A Celebration of Life for Marshall was held on October 29, 2022 in the Breeding Barn. You can watch the full ceremony below. While you're here, please share a memory or reflection of Marshall in the comments at the bottom of this page. Gifts in Marshall's memory may be made to the Marshall Webb Climate Action Fund. Read about Shelburne Farms Climate Action initiatives that he helped make possible.

Marshall Webb

April 22, 1948 - August 11, 2022 

Marshall Webb was the best of Shelburne Farms. He was passionate about this place, its purpose, and its broad community of people, and he served all three with quiet integrity and intelligence. Born and raised at Shelburne Farms, he loved it as his personal home and as his professional career, which began the day he and his siblings founded the education nonprofit in 1972. The impacts of that single act of generosity would ripple out over the next 50 years and beyond.

Marshall Webb with his family on the Inn South Porch, 1969. Not long after, he and his siblings would form the education nonprofit, using the farm as its campus. their father would later bequeath the property to the nonprofit. Left to Right (front row): Alec, Lisa, Robert; (middle row) Derick, Aileen, Elizabeth, Marshall's fiancée Emily Wadhams; (back row) Mary's fiancé David Phillips, Mary, Quentyn, Marshall. Photo: Clyde Smith

From the beginning, Marshall worked on the land; worked with his hands. He milked cows and hayed pastures for the young nonprofit, as he had since he was a boy. He led early camps in the Market Garden, and helped establish our cheesemaking operation, crafting some of our first cheddar. As Buildings and Grounds Manager, he painted, patched up, and repaired everything from aging windows to broken pipes. As he said in 2019, “You look at this place now, and it seems so solid and beautiful and everything is ship-shape. The programs are vibrant. But there was a time when absolutely nothing was certain.” Marshall made the organization’s success more certain.

Marshall and Bill Clapp pressing blocks of cheddar in Shelburne Farms’ original creamery, 1982.

Mostly, Marshall was in the woods that he loved. As our first Woodlands Manager, he tapped sugar maples and tended the boiling sap in our sugarhouse. He felled timber, then milled out beautifully grained boards, first for Lone Tree Lumber, and still today at the Farm Store. (He’d often show up in the office with sawdust in his hair, smelling of wood and the outdoors.) He charted and constructed our first walking trails, opening up this campus to thousands of people who would come to love it as he did. He pursued green certification for our woodlands, then managed them with great thoughtfulness and care. Marshall helped the nonprofit realize its vision of the farm as a true working landscape for learning–an enormous legacy.

The role suited him. Few knew this property as intimately or loved it more. From a lifetime dedicated to these 1,400 acres, he was as much a part of this landscape as the sugar maples and shale. He wore his family lineage lightly–mostly shrugged it off–but his long years at the farm gave him endless stories to share, which he readily did with grace and humor. He was a bridge to the not-so-distant past, though his mind and heart were firmly fixed on the future.

Marshall’s generosity of spirit, deep connection to place, and playful soul were a model for his coworkers and pure magic to program participants and visitors. Over the years and with endless patience, he worked alongside and mentored so many staff in how to tap maple trees or run a chainsaw, then how to close the day with a fierce game of stickball. He met the world with a kindness and curiosity that fed and inspired all who knew him, and all who learned from him.

His curiosity and love for the natural world shined through in his photography, a passion sparked when he picked up his first brownie box camera in the 1950s. He was so attuned to light and atmosphere; to the grand viewscape as well as the details of the forest floor. His vision and talent brought the Shelburne Farms annual wall calendar to life in 2003, and the Lenses on the Land photography workshops in 2006. Both endeavors quietly encouraged everyone to look at the world more closely, care for it more deeply.

That was Marshall’s guiding force. Throughout his life, he led with a heart-felt love and concern for the planet, which the nonprofit channeled and shared. As a grandfather and as a citizen of this earth, he was a champion in the fight against global climate change. In his last role at Shelburne Farms, as Carbon Drawdown Coordinator, he spearheaded efforts to help the organization achieve carbon negative status by 2028–in what would have been his 80th year. 

Marshall explains biochar to visiting educators, just one of the carbon drawdown solutions that he championed. photo: Bob Schatz.

The day that Marshall died–of a heart attack while swimming in Lake Champlain–the weather was volatile. But it ended, as stormy days often do, with an amazing series of natural wonders: a rainbow, a glowing sunset, and a super moon. Marshall would’ve photographed it all. And it was easy to believe that the universe was honoring him with the show. He was an original, and irreplaceable. Marshall’s legacy here has been profound.

For additional tributes to and remembrances of Marshall, please read:

• A birthday on Earth Day: The life and legacy of Shelburne Farms’ Marshall Webb, VT Digger
• Obituary: Marshall Canfield Webb, Seven Days
• The comments shared below. Feel free to add your own.

Gifts in Marshall's memory may be made to the Marshall Webb Climate Action Fund.