Hildene, the Lincoln family's summer home above the Battenkill
Photographs: Jonathan Ralton, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Justjoshfunk111, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Miguel Hermoso Cuesta, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Southern Vermont · landmark 11 of 15
Robert Todd Lincoln, the only one of Abraham Lincoln's sons to reach adulthood, built a Georgian Revival summer house in Manchester in 1905, with a formal garden laid out like a stained glass window.
- The houseA Georgian Revival mansion completed in 1905, furnished almost entirely with Lincoln family pieces.
- The formal gardenPlanted in 1907 in the pattern of a cathedral window, with more than a thousand peonies.
- The pipe organAn Æolian organ installed in 1908 and restored by the Friends of Hildene in 1980.
- The Pullman car SunbeamA 1903 wooden palace car, restored and brought to the estate in 2011.
- Hildene FarmThe Rowland Agricultural Center, with Nubian goats and a cheese-making facility.
Why it matters
Hildene, the Lincoln Family Home, was the summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln and his wife Mary Harlan Lincoln, at 1005 Hildene Road in Manchester Center. The name comes from old English words for hill and valley with a stream. The house, completed in 1905 in the Georgian Revival style, stands on a 300-foot promontory overlooking the Battenkill Valley, on an estate of 412 acres, about half of it in meadows and wetlands on the valley floor.
It is one of the few places in the country that tells the story of Abraham Lincoln's descendants rather than of Lincoln himself, and it is a short drive from the village of Manchester.
Robert Todd Lincoln
Robert was born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1843, the eldest of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln's four sons and the only one of the four to live past eighteen. He graduated from Harvard, served on General Grant's staff as a captain in the closing days of the Civil War, and built a successful law practice in Chicago representing corporate clients. He was Secretary of War under Presidents Garfield and Arthur from 1881 to 1885 and minister to Great Britain from 1889 to 1893.
He had three younger brothers, Edward, William and Tad, and was named for his maternal grandfather, Robert Smith Todd. After the war he married Mary Eunice Harlan, and the couple had three children. Some commentators think Robert had a distant relationship with his father, who spent months at a time away on the judicial circuit during his boyhood.
He became general counsel of the Pullman Company and, after its founder died in 1897, its president. He retired as president in 1911 and served as chairman of the board until 1924. He was often spoken of as a possible candidate for national office, but never took steps to run. In his later years he lived in Washington and in Manchester, and in 1922 he took part in the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial.
How the Lincolns came to Manchester
Robert first came to Manchester Center in the summer of 1863, at the age of twenty, when he, his brother Tad and their mother stayed at the nearby Equinox House to escape the heat of Washington. The family returned in later years, and he built Hildene on the hill above the village in 1905.
Descendants of the Lincoln family lived at Hildene until 1975, when Mary Lincoln Beckwith, the granddaughter of Robert and Mary and the next to last descendant of the Lincoln-Harlan family, died there. In 1978 a non-profit organization, the Friends of Hildene, bought the property and began restoring the house, the outbuildings and the gardens. The Manchester home was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.
The house and its furnishings
Hildene is furnished almost entirely with Lincoln family furniture and holds artifacts that belonged to Robert Todd Lincoln and to his parents. In 1908 an Æolian pipe organ was installed in the house, and the Friends of Hildene restored it in 1980. The rooms are shown as a family house of the early twentieth century rather than as a museum of the presidency, and the organ is one of the details that make the point.
The garden and the farm
A formal garden in the form of a cathedral's stained glass window was planted in 1907. Privet hedges draw the pattern of the window, and mixed borders of annual and perennial flowers fill it with color, the multicolored stained glass. The garden is especially noted for its collection of more than a thousand herbaceous peonies.
In 2008 the Rowland Agricultural Center at Hildene Farm opened to the public, with a herd of Nubian goats and a cheese-making facility. In the summer of 2011 the restored 1903 wooden Pullman palace car Sunbeam came to the estate. It was built during Lincoln's years as president of the Pullman Company.
Around Manchester
Manchester is a town of about 4,500 people and one of two shire towns of Bennington County. It was one of several towns chartered in 1761 by Benning Wentworth, the colonial governor of New Hampshire, who named it for Robert Montagu, third Duke of Manchester, hoping the aristocrat might take a patron's interest. It was first settled in 1764 and laid out in 1784. The land suited grazing better than farming, and by 1839 about 6,000 sheep roamed its pastures.
Iron mines, marble quarries, mills and lumber companies followed. The arrival of the railroad brought tourists, drawn by the architecture and the setting among mountains, and after the Civil War the town developed into an affluent resort area, which it remains. Manchester lies between the Green Mountains to the east and the Taconic Range to the west. Equinox Mountain, the highest summit in the Taconics at 3,850 feet, is in the western part of town, and the Lye Brook Falls Hiking Trail leads to one of the highest waterfalls in Vermont. The town has three state-recognized historic districts, the Depot district, Bonnet Street and Main Street, and the Southern Vermont Arts Center stands at the foot of Mount Equinox.
Planning a visit
For the area's history of battle and tavern politics, see the Bennington Battle Monument, and for the ridge above, the Long Trail and Killington. Hildene sets its own pace: plan on a half day for the house and the garden, and check the Friends of Hildene's own information for seasonal arrangements before traveling.
