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Profiles in Giving: The Ketchums Give Back

 

The Oak Log: Autumn 2007 

Download a copy of the Autumn 2007 issue of The Oak Log (PDF, ~1MB).

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The Oak Log / Autumn 2007

Few people have a longer connection to the Mount Equinox forest at Manchester’s Southern Vermont Arts Center (SVAC) than Richard Ketchum. As SVAC’s first director, Ketchum carried out the purchase of the 407 acres of land and facilities that became the permanent home for the arts complex in the 1950s. In the late 1980s, Ketchum joined The Nature Conservancy’s board, eventually becoming chair. Ketchum is delighted to see SVAC and the Conservancy working together to protect the 312 acres of mountainside forestland behind the Wilson museum.

A world-renowned historian, Richard Ketchum has published 15 books, including Victory at Yorktown: the Campaign that Won the Revolution. After studying history at Yale University, he commanded a World War II subchaser in the South Atlantic. Ketchum later served as an editor at the American Heritage Publishing Co., receiving a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his editing of American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War. In 1974, he co-published the magazine, Country Journal, which grew to a circulation of 350,000.

He and his wife, Barbara, moved to Vermont in 1964, purchasing Saddleback Farm in Dorset where they raised cattle and sheep. They later conserved their farm by donating conservation easements to the Vermont Land Trust and The Nature Conservancy.

The Ketchums established a Charitable Remainder Trust, designated in part to The Nature Conservancy, to help protect Vermont’s natural heritage. “During our lifetimes, we aren’t able to contribute as much as we’d like, but we will ‘on departure’.”

To learn about Charitable Remainder Trusts, please contact Trevor Law at (802) 229-4425 ext. 105.

Return to Autumn 2007 Contents Page

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Oak Log Cover Design: The Laughing Bear Associates; Cover Photos © Sarah Wakefield/The Nature Conservancy (Pitcher plants and visitors to Morristown Bog).