snake man and welcome to positively vermont and today my special guest is seth bond guards the president of hill dean the lincoln family home in manchester positively want well thanks for having me tell us a little bit about yourself first ah well you see i'm a i was born in vermont lived my whole life in vermont i like you practiced law for a number of years and  the history of the history well that could that could be the whole show so i could do very quickly robert lincoln was the only child of the four lincoln two of them to survive to adulthood he went on to lead a very interesting life in his own right served four years as minister said minister of war and was now secretary of defense and he served as four years to minister to england and along the way one was a lawyer and the 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 we really made his money and that was really the bulk of his career was with the polling company and law partner who had a summer house in manchester so that completely secured his fruit but himself back in manchester you know fifteen twenty years later and eventually he liked it there and purchased land and built a house that is now that the home on well when the robert's granddaughter peggy who was the last one to live there died in one thousand and seventy five  some people in town got together so that's a real story but got together and raised the money to buy the property because they wanted to preserve it they recognize the value to that to the state actually to the nation actually hand robert and his wife mary harlan lincoln could have easily built that newport they were sort of you know they were those of those who were contemporaries robert had made in the middle out of money and robert robert they could have so they could have had a grandiose house were built for entertaining and what this really isn't one of the things that people comment on frequently when they come to feel dean is they say i could live here so it's comfortable it's a home it has its elements of you and what is it like today where 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 don't have the original versions they just don't have the same feel one of things that's very special about l d n is that it's in the way that we have it a stab wished as it relates to the house is that it's sort of like you're visiting the house while robert and mary  basements that we are working to we're we're nearing the point that we're going to open out as well and with the washroom ice room wide room cold room it's really kind of fascinating but we haven't quite gotten the point that that's open to the public yet that's coming but the first house but then it has a system that sends messages from either the key 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 s coulter and we it's a long story but we got her to come build team and she's been she takes her leads the crew that takes care of the gardens and we have a the family's cutting kitchen gardens which are behind the walk the way through october so i go up there in the beginning of october and the gardens are gorgeous it's so it's really it's kind of remarkable because different things come into bloom of different points of the year it's great what about the carriage gone you know the museum store is and there's a little theater space so that where people can see videos to get into the hill dean as they come in they begin their day there but the it's just it's gorgeous and tells that is agricultural 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 we're 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 ageing room and it's all set up for guest to come through and we have a lot of kids with a lot of kids programs around that will run a lot of 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 h like a train station and go into the car oh yeah you can go in the car and it's an just it's was a meticulous restoration that took four years i think the last time you were here we talk about that now it was almost four years ago educational program which is 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 gas out across the entire property you know twenty years ago or whatever the it was mainly about the house and you know the house of stills the centerpiece to it quite a remarkable remarkable thing but we're now we've worked since we got there to expand and have the whole we take the fleece and produce yarn and sheep and an heirloom variety of vermont heritage breed of cattle randall so there's only about something like seven hundred fifty or a hundred of them so we're we're getting we're going to be involved in that in the restoration of the gene pool for rental cattle in addition to a museum it's a working farm we have yet again it's sort of two weeks 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 express all that's a large part of it but also to education with you know we have three thousand elementary school kids come to hill dean every year and lessons with their teachers for really rich programs in natural science and i go culture and hands on history and then we have a program with a local high school down at the second farm where we also have a  fabulous teaching greenhouse will we have kids come because it's close enough that there's a full time teacher at old dean around and kids come for classes down at the dean form but it's not we're not trying to produce farmers usually about agricultural natural science plants soil science so we get the entire range of kids involved in that so it's really it's really up in a guest can sort of get a feel for all of that when they're 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 really in this mix the whole thing deep and rich tell us about this  their robert was a very good amateur astronomer and so he built an observatory and of course robert could afford to have quite 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 in the find the right person to help us not to be on staff as an astronomer but but it's open you are on the hill roughly speaking half the property and the dean sort of the old english or gaelic for valley was stream is three hundred feet below it's all connected we get people back and forth as ways to do it but so it's hill and weapon and within that we have a six hundred foot floating boardwalk that goes from point to point that is really remarkable because you're really literally right out almost a water  level in the middle of a wetland it's an express which you don't get it's very peaceful on the one hand you really get to see things which you don't otherwise get to see and thel us about some of the other try to do is within the store the museum store is make sure that anything that we're selling it relates to relates directly to things are going to be in but you don't want to have a lot of great from on food product  vermont product now it's a very interesting website and it's beautifully done and has it's amazing what's there and just to get into it in fact it took me a while just even just get some cursory preparation of it and i commended two to our viewers and one of the things that i found unusual was this roadster you have there oh yeah so robert and mary harlan lincoln had three children one of whom the youngest was jesse and she i guess and one of the things she liked fast cars she had an air cooled people are so much smaller than i can't drive i can't get into the seat because i'm six three but we have it out in a nice space we bring it out and park it in front of the house and we take it in a matter of reunite of course during the winter weight is put away for the water and it runs the distance from where we keep it at night in for the winter up to the house it's about you know several hundred yards so does that twice a day during summer that's very interesting and how many people you do you  t forty thousand well we had forty thousand to share and we know that about half of the people who come to heel dean are in the area for the purpose of coming to build team we've become a major destination for a number of reasons but one of them is that we can community which is world wide and we are a link in sight we focus very much on the the legacy of president lincoln has that his son robert robert spent a lot of his life focused on his father's legacy and we do the same thing well so have incidentally it's not a huge we can collection but to put some really interesting we can pieces in clark are facts and one is get people to focus on the language of the second inaugural and what's going on but under we have the causes with malice toward none well that's sort of the end of it yeah we have the clauses of around the room at the top there with some artifacts  some things that help illuminates the meaning of those underneath of them we have a bible that belonged to lincoln we have a still pipe pat we have a relationship with brown university that allows us to borrow freely from brown because they have one of the great lincoln collections and so we have some some things that came originated with brown university that are part of the exhibit so it's really it's a i think it's a stunning exhibit and if you really spend the time to take advantage of plane yeah there are some photos in the exhibit 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 the children but we don't do other things in the house that wouldn't have been something robert murray would have had the  but in the grand scheme of things we produce some of a lot of our own revenue some through admissions some through the store we sell the goat cheese we sell or honey we do so it's a little we well let me back into that a little bit one of the things that we want the way that we want people think about hill beam is as a place where you come and spend the day  outside with really interesting and connected things to do while you're there be at the house the pullman car the go terry the dean farm now the observatory the gardens were you know and the trail systems themselves by the way really ckers you know decent sneakers and or maybe even light hiking shoes they don't you know have to do this but it's you it's to really take advantage of it it's a place to really spend you can it's just wonderful to spend a lot of time both inside and outside and he'll be in the winter it's sort of the same thing except that you do it on skis or snowshoes me that we also have transportation of people you know can't do that we have we have vans that take people around to the to the go to area to the point car the house whatever it is that that place they want to go but it's this is dennis mcmahon thanking you for joining positively vermont with our special guest today seth bombards the president of he'll be in the lincoln family home in manchester vermont thanks for watching