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Early on a cool June morning, while dewdrops still slumbered, I ran across a stubbled field toward Lake Champlain, which was the closest thing I could find to a path. I was lost, but not very. My cross-country run had taken me five miles around the grounds of Shelburne Farms, a 1,400-acre idyll just off the trafficked strip of Route 7, south of Burlington, Vt.

A mile or so before, a sign had asked me to run "No Farther" down a private drive and pointed politely into the woods, where the trail spilled into a gilded clearing before petering out before a view of a haze-brushed lake. When, after a mile or two more than my calves had planned for, I came in view of the inn I had started from, the turreted brick cottage was stretched serenely on its perfectly molded hilltop as if to say, what took you so long? Coffee stood ready in the Gothic lobby, a fire murmured genially in the baronial hearth. For the moment -- and for $140 a night for a double -- I was royalty.

Shelburne Farms is a testament to the magnificent aspirations of so many late-19th- century company men. The executive in question was Dr. William Seward Webb, who gave up a career in medicine to work for the Vanderbilt railroad empire and, more lucratively, to marry a Vanderbilt daughter, Lila. In 1886, gripped by a Tolstoyan fantasy of a progressive farming aristocracy, the couple hired none other than Frederic Law Olmsted, the landscaper of Central Park, to shape a grand agricultural estate. It's a thing of downy meadows and artfully arranged vistas of the Adirondacks across the water, of manicured woods laboriously thickened with 100,000 trees -- and that bulky, castle-like manse, with its lawn cascading down to Champlain's comely shore.

The estate is still a model farm, now run by a nonprofit organization. What once was a rich man's fancy has become a social enterprise. In a perfect world (which might actually look a lot like Vermont) everyone would be able to pet the footloose chickens whose eggs furnish the breakfast table, see sheep graze before they're slaughtered and maybe even have a hand in squeezing curds into Cheddar. Shelburne Farms is a showcase of everything local, free-range, grass-fed, sustainable and organic -- that is, of food that tastes the way food should.

Busloads of children pull up every day at the Farm Barn (which is far enough away from the inn not to disturb the guests' serenity). They paw lambs, coo at piglets and tickle impassive goats. What matters is not the picture-book barnyard scene, but the ability to make a physical connection between farm and food.

It's a link you can taste. Dinner at the inn was not only harvested almost entirely from the hills outside the window, it also held its own against some of the best meals I've had in expensive Manhattan sanctums and rural French redoubts. An aroma of something savage still clung to the wild mushrooms. Mint made a cameo appearance in a Bolognese sauce, along with some lively peas, transforming a traditional winter dish into one that was vernal and light. The steak had a quality that you can't take for granted these days: It tasted like meat.

Melancholy as it is to break away from this pastoral utopia, the fantastically eccentric Shelburne Museum is a powerful incentive for a short trip down the road. The museum is the product of another rich Webb marriage: William and Lila's son James married Electra Havemeyer, daughter of the sugar baron and art collector extraordinaire Henry O. Havemeyer. Electra was no slouch as a collector either, but while her father amassed Impressionist paintings, she bought quilts, dolls, cigar-store Indians, pewter place settings, carriages and other expressions of American folk ingenuity. She ennobled the tchotchke.

The museum is vast and marvelous. A miniature carved circus parade, conceived on a scale that makes Barnum & Bailey look like a Kiwanis Club, occupies a building designed especially to show it off. The 36 other buildings include the main house, featuring a fistful of Degas and a couple of beautiful Rembrandts of questionable authenticity. The 1950 House looks as if the owner simply walked out the door for good half a century ago, leaving food in the cabinets and underwear in the drawers. The steamboat Ticonderoga, which once plied Lake Champlain, sits surreally among waves of grass, its interiors restored to the specific splendor of a date in 1923.

Happily inauthentic

We cut diagonally across Vermont from northwest to southeast, avoiding Interstate 83, choosing instead the roads that cut sibilant curves through maple woods and happen upon villages that suddenly materialize around a bend. Vermont is an impressively un-sprawled, billboard-free state, and so covered in foliage that it's difficult to conceive that when the Webbs were founding their Eden, much of the state was bald, forlorn pasture. In the middle of the 19th century, the majority of Vermonters were sheep. The country's demand for wool and timber stripped the forests, and the fall consisted of a few daubs of color on otherwise bare hills. Then the wool market collapsed, and a consensus developed that New England needed more trees. Vermont today is the proof that an environmental movement can work.

Much of what is best about Vermont is happily inauthentic. The wilderness is planned, the farms protected, the folk art gathered and displayed. The local beers, part of a relatively recent brewing renaissance, taste persuasively German. One of the best meals we had in the state was at American Flatbread, a chain restaurant in Burlington, where we watched a sweaty young man with a long-handled paddle slide fanatically wholesome pizzas out of a wood-burning oven.

Among the best of Vermont's splendid simulacra is Grafton, a showcase town rescued from decrepitude in 1963 by a nostalgic banker. The village, located midway between the malls of Manchester and Interstate 91, represents a wistful but totally convincing Norman Rockwell ideal of small-town life, meticulously curated by the nonprofit Windham Foundation.

The Foundation owns the delightful Old Tavern, the general store and almost half of the white-painted clapboard real estate in town. It grooms a footpath through its meadows and past its sheep barn to its Cheddar-making operation, the Grafton Village Cheese Co. Grafton is the benevolent version of a company town.

The goal of all this grooming of the present is to secure a prosperous future by evoking a pretty past. In this, Vermont is in step with the rest of the country. Megalopoli and new suburbs everywhere have taken a similar tack, putting up new iron lampposts and laying down brick sidewalks in an attempt to preserve a history they never had. Usually, these strategies lead to retro sentimentality and ersatz quaintness. Vermont's efforts at historical preservation, though, are done in such good taste and produce such profoundly pleasant results that it's hard to get indignant about authenticity. Besides, the cheese is really very good.

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