This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue
Behind much of the conserved land in the Connecticut River watershed are stories of remarkable people who donated the land or placed easements that ensure the land is preserved for future generations. Two such people are profiled here.
Elsie Newburg Aidinoff
Elsie Vanderbilt Newburg Aidinoff may be 95, but she is still going strong. She is the daughter of the late William Vanderbilt III, who was governor of Rhode Island from 1939 to 1941. Cornelius Vanderbilt, her great-great-great-grandfather, whose fortune was built on shipping and railroad investments, endowed the founding of Vanderbilt University. All of which is to say that the example of civic engagement was and is embedded in the family’s history.
Elsie Vanderbilt Newburg Aidinoff has donated conservation easements on 90 acres of land to the Lyme Land Conservation Trust. Photo: Janet Roach, 2026.
Elsie says she was shy and easily frightened when she was a child, unhappy when her parents trotted her and her twin sister, Anne, out on the campaign trail, at summer clambakes, and on horseback for a Life magazine photo shoot. She was far happier when her father left political life. After serving in the US Navy during World War II, he moved the family to a 450-acre horse-breeding farm in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, which he had inherited from his father, and then to a far more down-to-earth one in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
After college, Elsie married Andy Newburg, a lawyer, in 1953 and started a family in New York City. By 1965 Elsie began tutoring 6th grade non-readers at the nearby public school. In 1977 her work there led to her becoming a board member of the New York City Schools’ volunteer program.
A cousin introduced Elsie to poet and activist Ned O’Gorman, founder of the tuition-free elementary school in Harlem called The Children’s Storefront. The school emerged in the late 1960s as an alternative to the overcrowded and underachieving neighborhood public schools. The organization’s mission was to “provide a rigorous, joyful learning environment” that prepared students for success in high school, college, and beyond. Elsie started teaching there, soon becoming an administrator and then a trustee. She became chairman of the board in 1980.
Which brings us to Elsie’s perhaps most personal philanthropic effort—right here in the Connecticut River Valley. For 20 years starting in 1982, Elsie added a summer camp to The Children’s Storefront’s program. She built the camp on her family’s 80-acre seasonal retreat in Lyme, modeling it after the camp in Maine where she spent happy summers as a child. Children from the school came to Lyme for six weeks, learning to swim, canoe, kayak, and enjoy the natural world. For many of the children, it was their first experience outside of Harlem.
Initially Elsie worried whether the community would accept the camp. She quickly learned that her fears were unfounded. The First Congregational Church of Old Lyme invited the campers for church suppers, and local families hosted them two or three at a time to visit in their homes.
At first the campers slept in tents. Elsie’s son, Michael Newburg, aided by church members, built cabins and a building where all could gather for meals, craft-making, and sing-alongs. One year, under his guidance, campers helped build a geodesic dome.
Elsie Aidinoff’s son, Michael Newburg, grows
native plants for sale in Lyme. Photo: Janet Roach.
The camp ended in the early 2000s, and the original Children’s Storefront school closed in 2018. The organization re-emerged as an early childhood center to help parents and other caregivers learn how to support cognitive development in the very young. Even now, nearly 50 years after her first involvement, Elsie remains a trustee and supporter. “Giving money,” she says, “is not very interesting. You just write a check. Getting involved—that’s where the fun is.”
Elsie’s son, Michael, continues her tradition of generosity and involvement in his own way on his property carved out of the original family retreat. He collects seeds of ever more rare and threatened native species of plants and—one seed at a time—propagates them and sells the new plants to landscapers, garden designers, and buyers at the Lyme Farmers’ Market. He built the shed where he starts the plants out of tamarack wood that grew on the property—tamarack is the Native American word for “wood to make snowshoes with.” Leah Grear, Michael’s partner, has started an artists’ colony there, inviting painters, potters, fiber artists, and others to a barn where they can deepen and broaden their skills.
