 This is Dennis McMahon and welcome to Positively Vermont and today my special guest is Seth Bondgarts, the president of Hildine, the Lincoln family home in Manchester, Vermont. A very interesting place and some someplace that people will look forward to visiting and we're gonna try to learn everything we possibly can about Hildine from my guest Seth. Welcome Seth to Positively Vermont. Well, thanks for having me. Tell us a little bit about yourself first. Well, let me see, I was born in Vermont, lived my whole life in Vermont. I like you, practiced law for a number of years and then 16 years ago I took the leap and took the job at Hildine and I've been president of Hildine for just a few days shy of 16 years at this point. That's great. Well, tell us about Hildine, the Lincoln family home. Tell us the history of it. The history? Well, that could be the whole show so I'm gonna do it very quickly. Robert Lincoln was the only child of the four Lincoln children to survive to adulthood. He went on to lead a very interesting life in his own right, served four years as minister of war and was now secretary of defense and he served as four years to minister to England and along the way was a lawyer and successful law practice and along the way started representing the Pullman Company and then eventually became president of the Pullman Company and that's how he really made his money and that was really the bulk of his career was with the Pullman Company and he had visited Manchester during the Civil War with his mother and her younger brother Tad in 1864 and then threw a roundabout way that's too, you know, take too much time to go into, found himself back in Manchester with this law partner who had a summer house in Manchester so to completely secure this route, found himself back in Manchester, you know, 15, 20 years later and eventually he liked it there and purchased land and built the house that is now the home on the 412 acres that is Hildine. That's great. And how long did he live there? Well, Robert, they purchased the property in 02, went through the design process and then moved into the house in the spring of 05 and Robert actually died at Hildine on July 25th 1926 so they were there a good six months a year maybe longer sometimes we know for instance they were there for Christmas in 1912 and we suspect a couple of other times but you know for that period of time that was really what they considered their real home. And how did the property develop into a tourist attraction? Well, when the Robert's granddaughter Peggy who was the last one to live there died in 1975, some people in town got together, that's a real story, but got together and raised the money to buy the property because they wanted to preserve it, they recognized its value to the state actually, to the nation actually. And so they managed to complete the purchase in 1978 and it opened to the public in 79 in a very sort of limited way initially and it's just grown and grown since then. Amazing. Describe what the main house is like, what is that? Mansion or is it a farmhouse? That's such an interesting question. I guess you would think of it as like a mansion on the one hand. On the other hand Robert and his wife Mary Harlan Lincoln could have easily built that new port, they were sort of, those were their contemporaries, Robert had made a lot of money and Robert, they could have, so they could have had a grandiose house built for entertaining and what this really is and one of the things that people comment on frequently when they come to Hildin is they say, I could live here. So it's comfortable, it's a home, it has its elements of being grand, it's kind of kind of the entry hall, although it's not huge, makes a statement and the grand staircase up and you know not like you would have found typically in Vermont at the turn of the 20th century under one hand, but on their hand it's really a home and that's what they did with it. And what is it like today? Well one of the things by the way about the house that is very special is that nobody ever lived in the house except Lincoln's and therefore it's almost all original, the furniture is original, the paintings on the walls in the photographs, almost everything is original and that really sets it apart from a lot of other historic homes and been to some others that don't have the original furnishings and they just don't have the same feel. It's one of the things that's very special about Hildin is that it's and the way that we have it established as it relates to the house is that it's sort of like you're visiting the house while Robert and Mary are out for lunch and it feels that way, they can still be there. And how many floors is it described? It's 8,000 square feet, it's two floors. It's got one of the classic basements that we are working toward, we're nearing the point that we're going to open that as well, you know the washroom, ice room, wine room, cold room, it's really kind of fascinating but we haven't quite gotten to the point that that's open to the public yet, but that's coming. But the first two floors, you really come in and you get a real feel for the Lincoln family. And what about paintings on the wall and other types of accrualments and personal effects? It's all personal, it's very, we've got Robert's cigar box is sitting in his bedroom, paintings that they had on the wall, you know it's all in the book, the library are all the original books, it's really kind of remarkable. And I understand there's an organ, tell us about the type organ. The organ is called an electric pneumatic organ and it has, it's kind of complicated because it has, as you can see, when you see the organ when you come into the house but then it has a system that sends messages from either the keyboard or from, it was a player organ and then it goes down to the cellar where there's a bellows room with this big huge machine, the bellows, that sends the signals from there, the air up through the portico chair on the outside to the