Rutland, VT
A Georgian Revival mansion in Manchester, Vermont, completed in 1905 as the summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln — Abraham and Mary Lincoln's eldest son and only child to survive to adulthood. Robert had served as Secretary of War under Garfield and Arthur, U.S. Ambassador to the UK under Benjamin Harrison, and president of the Pullman Company. The Lincoln family lived at Hildene until 1975, when Mary Lincoln Beckwith — Abraham Lincoln's last direct descendant — died there. The 412-acre estate sits on a bluff with a 100-mile view down the Vermont Valley to the Green Mountains. Inside the house: one of Lincoln's three surviving stovepipe hats (verified provenance), the family's 1908 Aeolian pipe organ (still played), the original 1908 furniture and family photographs. Robert Todd Lincoln has the strange distinction of being at or near the scene of three presidential assassinations — his father's in 1865, James Garfield's in 1881 (he arrived moments after the shooting at Sixth Street Station), and William McKinley's in 1901 (he was an invited guest at the Pan-American Exposition). After the third he reportedly stopped accepting invitations from sitting presidents.
A small Ivy League college on the Vermont border in Hanover, New Hampshire — founded 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock under a royal charter from King George III, originally intended to educate Native American boys (very few attended; the school quickly pivoted to colonial English students). The ninth-oldest U.S. institution of higher education, the smallest in the Ivy League (about 4,500 undergraduates). The Dartmouth Green — a 7-acre quadrangle bordered by the historic Baker-Berry Library, Dartmouth Hall (1791 original, reconstructed 1906 and again 1935), and the Hopkins Center for the Arts — is the geographic and ceremonial center of the campus and town simultaneously. Daniel Webster (Class of 1801) defended the college's independence before the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), establishing the contract-clause protection for private corporations against state interference — one of the most important cases in U.S. constitutional history. Other Dartmouth alumni: poet Robert Frost (briefly, 1892, before transferring), surgeon C. Everett Koop, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and journalist Mindy Kaling. The Hood Museum of Art holds one of the oldest college-museum collections in the U.S.
A 306-foot blue limestone obelisk in Bennington, Vermont — the tallest structure in the state of Vermont, completed in 1891 to commemorate the Battle of Bennington fought August 16, 1777. The battle was actually fought across the New York state line in Walloomsac, NY, but the supply depot the British wanted to capture (and didn't) was in Bennington. Brigadier General John Stark led 2,000 New Hampshire militia against a 1,200-man British/Hessian/Loyalist raiding force; the Americans lost 30 dead and captured 700 prisoners. The British defeat at Bennington — combined with the loss at Saratoga two months later — convinced France to enter the Revolutionary War on the American side, the strategic turning point of the conflict. The monument's observation platform 200 feet up gives a 360-degree view across three states (VT, NY, MA). Robert Frost is buried in the Old Bennington Cemetery at the base of the monument — his epitaph reads "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."
On October 17, 1777, British General John Burgoyne surrendered 6,000 troops to American General Horatio Gates at Saratoga, New York. It was the first major British defeat of the American Revolution. The news reached Paris in December, and on February 6, 1778, France formally entered the war as an American ally. Without French troops, French ships, and French money, the Continental Army would have lost the war. Historians call Saratoga the turning point of the Revolution. The battles actually played out across two engagements — the Battle of Freeman's Farm on September 19 and the Battle of Bemis Heights on October 7 — over a 10-square-mile stretch of farmland and forest along the Hudson River 30 miles north of Albany. Benedict Arnold (still on the American side, before his 1780 betrayal) led the decisive charge at Bemis Heights and was wounded in the leg. A boot monument on the battlefield commemorates Arnold's leg — but not Arnold himself. He is the only named American general who fought at Saratoga not honored with a personal monument. Saratoga National Historical Park preserves 3,400 acres of the battlefield. The 9-mile auto tour road links 10 interpretive stops including the Neilson House, Balcarres Redoubt, Breymann Redoubt, Hessian Camp, and the Saratoga Monument (a 155-foot granite obelisk near Schuylerville commemorating the surrender). Saratoga Springs, 12 miles W of the battlefield, is the spa town. Sixteen mineral springs bubble up from the carbonate-rich aquifer beneath the village. The Iroquois drank the water; rich New Yorkers built bathhouses here in the early 1800s; by the Gilded Age Saratoga was the most fashionable summer resort in the East. The Adelphi Hotel (1877) on Broadway is the last surviving Victorian grand hotel. Saratoga Race Course opened in August 1863, six weeks after Gettysburg — the oldest organized sporting venue in continuous operation in the United States. The Travers Stakes, run annually since 1864, is North America's oldest major stakes race. Six weeks of racing each summer (mid-July through Labor Day) draw 50,000+ to the track on weekends. Yaddo, the literary artists' colony founded 1900, sits across the road from the racetrack; Truman Capote wrote "Other Voices, Other Rooms" there, Sylvia Plath worked on her novel, and Saul Bellow, Carson McCullers, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Philip Roth all spent residencies there.