘showy wealth’ embodied by their ancestors to the communal values of their own countercultural generation,” Chaisson explained. “(Alec) wanted to learn from ‘what the land had to teach,’ and he wanted others to come learn as well, especially children.
“In 1970, the Webbs decided that they would save their farm,” Chiasson wrote. “This private refuge of industrialists became a nonprofit, as much of the land passed quickly into the hands of a conservation trust.”
When their father died in 1984, he left “a surprise in his will: the balance of the acres, along with all the barns and the deteriorating main house, were deeded to the children’s nonprofit … Inside of 100 years, the most exclusive parcel of land in Vermont, the very signature of hoarded wealth, had been turned over to the people. The property’s vast network of trails and country roads have been open to the public for decades, free of charge.”
When Marshall Webb died at age 74 in August 2022, Seven Days, Vermont’s free weekly newspaper, headlined his obituary “Shelburne Farms nonprofit co-founder embodied the mission and values of the organization he created.”
Alec Webb, now in his mid-70s, who became the president of Shelburne Farms in 1988 after years as general manager, remains one of the nonprofit’s employees who diligently works in the Farm Barn’s office wing.
by Edith Tucker