pipes of the organ that are at the top of the second, of the stairs on the, partly up the stairs to the second floor, a thousand pipe organs. It's really quite a, so it's one of the few from that era that are especially in the home that are still being played every day. Amazing. And I understand that in addition to the home there's a number of other parts of the estate and we're going to try to go through some of them. What about this garden that's attached to it? Well the garden is, that's one of the reasons that in particular people come to Hildin. We have the formal gardens that were, went with the house, we have restored very well, we actually, and we have a full-time horticulturist, actually she's from South Burlington, Andrew Likini, graduated from the master's degree from UVM in horticulture and we, that's a long story, but we got her to come to Hildin and she's been, she takes leads the crew that takes care of the gardens and we have the families cutting the kitchen gardens which are behind the welcome center, so the formal gardens behind the house, cutting the kitchen gardens behind the welcome center, all very much intact. So that's the, and the gardens, one of the things that I think is remarkable about the gardens is that they hold their color from early spring almost all the way through October. So I go up there in the beginning of October and the gardens are gorgeous. It's, it's really, it's kind of remarkable because different things come into bloom at different points of the year. That's great. What about the carriage barn? You have a carriage barn there? Yeah, well the carriage barn is now the welcome center and it, in, I forget when, 07, 08, we did a top-to-bottom restoration of the carriage barn. It's really one of the great things that we've accomplished since we've been there, this team of us. And so it is gorgeous, frankly. Still has the stalls in it. It's the welcome center. It's where you buy your ticket to get in and it's where the museum store is and there's a little theater space so that where people can see videos to get oriented to Hildine as they come and they begin their day there. But the, it's just a, it's gorgeous. And tell us about this agricultural center that's attached to the property. Well there's two. We have, we have a goat dairy at which we milk goats and make cheese and that's really one of the special things at Hildine and we can talk more about that depending on where the conversation goes. We could spend the whole time talking about that. But, and it's very visitor friendly. It was built to be very visitor friendly where everything's in order and you can see the entire operation, everything from the feeding of the goats to the milking to the cheese making to the aging room. And it's well again all set up for a guest to come through. And we have a lot of kids with a lot of kids programs around that around a lot of aspects of Hildine but one of them is at the goat dairy. And how long does that operate? Does that operate year round? Year round. The goats are dried off for part of the year. In fact they're dried off right now as they rebuild their, as they're pregnant. They rebuild their colostrum to get birth in the spring. And then the milking starts again. In the meantime we bring in cow's milk cheese from one of the farms in the Meadowwee Valley. And we make, we'll make a cow's milk cheese. Most of the year we're making goat's milk. That's amazing. And I understand there's a working train there. Well it's not a working train. We have a, Robert as I mentioned earlier was president of the Pullman Company, the Pullman Palace Car Company, which was probably the largest manufacturing company in the world at the time that he was president. And one of the things Robert did was convert from wood to steel. So we decided that in order to sort of round out the story about Robert Lincoln we wanted to get a Pullman car built during his tenure. We decided that we wanted to get a wooden car built during his tenure. And we now have what is the finest example of a wooden Pullman car in the world at Hill Dean. In the gorgeous building it sort of feels like a train station. And you can go into the car? Oh yeah, you can go into the car. And it's just, it was a meticulous restoration that took four years. Amazing. I think the last time you were here we spoke about that and that was almost four years ago. Okay I knew, I couldn't remember how long ago it was that I was here. So yeah that's there. Now we have one of the goals for the property is to utilize the entire 412 acres and make that 412 acres all part of our educational program which is deep and rich and also a place that is open and available to visitors as the routine guest experience. So we're trying to get guests out across the entire property. You know 20 years ago or whatever it was mainly about the house and you know the house is still the centerpiece it's really quite a remarkable thing. But we're now we've worked since we got there to expand and have the whole problem. You know the Lincoln's didn't think of the house as their home they thought of the 412 acres as their home and we're thinking about it the same way. So we now have a second agricultural operation that we have alpacas from which we take the fleece and produce yarn and sheep and an heirloom variety of Vermont heritage breed of cattle randles. There's only about something like 750 or 800 of them so we're getting we're going to be involved in the restoration of the gene pool for the randle cattle. In addition to a museum it's a working farmer. We have yeah and again there's sort of two we in a way we think of them as one because we do things go back and forth but but there are two different locations the two farms and both of them tied very much not just to the guest experience so that's a large part of it but also to education with you know we have 3000 elementary school kids come to Hildene every year and buses with their teachers for really rich programs in natural science and agriculture