Vermont a la Vanderbilt

	Bucolic Barony Awaits
	Photo: Marshall Webb

If you want to leaf peep in New England this season while knocking around the house like a Vanderbilt, there is unfortunately only one way.

Luckily, it works equally well if you go as a couple or with the entire family. Best of all, intrepid correspondent that I am, I sampled -- for the sake of good journalism only, of course -- a weekend both ways.

The Vanderbilt house in question is on the grounds of northern Vermont's Shelburne Farms, a 1,400 acre expanse perched alongside Lake Champlain and, as if one weren't scenic enough, nested between two mountain ranges: the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains.

The estate was started as a summer getaway and experimental farm by the Vanderbilt family in the late 1800s. Dr. William Seward Webb, who made his big money the old fashioned way -- he married it -- used Lila Vanderbilt's riches to build a rambling 25-room mansion. He also started a state-of-the-art farm, which was designed, along with several big-ticket barns and other buildings, to discover, refine and showcase the very best in modern farming methods.

As is sometimes the case when men with grand plans use someone else's money to implement them, it did not take too many years for the property to start running into financial trouble.

By the early 1970s, the Vanderbilt family came up with a plan to transform the estate into an educational farm, and their palatial home eventually became an inn. ...