The special partnership that preserved Bread Loaf for the ages.
In 1915, when Joseph Battell died and willed his expanse of lands along the spine of the Green Mountains to Middlebury College, he included a proviso that the College “preserve as far as reasonably may be the forests of said park, and neither to cut nor permit to be cut thereon any trees whatsoever except such as are dead or down and such as it may be necessary to cut in making and repairing needful roads; it being a principal object of this [will] to preserve intact such wild lands as a specimen of the original Vermont forest.”
Which seems fairly conclusive. Except that in the 1930s, with the College facing a financial crisis, its trustees sold off 90 percent of the land that Battell had left it.
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For more than 50 years, Bread Loaf and its 2,100 acres of forest and mountain meadow—the remaining 10 percent of Battell’s original bequest—had remained a changeless place, echoing with Robert Frost’s Yankee accent. Down in the valley, Middlebury’s main campus had spent the better part of the half-century undergoing a massive building boom, yet the Ripton domain was a bit of an afterthought for trustees and administrators until, in 1997, an Environmental Studies class devoted much of a semester to studying Battell’s will.
The buyer of the land in the 1930s sale was the U.S. Forest Service, and the real estate had become the core of the northern portion of the Green Mountain National Forest—one of whose chief goals is growing trees so that they may be cut. Over time the Forest Service, at least in Vermont, has developed a more sustainable outlook, yet the students looking at the will felt real pause: What might the College do with Bread Loaf if it hit financial trouble again? Condos?
These students met with the Board of Trustees, who, while respectful of their research and recommendation that the College never sell the remaining land, took the position that they couldn’t “tie the hands” of future trustees. “They said nice things about the student presentation, but they also said: ‘Look at what happened in the Depression,’” recalls a participant in the discussion. “‘How can we take out of our successors’ hands the ability to monetize those lands?’”
That participant was the provost at the time, and while he, too, was impressed with the students’ presentation, he was preoccupied with other matters. But, he says, “I kept that in my back pocket,” and when Ron Liebowitz was named president in 2004, he scheduled his first meeting of the trustee’s Prudential Committee up at Bread Loaf. “They asked me, ‘What would be your dream for the next 10 years?’ And I think I shocked them when I said, ‘Preserving Bread Loaf.’ The wealthiest person in the room said, ‘What would it cost?’ And I said, ‘I have no idea.’”
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If the prototypical Vermonter is Calvin Coolidge—so taciturn they called him Silent Cal—then outgoing Middlebury President Ron Liebowitz is pretty much the polar opposite. The first thing one notices about him, even before his relentless intelligence, is the relentless speed with which he converses. Faster than anyone I’ve ever met, a subway-train rush of words. His Brooklyn birthplace and his Jersey upbringing shine through even after 31 years in the Green Mountains. You think: city boy.
And yet those three decades in Vermont have worked their particular magic. His parting gift to the College, spurred by a deep love for the landscape, is remarkable: finding the funds to preserve forever the thousands of acres in the Bread Loaf landscape. Liebowitz will rightly be remembered as the man who brought the College through financial crisis and broadened its reach to the shores of the Pacific, but his legacy is perhaps most secure in the tens of thousands of birch and beech and maple, the red pine and green grass, the unbroken vistas that will stay unbroken. In thousands of Ripton acres where, most of the time, no one ever says a word, and certainly not fast.
On a chill March day, towards the tail end of the finest winter in years, I walked with Liebowitz through the woods east of the Bread Loaf Inn. There was still two feet of snow on the ground, so we were on snowshoes, and he reminisced about his first glimpse of this land. After his undergraduate years at Bucknell, Liebowitz went to graduate school at Columbia, a budding Sovietologist. But his Russian was weak, so his professors dispatched him to Middlebury for a summer of language school. He was three weeks in, which he said was going “gruesomely,” when a friend called and, speaking forbidden English, convinced him to take a weekend trip. “He whisked me away to Bread Loaf—that was the first time. This was 1982, and there was a real heat wave down in the valley. I was suffocating from language school, and from the weather. But then we were suddenly on Rte. 125, climbing up this tiny road. Halfway up the temperature dropped 12 degrees; suddenly it was almost chilly. By the time we got up to Bread Loaf—well, I never forgot it. Immediately it was an important part of my own conception of Middlebury.”
