Shelburne Farms

Completed in 1899 for William Seward Webb (1851-1926) and his wife Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt (1860-1936). Webb was the "most lavish entertainer in the Vanderbilt family" and their 44,000-square foot Queen Anne-style summer home on Lake Champlain sat on one of the largest country estates in America, "a village in itself" second only to Biltmore. Outbuildings totalling 75,000-square feet were dedicated to breeding and training a variety of nearly 300-horses horses (notably Hackneys) and the dairy herd here supplied all the butter for every dining car on the Vanderbilt's New York Central Railroad while the game preserve required a team of keepers and beaters who were paid three times as much as they might have been on any English or Scottish sporting estate. Open to the public today, it remains one of the best preserved model farms of the Gilded Age....