Tucked into 1,400 acres along the southeast shore of Lake Champlain, framed by the Adirondack Mountains to the west and the Green Mountains to the east, Vermont’s Shelburne Farms has always been about far more than farming. From its inception during the Gilded Age, the property has been intended as an ambitious campus for learning—though exactly what that means has evolved over its lifetime in fascinating ways.

When Manhattanites Lila and Seward Webb—she a granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and he a prominent physician-turned-railroad-magnate—broke ground on their Vermont country estate in the 1880s, their goal was to create a top-flight agricultural research center where cutting-edge practices could be tested and disseminated around the world. They spared no expense bringing their vision to life, hiring New York City architect Robert H. Robertson to spearhead the design of 36 buildings and Frederick Law Olmsted to plan the undulating landscape. The magnificent Farm Barn—a five-story structure of stone, shingles, and half timbers that wrapped around an almost two-acre courtyard—served as the estate’s hub and heart.

Fast-forward to 1970, when Lila and Seward’s descendants, faced with mounting costs and shrinking funds for running the still-functioning (if much-diminished) farm, made the decision to convert the whole endeavor into an educational, eco-conscious nonprofit. It was a radical idea at the time, informed by the era’s social and cultural urgencies, coming on the heels of the civil rights movement, in the midst of the Vietnam War, and in tandem with the founding of both the EPA and Earth Day. There was a general sense in the country’s zeitgeist that we could do better, we had to do better. In that spirit, the fledgling nonprofit set up shop in the Farm Barn and never looked back.

At first, Shelburne Farms centered its programming around kids, organizing farm-based summer camps, teen-leadership workshops, and visits for school groups. It also pushed its agricultural work more pointedly toward sustainability: By the 1980s, it had embraced grass-fed livestock practices and the then-nascent farm-to-table ethos, sourcing everything for its restaurant from either the farm itself or from nearby foragers and producers. In 2006, Shelburne Farms was the first in Vermont to earn the designation of Certified Humane Farm.

Today, that core mission continues to deepen and mature, expanding beyond its original parameters while staying true to the conviction that education is a lever for change, working annually with more than 1,500 teachers and instructors at all levels. “Shelburne Farms is a place where people can connect with the land and with one other,” explains chief advancement officer Robin Turnau. “Even if educators aren’t in our specific community, we can help them connect their students with their community, so that the kids feel empowered to make decisions and changes in their own backyards.” Recently, it partnered with the nearby University of Vermont to offer a Master’s Certificate in Education for Sustainability, an innovative program that brings together staff from both institutions with educators from around the world.

The four seasons are a very real thing in Vermont, and in some regards, Shelburne Farms hews to that rhythm. The farm is open to the public from mid-May through the end of October, during which time it teems with activities. On any given day, the roster might include a draft horse–driving demonstration, a guided hike to gather weeds for nettle pesto, or a tour of the farm’s award-winning cheese-making operation (the nonprofit turns out an impressive 170,000 pounds of first-rate cheddars each year). A much-loved children’s area provides opportunities to milk cows, groom Angora rabbits, and play with goats.

In addition, the grounds contain two sets of gardens. The Market Garden (once the site of greenhouses where Lila overwintered her bay trees and roses) is a seven-acre network of hoop houses and open beds that generates the farm’s abundant organic vegetable and fruit crops. Thoughtfully laid out as a kind of living classroom, it’s the site of lively, hands-in-the-dirt workshops and sessions during the summer months. The Formal Gardens are a series of gentle, lushly planted Italianate terraces that descend to a dramatic lakefront lily pond, and which Lila is credited with having largely designed. The immense turreted Farm Barn has been the nerve center of the property throughout its history.

Over the decades, the Shelburne Farms team has also been reinventing and restoring the historic buildings on the estate. In the 1980s, they turned their attention to Lila and Seward’s rambling former residence, Shelburne House, using a 1915 soup-to-nuts inventory handwritten by Lila herself as an abiding guiding light. In 1987, it debuted as the Shelburne Farms Inn, and despite being a National Historic Landmark—about 80 percent of its furnishings are original to the house—it is decidedly not a museum. “The inn is meant to be experienced and lived in,” says Julie Eldridge Edwards, curator of collections. “We want guests to feel the pomp and grandeur of the home, but also feel how, given the Webbs’ milieu, it was also very relaxed and low-key.”

Guests eat meals in the same room as the Webbs once did, surrounded by the same French-silk damask wallpaper and Vermont-sourced marble floors. In the library, guests noodle over puzzles and leaf through books amid shelves that retain their 19th-century paint and gilding and groan with the Webbs’ volumes. Each of the 24 guest rooms is individually decorated and bears the hallmarks of its previous life: The Louis XVI room contains a suite of Schultz, Dowling & Butler furniture and oil portraits by American fin-de-siècle artist Mariette Cotton, a Webb family friend, while the Dutch Room still has its enchanting fire surround of tin-glazed tiles.

Designed to have all the mod cons of 1890s America, the building was wired for electricity and fitted for indoor plumbing, but no longer has its original coal-fired furnaces: They were removed during World War II and never replaced. As such, the inn, too, operates on Shelburne Farms’ seasonal schedule: Come November, the shades are drawn, the furniture covered with cloths, and the inn goes dormant until May.

But the real work at Shelburne Farms—using education as a powerful catalyst for a better future, and harnessing this singular place to incite lasting change in the wider world—never stops.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN VOLUME 13 OF FREDERIC MAGAZINE. CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE!