James Madison's Montpelier We The People Fall 2017 WTP_fall 2017_FINAL-rgb | Page 9

FALL 2017
From a young age, Montpelier President & CEO
Kat Imhoff has had a genuine interest in the
natural world. With a background in environmental
planning that has led her to some of the most
expansive parts of our country, including The Nature
Conservancy in Montana, Imhoff reflects that early
in her professional career it was “always about the
wild places and wild things.”
She could never shake,
however, another one of her
lifelong interests: history. She
often found herself “fascinated
by man’s impact on the
landscape and the traces that
people have left,” so much so
that her father affectionately
called her “the woman who
cried over old things.”
best of both.” The plantation is home to structures
spanning hundreds of years, and more than eight
miles of natural trails, matching Imhoff ’s interest
in Madison and history with her expertise in land
conservation. “Nowadays I have found that if you
just try to save wild places for wild things alone, that
doesn’t always resonate in people’s minds,” Imhoff
explains, “but when you’re
saving places because they
define us as human beings
and the reason we want to
save these places is our story
and our place in them, it has a
greater resonance.”
The story of conserving the
grounds of James Madison’s
Montpelier is one that spans
centuries, beginning with
At Montpelier, Imhoff
Madison himself looking
has merged her two great
at his plantation and trying
interests to make the 2,650-
to figure out how make it
acre plantation a place where
sustainable. He bemoaned
“
[
Madison]
was,
in
his
own
right,
a
visitors can simultaneously
man’s frivolous destruction of
experience history and the
very early thinker in what we would trees in particular, favoring,
unencumbered natural world.
was his nature, a much
now call the conservation movement.” as
“I was always interested
more pragmatic approach,
—Kat Imhoff, Montpelier President & CEO stating that “of all the errors
in freedom of religion,
and knew of [Madison’s]
in our rural economy, none
thinking around that. But I
is perhaps, so much to be
had no concept of Madison
regretted, because none so
as a farmer, with Jefferson
difficult to be repaired, as
even calling him the ‘best
the injudicious and excessive
farmer in America.’ This
destruction of timber and
other part of him wasn’t
firewood.” This ethic has been
really on my radar until I
carried forward by Imhoff
got to Montpelier. He was,
with a unique “urgency
in his own right, a very early
because I have seen the loss
thinker in what we would
of open space accelerate
now call the conservation
everywhere through my
movement.”
career.” At present, there
are over 700 acres currently
For Imhoff, “conservation”
protected under four
and “preservation,” though
permanent historical and conservation easements,
different, are two sides of the same coin. “These
each with a specific purpose.
terms are hard to separate, and are often confused,”
she says. “Typically conservation has meant the
Montpelier has also employed “adaptive reuse”
land and the wild things, and preservation has
for many buildings on site, transforming and
been man’s traces and man’s creations on the
updating existing structures for modern-day uses.
landscape,” she explains. “Montpelier re presents the What was once a dog kennel is now a comfortable
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