Woodstock
After talking over a roast beef sandwich lunch in New York, Rockefeller hired Donath away from the Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, N.H., to manage the farm that summer, an early step in the efforts of Rockefeller and his wife, Mary, to reinvent what was then primarily a working dairy farm.
Donath, now 67, said the honeymoon period of his employment lasted about six weeks — that was when Rockefeller called him into a meeting and laid out his plans to rehab the property’s old farmhouse, to serve as apartments for some of the farm workers, “just kind of company housing, if you will,” Donath said.
To Donath, gutting the 1890 farmhouse for functional efficiency was absolutely the wrong call. He had only just begun to dip into what was called, somewhat grandiosely at the time, “the archive” — a bunch of dust-laden boxes tucked into a bomb shelter underneath the old Frederick Billings mansion. But he already had a growing awareness that the farmhouse had a special history all its own. It had, for generations, served as the brains for a sprawling operation that included cheese factories and milk bottling and hay fields and all the other many components of the farm’s commercial dairy operation.
“I took several deep breaths,” Donath recalled. “I said to Mr. Rockefeller, ‘Do you think we could put a pause on this project, and give us a few months to develop an alternative plan?’ ”
Rockefeller “paused greatly,” mulling it over, Donath said, before delivering an answer.
“OK. Sure. You’ve got six months.”
Working History
The farm, which today is ranked among the finest outdoor agricultural museums in the country, has an impressive pedigree. In 1869, Frederick Billings, a Royalton native who co-founded the Northern Pacific Railroad, bought 246 acres from George Perkins Marsh, an early advocate of environmental stewardship and the son of a prominent Vermont lawyer. In the 1950s, Rockefeller and his wife, Billings’ granddaughter, Mary, took an interest in the declining farm, planning to build on its history as a model of agriculture.
When Donath came to Rockefeller’s attention, he had only recently returned to New England, having spent his teen years as a resident of Burlington, followed by a stint at the University of Vermont. After leaving the area to attend the University of Madison-Wisconsin in the late ’70s, Donath took a job in 1983 as director of the Banke Museum, which celebrates a historic waterfront neighborhood. In 1985, a self-described “young whippersnapper” at 34, he accepted Rockefeller’s offer to come work in Woodstock. The Rockefellers helped create the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, which opened in 1998.
By the end of the farmhouse’s grace period, Donath knew enough about the aging structure to tell its story, beginning in 1884 when Billings installed a professional farm manager, Scotsman George Aitken, into the house with Aitken’s elderly mother-in-law, his wife and four daughters.
Donath pitched Rockefeller on the idea of not rehabbing, but restoring, the farmhouse, paying attention to details like the Sears Roebuck-purchased wallpaper, and all the little furnishings that could be used to show the public what life was like for a middle-class, professional farm-managing family of the day.
It was a victory for Donath, and it laid the foundation for his own vision for the farm as a place that would tell its own tale.
And the story of the farm — a story that includes Abenaki cornfields, forest-clearing Merino sheep operations, Civil War mustering grounds, 1893 World’s Fair ribbon-winning Jersey cows, World War II victory gardens, Windsor County fairgrounds and, in recent decades, an embrace of the artisanal cheese movement — is really the story of agriculture in Vermont, said Donath. He received nearly $300,000 in compensation in 2016 for running the $4.6 million Woodstock Foundation, the parent organization of both Billings Farm and the Woodstock Inn, according to public financial records filed by the Woodstock Foundation.
To Donath, who has overseen farm offerings experienced by 1.7 million visitors, history is not simply esoteric academia — it’s practical.
“What does Billings Farm have to say about Vermont’s future?” he asked. “And you can extrapolate to the future of agriculture in America, which is in flux.”
Reflecting on the current state of the archive, which has been modernized and organized and now sits in an attractive brick building built by one of Billings’ children, Donath sounded almost wistful about how much has yet to be mined from the wealth of personal papers and business records.
“If you were to ask me,” he said, brightening at the prospect, “Who were the crew in 1887? How many teams of oxen were working? What was the payroll? We have that kind of information. … The degree to which we can delve into the real history here is extraordinary.”
Thoughtful Legacy
Donath is credited with not only restoring the 1890 Farm House and opening it to the public, but also with building the site’s visitor center and theater. And since 1997, he has served a dual role as president of the Woodstock Foundation.
“What a gift,” said state Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Woodstock, who has known Donath for nearly all of the 26 years she’s been in the area.
“He’s always been a cheerleader for this history of Vermont and the history of Woodstock and the history of that particular farm,” she said. “David’s vision and persistence were the gift that made the farm possible. They chose the right person to do it, and we are forever grateful.”
Woodstock Foundation Chairwoman Ellen Pomeroy called the moment of Donath’s retirement “bittersweet.”
For more than 30 years, she said, “I have appreciated his vision, leadership and integrity, and have valued our friendship.”
But Donath says he merely brought a historian’s skills to what ultimately was Rockefeller’s vision.
“I was the guy who had the wonderful good fortune to get hired by Laurance Rockefeller and make real the vision that he had,” Donath said. “We’ve now brought on board the next generation of leadership.”
Donath will be succeeded by David Simmons, who has been the Billings Farm executive director since 2016.
Donath plans to retire with his wife to a cottage they own on Lake Groton, in Groton, Vt. But he says that there’s another chapter still waiting to be written about his involvement with the foundation, as president emeritus.
“I gave the board a list a couple of pages long,” he said.
The list contains between 35 and 40 different topics — the subjects, he says, of aspects of the farm’s history that he’d like to research and write about.
For example, he said, he’d like to tell the story of the Abenaki who burned and planted a portion of the farm repeatedly, but who were gone by the time the first white settlers arrived.
The archaeological site remains tantalizingly unexplored.
“What happened to the people?” Donath said. He’d like to find out.
Then there are the women, descendants of Billings, who carried the farm through perhaps the darkest chapter in its history, in the mid-1940s, by cashing in their inherited trust funds and investing everything into the farm, to modernize it and revitalize its commercial prospects.
“It was an amazingly courageous thing to do, and something that was, frankly, just not done by rich people,” he said. “This story has, certainly, its wealthy visionary males involved, but it also has some very, very resourceful visionary females who played a pivotal role.”
Then there are the farm management topics. And the guidebook for visitors he’d like to write. And the heyday of the county fair, which embedded the land with fragments of pottery that still turn up like lost pennies after heavy rains. And. And. And.
“It’s going to take me,” Donath said, “about 35 years to get through this list.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.
Correction
Prior to European settlement, members of the Abenaki tribe planted such crops as corn and squash in fields at what is now Billings Farm & Museum in Woodstock. An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the crops.