Upper Valley Connections

Your weekly guide to life along the Connecticut River

Welcome to the very first Thursday Digest from Upper Valley Connections. Every week we’ll round up the best events happening in our corner of New Hampshire and Vermont, plus a bit of local history to make your Thursday morning a little richer. We’re just getting started — and we’re glad you’re here.

The Man Who Taught America to Care for the Land

This Sunday marks the 225th birthday of George Perkins Marsh, born in Woodstock, Vermont in 1801. Growing up in the Upper Valley, Marsh watched firsthand as forests were cleared and hillsides eroded — observations that would stay with him for life. After graduating from Dartmouth College with highest honors, he went on to serve in Congress and as a U.S. diplomat abroad. But his most lasting contribution was a book: Man and Nature, published in 1864, which argued that humans were degrading the natural world and that we had a responsibility to restore it. Many consider it the founding text of the American conservation movement — and it began right here, in the hills above the Connecticut River. His boyhood home in Woodstock is now part of the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, Vermont’s only national park.

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