and hands-on history and then we have a program with the local high school down at the second farm where we also have a fabulous teaching greenhouse where we have kids come because it's close enough they there's a full-time Burton Burton teacher at Hildene year-round and kids come for classes down at the dean farm but it's not we're not trying to produce farmers it's really about agriculture natural science plant and soil science so we get the the entire range of kids involved in that so it's really um it's really a and the guest can can sort of get a feel for all of that when they're there both both their own experience and then part of their own experiences seeing all the educational things that are going on at the same time that they're there really makes makes the whole thing um deep and rich great tell us about this observatory you had there Robert was a very good amateur astronomer and so he built an observatory and of course Robert could afford to have the finest scope you could get in the day Warner and Swayze made in Cleveland with a six-inch brochure lens and you've just about now you've exhausted my knowledge of astronomy but I know that the and uh but um really quite um and we have it all and we've had it restored and it actually functions we actually our problem has been that we don't do too much with it because we haven't been able to find the right person to help us uh none of the only on staff is an astronomer uh but but it's open to the public and you can come and see it and the scope the scope is really kind of wonderful and the observatory itself there's it's so period because they don't build observatories that way anymore everything's you know uh different but um you're looking you're really back in time with this big long scope with the viewing chair it's really quite remarkable and is that attached to the house itself no no it's um but it's within the you know so it's right there because the separate little building separate little building yeah that's amazing and I understand uh in addition to the house and the other uh elements you described there's a metal land uh that's that's the part where the second farm is um and by the way what I didn't mention about that is that that's relatively speaking well okay let me back up for a second hill dean the when you come in to hill dean you are on the hill roughly speaking half the property and the dean uh sort of old English or Gaelic for um valley with stream is 300 feet below it's all connected and we get people back and forth and there's ways to do it but um so it's hill and dean and the dean portion has both the meadows that you're talking about um where we have the second agricultural operation in the greenhouse in the high school program and 80 acres of wetland um adjacent to the baton kill that's part of the baton kill wet wetland um and within that we have a 600 foot floating boardwalk that goes from point to point um that is really remarkable because you're really literally right out almost at water level um in the middle of a wetland and it's an experience that you don't get it's very peaceful uh on the one hand you really get to see things that you don't otherwise get to see amazing um and um tell us about uh some of the other uh things you have do you have a bookstore or a souvenir shop or things well we have a museum store um that um where we have books um and and we sell a lot of Vermont produce what we try to do is within the store the museum store is make sure that anything that we're selling relates to um relates directly to the things that are going on at hill dean but you know one of we have a lot of great Vermont food product yeah so you can just uh have your education experience or your store experience and get some yeah and local flavor um we sell obviously our we sell our cheeses there we sell goat goat's milk soap that we make they're honey that we produce um and um potted plants heirloom peony seeds um from the the from the Lincoln's original peonies um so a lot of our own product plus we try as much as possible have it be other Vermont product no it's a very interesting website and it's it's beautifully done and it has it's amazing what's there and just to get into it in fact it took me a while just to even just get some cursory preparation of it and I commend it to to our viewers and one of the things that I found unusual was this roadster you have there oh yeah um so Robert and Mary Harlan Lincoln had three children um one of them the youngest was Jesse um and um she um I guess among other things she liked fast cars she had an air-cooled 1928 Franklin that was at the time one of the you know highest could could go faster than most other cars uh it's a it's a coupe it's a um with a rumble seat um and um one of my disappointments for for me is that people were so much smaller than I can't drive it I can't get into the seat because I'm six three but we have it out and on nice days we bring it out and park it in front of the house really and we take it in and out every night and of course during the winter it is put away for the winter can people riding it no no but it does run 1928 yeah yeah 1928 air-cooled Franklin and who maintains that uh we have someone in staff who keeps it going and uh of course it's not easy to find parts but it it runs um the distance from where we keep it at night and for the winter and up to the house it's about uh you know uh several hundred yards so it does that twice a day during the summer that's very interesting and how many people a year do you do you get visiting? That's 40,000 where we hit 40,000 this year um and we know that about half of the people who come to Hildin are in the area for the purpose of coming to Hildin um we've become a major destination for a number of reasons but one of them is the Lincoln community which is worldwide um and we are a Lincoln site we focus very much on um the the legacy of President Lincoln as did his son Robert Robert spent a lot of his life focused on his father's legacy