By VDC staff

On Sept. 29, 1875, a wood-burning locomotive named Winooski pulled four passenger cars over the newly completed railroad between White River Junction and Woodstock, beginning nearly six decades of rail service and adding another chapter to the remarkable career of Frederick Billings.

The opening came 151 years ago today. The Winooski made two round trips that first day, carrying about 500 passengers, according to an account published by the Hartford Historical Society. About 300 passengers paid $1 apiece for round-trip tickets. The date coincided with the Windsor County Fair in Woodstock.

The 13.88-mile Woodstock Railroad followed the Ottauquechee River valley, with stops that included Hartford Village, Dewey’s Mills, Quechee and Taftsville. Its construction required major engineering work, including a long cut through Stanley Hill and a bridge across Quechee Gorge.

The railroad helped connect Woodstock with the larger rail network at White River Junction, moving farm products, manufactured goods and passengers. It also helped turn Woodstock into a tourist destination. For a time, passengers leaving New York City could board a coach marked “This Car for Woodstock” and reach the Vermont village by dinner.

Behind the railroad was one of the most successful Vermonters of the 19th century.

Frederick H. Billings was born in Royalton in 1823 and moved with his family to Woodstock as a boy. He graduated from the University of Vermont in 1844, studied law and headed west during the California Gold Rush. In San Francisco he became a prominent land lawyer and businessman, handling complicated property claims left from California’s years under Mexican rule. His investments in real estate and other enterprises helped make him a millionaire while still a young man.

Billings returned to Vermont after the Civil War and made Woodstock his home. He was among the early financial backers of the Woodstock Railroad and became its president in 1883.

But the small Vermont railroad was only part of his railroad career.

Billings invested heavily in the Northern Pacific Railway, which was being built across the northern United States toward the Pacific. After the Panic of 1873 pushed the railroad into financial trouble, Billings helped reorganize and revive it. He became president of the Northern Pacific in 1879 and served until 1881, remaining on its board afterward. He was present in Montana when the railroad celebrated completion of its transcontinental line in 1883.

His name remains on the map of the American West. Billings, Montana, was named for him. His business interests there included land, banking, mining, ranching and railroads.

Billings also became an early conservationist. After returning to Woodstock, he purchased the former estate of George Perkins Marsh, the Vermont diplomat and author whose 1864 book “Man and Nature” warned about the environmental effects of deforestation and poor land management.

Billings began restoring the depleted hills around his Woodstock estate, planting trees and developing managed forests. He also established a model dairy operation with Jersey cattle and promoted better farming methods. Much of that property eventually became today’s Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park and Billings Farm & Museum.

His impact is also plainly visible in Burlington.

Billings, a UVM alumnus and former university trustee, purchased Marsh’s personal library of about 12,000 volumes in 1882 and gave it to the university. Concerned that UVM needed a safe building to house the collection, Billings financed a new library designed by famed architect Henry Hobson Richardson.

Billings Library was dedicated in 1885. The Richardsonian Romanesque building, overlooking the University Green, remains one of UVM’s best-known buildings. Although it is no longer the university’s main library, it today houses Special Collections and other academic programs.

Billings died in Woodstock in September 1890. His legacy stretched from Vermont to California and across the northern tier of the American West: lawyer, financier, railroad president, farmer, conservationist and philanthropist.

The little railroad with which he was closely associated lasted another four decades after his death. Reorganized as the Woodstock Railway in 1890, it continued carrying passengers and freight until its final train ran April 15, 1933. Parts of its old right-of-way later became U.S. Route 4, and the railroad crossing over Quechee Gorge eventually became part of today’s highway bridge.

But it was Sept. 29, 1875, when the Winooski and its passenger cars made the first scheduled runs between White River Junction and Woodstock — linking a Vermont village to the wider world and marking the beginning of a railroad closely tied to one of Vermont’s most accomplished 19th-century citizens.

Sourced from Wikipedia accounts of Frederick Billings, and a July 19, 2017 blogpost by F.H. Gillingham & Sons, whose ownership includes descendents of Frederick Billings. For a well-written and researched and highly readable biography of one of Vermont’s leading citizens of the 19th century, read Frederick Billings: A Life, by Robin Winks.