So, while the trustees may have been surprised by Liebowitz’s 10-year dream, it was in keeping with his longer view of the place. Work to evaluate the property began but like everything else, this took a back seat to surviving the financial crisis that soon broke out. “I mean, the endowment went from $962 million to $649 million,” says Liebowitz (figures that seem etched in his mind). But as the ship slowly righted itself, he began to pursue the project more actively, engaging a trustee, a hedge fund magnate who had already won plaudits from conservationists for preserving large tracts of land on Long Island Sound, Colorado, and the Outer Banks.
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A couple of years ago, Louis Bacon ’79 received one of the highest honors in conservation, recognition from the Audubon Society for all that he has done to “preserve and protect key natural ecosystems.” Accepting the Audubon Medal, he gave a speech at a gala in New York in which he talked about how important his Middlebury education—and the sense of place that came with it—had been to his development. He spoke of taking courses in environmental studies; of spending a lot of time outdoors, hunting, fishing, and skiing; of majoring in American literature and channeling Ernest Hemingway. It was an idyllic time, he said.
“That was a fat, juicy pitch right there,” says Liebowitz, who was in attendance that night. “And so from then on I got to be really direct, quoting his words at him. I kept telling him this was logical and he was the guy.”
“Ron is persuasive, and I think he knows a donor’s soft spot,” says Bacon, who fondly recalls a deer hunt at Bread Loaf one Thanksgiving when he couldn’t make the trip home to North Carolina. (He’d shot, gutted, and hid his prize in the snow, till the next day when Ripton resident and beloved professor Horace Beck helped him drag it out.) “Otherwise, I remember cross-country skiing on the trails in the afternoons after swishing down the Snow Bowl, trying to keep up with my much more practiced Finnish girlfriend. I had learned to ski cross country on the flats of the Middlebury campus, and I was not prepared for the downhill parts of the hills behind the Bread Loaf campus; I remember the terror of speeding along towards the creek bed on two skinny, unstable reeds to which the toe of my shoe was fixed, my ankle in the balance. Swearing if I survived I would never do this again, I was nonetheless at it again and again.”
Bacon—who says he initially reacted in “disbelief” at the thought that the trustees could ever contemplate selling off the lands—funded four or five researchers to scour the property. The College’s forest ecologist, Marc Lapin ’83, coordinated student research on the flora and fauna; Middlebury’s chief philanthropic adviser, Mike Schoenfeld ’73, helped pull the efforts into a package that eventually spurred “an eight-figure gift” from Bacon. In effect, he’d bought the development rights from the trustees and placed them off-limits; they’d monetized the land, and he’d paid the money, extinguishing those rights. And with that the Bread Loaf lands were secure. In a sense Bacon had made good on Battell’s intention, with Liebowitz as the proud midwife.
“I think it’s crucial to Middlebury, absolutely crucial,” says Liebowitz. “This is a microcosm of Middlebury, but in some ways it’s the place where you feel the connection to our past most deeply.” What makes the sentiment remarkable is that, viewed from a distance, the Liebowitz years have been about expanding Middlebury ever further out: the acquisition of Monterey, the spread of the Schools Abroad, the expansion of the Language Schools.
“But with all that expansion one thing remains constant,” he says. “From September to May we’re always and only about undergraduate education, and that’s centered here in Vermont.
“And undergraduate education, in a lot of ways, is about contemplation. You can have a graduate education anywhere. But we needed to retain the core of who we are, and that’s why this Vermont piece is so important,” Liebowitz says.
Bacon speaks in much the same terms: the landscape provides a “combination and closeness of nature and scholastics” especially valuable “in this day of the rush of modernity and electronic devices, because it allows one to ponder larger questions undistracted.”
Bread Loaf is contemplation defined—Ripton’s population today is about 500, or the same as the town of Middlebury when the College was founded. “To lose this would take away a large, symbolic piece of Middlebury’s identity,” says Liebowitz. “I’m not an outdoors person, but I am a geographer; that’s why it’s so easy for me to see that our location has been so central to our success.”
Has been, and will be. For perpetuity, as they say in wills.