Millbrook, New York, has many charms, as the Palm Beachers who summer there know. Come September, it will boast a new piece of environmental art, conceived by an artist father grieving a daughter, who has turned his mourning into a gift for his community. Ten acres of beauty on Ryder Pond on the border of Millbrook and Stanfordville, once a run-down, overgrown century-old orchard, have been reborn as The Elisabeth Cord Orchard. It’s the creation of the late model, artist, writer and social figure’s father, the award-winning accessories designer Barry Kieselstein-Cord, who created it as a sanctuary strictly reserved for other parents who have lost children. While it won’t be completed until summer 2025, its soft opening is set for next month.
Often called an “It” Girl when she was young, Elisabeth Kieselstein-Cord Hamm was a striking presence in New York and Millbrook, where her parents (her mother, CeCe Cord, is an artist and the founder of Travels with Tiger, a posh pet products line) lived from the late 1990s until Elisabeth was stricken with Lyme’s Disease in the early 2010s. She retreated from public life, living quietly in California and Florida with her husband, the film producer Ted Hamm, and died at 41 on August 28, 2021, of complications from her long illness.
Barry Cord had bought the Orchard land when his daughter was a student at Chapin. “I crashed in with a jeep, climbed a tree, and decided Elisabeth should own this,” he says. He secretly put it in trust for her, hoping that one day she’d have children and “build a home near me.” He’d even park down the road and take his daughter to the orchard without revealing that it was hers. “She asked me if we were stealing fruit and I’d tell her I had an arrangement with the farmer who owned it,” Cord says. When she left Trinity for college at Georgetown, he gave her the deed as a graduation gift. “She said she’d always known I wouldn’t steal fruit.”
Over the years, Cord improved the land, cutting back overgrown plants, rescuing ancient apple trees, clearing meadows. Asked if Elisabeth ever had a plan for it, he admits, “I don’t know; she kept a lot to herself.” He pauses. “She was beautiful, successful, and married to a prince. She had the life people dream of.”
After her sudden death, “I was in misery,” he continues. He immediately thought of creating a memorial, but a year later, after spurning several offers for the land and realizing that two other local children had died on the road that fronts the property—“which was fucking weird,” he allows—“it all came together with my broken heart.”
Today, what he built—winding paths, meadows crossed by deer and fox, dozens of peach, pear and apple trees where wild fowl alight, an alley of chestnut trees, blackberry bushes, sculptures, architectural elements, discrete seating areas, and a wharf leading into the lake—is ready to be shared. And soon, a potting shed on the property will be filled with young plants for visiting parents to take away with them. “To give them joy,” says Cord, “and remind them that life is eternal.”
The Elisabeth Cord Orchard on Bangal Amenia Road will be open by appointment only for the families of lost children. To reserve, call 413-854-7090 or write to The Elisabeth Cord Foundation, Box 519, Millbrook, NY 12545.