Windsor, Vermont: Paradise Park brochure

A one-sheet brochure featuring Paradise Park in Windsor, Vermont. From the brochure: "Windsor found generous benefactors and active citizens in lawyer and statesman William Maxwell Evarts (1818-1901) and his descendents. The family’s early historic preservation efforts, large-scale landscape design projects, and support of industry and culture had a profound influence on the way Windsor looks today. Evarts, who served as attorney general for President Andrew Johnson, secretary of state for President Rutherford Hayes, and as United States senator for New York, began to create a summer retreat for his family in 1846 on several estates and land within the village of Windsor. By 1857 he and his wife, Helen Wardner Evarts, a Windsor native, owned 1,000 acres. The estate included many fine homes on the north end of Main Street, forest, and farmland in both Windsor and Cornish, New Hampshire. In the mid 1800s the part of the estate stretching west of Main Street, visible behind the Old Constitution House, was called “Paradise” for the beauty of its white pine forest. The land contained a low swamp traversed by the winding Pulk Hole Brook. In 1884 the family constructed a granite and earthen dam across the brook to create 63-acre Lake Runnemede, used for swimming, boating, and fishing. Several of William Evarts’s 12 children made significant contributions to the town. Maxwell Evarts financed the Windsor Machine Company, an important industry in the early 1900s. Judge Sherman Evarts was instrumental in saving the Old Constitution House from demolition, moving it onto the Evarts estate in 1914, where it is now a state-owned historic museum. The 119-acre Paradise Park and Lake Runnemede, important both for recreation and as a natural habitat, are under a conservation easement and now owned by the town of Windsor for public use. A trail behind the Old Constitution House leads to the dam and park trails." Funding for this item was provided in part through a 2007 Preserve America grant to the Town of Windsor, Vermont (grant number 50-07-PA-3038) for the project Welcome to Windsor. The grant was administered by the State, Tribal, and Local Plans and Grants Division, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. Preserve America is a federal initiative that encourages and supports community efforts to preserve and enjoy our priceless cultural and natural heritage. The goals of the program include a greater shared knowledge about the nation's past, strengthened regional identities and local pride, increased local participation in preserving the country's cultural and natural heritage assets, and support for the economic vitality of our communities.

Windsor, Vermont: Paradise Park brochure

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