and we do the same thing we also have um incidentally it's not a huge Lincoln collection but some really interesting Lincoln pieces um artifacts and one of the one of them we have that people love because how can you knock is this iconic uh we have one of three of Lincoln's stove pipettes still in existence and that's um right now on display in an exhibit that we've produced um a round Lincoln second inaugural it's actually a fabulous exhibit I'll have to say I'll be a modest and say that it's a really really good exhibit and that's going on right now yeah that's right now and what does that consist of um well what we're trying to do is get people to focus on the language of the second inaugural and what's going on but under we have so we have the clauses with malice towards none well that's sort of the end of it yeah we have the clauses around the room at the top and then with some artifacts or some things that help illuminate the meaning of those underneath of them um we have a bible that belonged to Lincoln we have this stovepipe hat uh we're we have a relationship with Brown University that allows us to borrow freely from Brown uh because they have one of the great Lincoln collections um and so we have some some things that came originated with Brown University that are part of the exhibit so it's really um it's a I think it's a stunning exhibit and if you really spend the time to take advantage of it and really think about what's going on with the second inaugural you realize what a remarkable speech it was I think there's a photograph of that uh that speech uh very famous photograph of that but what about photographs do you have photographs on on display um yeah there are some photos in the exhibit um we don't have photos particularly yes we do we have a few in the house but we have only what if you think about it outside of the room with the exhibit and the rest of the house we want we have one we have out things that Robert and Mary would have had out which does include some pictures of their children um but we don't do other things in the house that wouldn't have been something that Robert and Mary would have had at the time that they were there excellent now in addition to uh uh support from the historical community around the country do you have uh people who are partners or uh assistant in the running of the place corporate sponsors and things like that um well we have a corporate uh partners program um we have another with with um ins and lodges that you know sort of within a 40 mile radius or whatever um but in the grand scheme of things um we produce some of a lot of our own revenue some through admissions um some through the store um we sell the goat cheese we sell our honey we do other things like that um and in the end we have um like any organization like I killed the um major annual fund um it's going on right now I'm trying to close it out successfully and the year in the black it's always a struggle um and we do have some some businesses though that are very supportive of us excellent now tell us about volunteers do you need volunteers well sure um and we have it's a little hard to count how many volunteers we have because some of them will come for just one one thing a year um but we have about a hundred we um volunteers that and they really play a role at hill dean um they have their their job like for instance the cutting and kitchen gardens um although Andrea our horticulture sort of oversees it in the grand scheme of things all the work is done um by volunteers and they do a beautiful job with that and then everything that we produce goes to the food bank excellent this actually played a role for the hungry as we said before we thought it's amazing how fast the time goes when we talk about this and you're really a wonderful uh spokesman to this uh and one final thing I just want to cover this Nordic rental tell us what that's about oh so it's it's a little um we well let me back into that a little bit one of the things that we want the way that we want people to think about hill dean is as a place where you come and spend the day outside um with really interesting and connected things to do while you're there be at the house the Pullman car the goat dairy the dean farm now the observatory the gardens where you know and the trail systems themselves by the way we really folk we have we have um miles of trail systems that we really do a very good job both in the summer in the winter um keeping available so when people come your listeners if they are coming next summer you know where where we're a pair of sneakers you know decent sneakers and or maybe even light hiking shoes you don't you don't have to do this but it's a you it's to really take advantage of it it's a place to really spend you can it's just wonderful um to spend a lot of time both inside and outside at hill dean and in the winter it's sort of the same thing except that you do it on skis or snow shoes now we also have transportation if people you know can't do that we have we have vans that take people around to the to the goat dairy or the or the Pullman car the house whatever it is that they place they want to go but it's um so we're trying to make it a rich deep experience across the whole 412 acres year-round yeah that's wonderful I want to thank you for appearing today Seth on Positively Vermont and uh do you have a wonderful website which all of this is described quite wonderfully in some photographs and uh and you're open all year round yeah we close five days a year um three days at christmas 24th 25th 26th eastern thanksgiving open every other day year-round 9 30 to 4 30 excellent and plant if you come really try to get there early in space the place you come and spend the day or even two days excellent well thank you very much Seth and uh this is Dennis McMahon thanking you for joining Positively Vermont with our special guest today Seth Bondgaard the president of Hill Dean the Lincoln family home in Manchester Vermont thanks for watching