Elsie, meantime, has, starting in 1989, donated conservation easements on several parcels of land totaling a little over 90 acres to the Lyme Land Conservation Trust. The land abuts the Nehantic State Forest and provides protection for the ridgeline on the eastern side of the Falls Brook, which flows directly into the Connecticut River. The easements provide a wide variety of habitats for flora and fauna and ensures that will be the case for generations to come.
Max Belding
Forty-odd miles northeast, in Vernon, the Connecticut River has another remarkable benefactor: Max Belding inherited 282 acres of land from his father bordering a section of the Tankerhoosen River, which, after joining the Hockanum River at Talcottville, becomes a tributary of the Connecticut River. His grandfather was part-owner of Belding Brothers & Co., manufacturers of silk thread that was once a part of the thriving textile industry in the Rockville section of Vernon. His father, Frederick Belding, acquired the property on the Tankerhoosen and had a farm there.
For decades, Max, whose wealth derived from real estate development and finance, treated friends and family to the many pleasures available on the farm. He built a cabin of boards salvaged from an old tobacco barn. Family and guests camped, rode horses, fished for native trout, enjoyed cookouts around a large stone table, and watched fireflies in the evening light.
In 1981 Max gave his still-pristine property to the State of Connecticut, now called the Belding Wildlife Management Area (Belding WMA). His desire, according to Jane Seymour, a trustee and steward of the property, was “to protect the wildlife and fisheries habitats, provide environmental education by teaching young people about our relationship with nature, and offer the public a place where they can enjoy and discover wildlife and their habitats.” Each year, hundreds of school children visit to learn about nature and wildlife taught by volunteers and students from Rockville High School Agricultural Education Center.
Maxwell Belding gave 282 acres on the Tankerhoosen River in Vernon, CT, to the State of Connecticut in 1981. It is now accessible as the Belding Wildlife Management Area. Photo: Ed Mitchell.
More than 130 species of birds are seen in the Belding WMA. Hikers along the established trails may also encounter a wide variety of butterflies, moths, native bees, and beetles, several species of frogs and salamanders, painted and snapping turtles, fisher cats, mink, coyotes, fox, and deer. (See also Casting About, Spring 2026.)
Max’s love of that land did not end with giving the property away. In 2005 he established the Belding Charitable Support Trust, which provides funds for maintenance and improvement of the Belding WMA and underwrites salaries of personnel responsible for its upkeep. His daughter, Ruth Belding Nardi serves as a trustee.
If that were the extent of Max’s philanthropic endeavors, he’d deserve great appreciation. But his generosity extended far and wide. He and his wife Ruth gave major support in the late 1990s for a 900-seat state-of-the-art theater at The Bushnell performing arts center in Hartford. As a long-time resident of Old Lyme, Max also served as a trustee of the Florence Griswold Museum and a generous supporter of a full restoration of the Griswold House. The list goes on.
By all accounts, in his every eleemosynary activity, Max earned high praise. “Max was a pleasure to work with,” said Bill Hyatt, Director of Fisheries and Chief of the Bureau of Natural Resources for the Connecticut DEEP. “When you were with him it was a conversation. He listened, then had insightful questions to ask and practical suggestions to make. He was incredibly gracious, and that made for a productive exchange.”
Max died in 2020 at age 98. But his generosity and engagement in a wide variety of philanthropic causes live on—to the benefit of the many fortunate enough to live or visit along the banks of the Connecticut River.
Philosophers and psychologists have long known that generosity is a benefit to the givers as well as the receivers. It boosts health and happiness, and even helps us live longer. And it’s not just about money. As Elsie Newburg Aidinoff knows, and Max Belding certainly understood, it’s about giving time and effort, of caring about the world and its occupants, of putting a love for humanity into action, and using both head and heart to express unselfish concern for the welfare of others.
Few people have the financial resources of Max Belding and Elsie Newburg Aidinoff. But gifts of self carry equal benefits to the giver. In the words of Seneca the Younger, the Stoic philosopher, “We should give as we would receive, cheerfully, quickly and without hesitation, for there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers.”
Janet Roach is Professor Emeritus, Columbia University. She taught writing at the Graduate School of the Arts and had earlier careers as a journalist and Hollywood screenwriter.