A view that did not exist 150 years ago: Mount Tom’s South Peak in Vermont

The view from South Peak on Mount Tom, in Vermont's Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, is one of sweeping, rounded, forest-covered hills fading into the distance. According to a National Park Service profile of a park employee's favorite view, it is not what anyone would have seen 150 years ago. The story behind it is the story of the park's namesake.

Image from the National Park Service's page: a present-day view over a town and forested hills.

A hillside without trees

George Perkins Marsh, the conservationist and environmental writer the park is named for, was born in Woodstock, Vermont, in 1801. As a youth, looking over the hills from here, he may have seen a view much like today's. By his mid-40s most of the trees were gone, in large part because of "merino mania," a sheep-wool craze that swept the state, and also because of large-scale logging. By the mid-to-late 1800s about 80 percent of Vermont had been deforested.

Image from the National Park Service's page: a black-and-white photograph of a town in a valley with very few trees.

Marsh saw the damage this did: more flooding and erosion, degraded fish and wildlife habitat, even changes to the local climate. His experience led to a speech in Rutland, Vermont, in 1847, in which, the profile says, he was one of the earliest voices to call out human-induced climate change. The profile's favorite line from it:

"But though man cannot at his pleasure command the rain and the sunshine, the wind and frost and snow... it is certain that climate itself has in many instances been gradually changed and ameliorated or deteriorated by human action."

Image from the National Park Service's page: a full moon rises over rolling hills in fall colors.

Getting to the view

The panoramic view of Woodstock from South Peak can be reached several ways: gentle-grade carriage roads, open only to hikers and horseback riders, or steep, switchback-laden trails. Each has its own character. The park's hiking trails page has more.

The profile is part of the Park Service's "Enjoy the View Like Us" series, in which employees share their favorite park views. The employee here calls the hike to the view high on a self-made effort-to-reward scale.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Enjoy the View Like Us" series, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park profile (nps.gov article); the 1847 quotation is from George Perkins Marsh's Rutland speech; rewritten in hubnx's own words.