Corbin's Animal Garden with Mary Kronenwetter

In the late 1800s, banking, railroad, and real estate mogul Austin Corbin returned to his hometown of Newport, New Hampshire. He built a grand estate and bought out his neighbors’ farms to create a 22,000 acre wildlife game preserve stocked with boar, bison, bighorn sheep, antelope, elk, Chinese pheasant, and other imported animals. This illustrated slideshow features archival images and a discussion of the complicated history and legacy of New Hampshire’s own American Gilded Age robber baron. The talk will also highlight the important legacy of the role the Corbin family and park naturalist Ernest Baynes played in the saving of the American bison from extinction.