Attention Ken Griffin: Carnet de Voyage would like to suggest your next trophy real estate purchase.
Asking a mere $65 million, 45 Hitchcock Lane in sylvan, sporty Millbrook, New York, is a 2,000-plus acre paradise, and a time capsule of American history from the Gilded Age to the present, some of it Palm Beach-adjacent. It was originally named Daheim by its creator, Charles Dieterich, a German national who made a fortune in natural gas and founded the company that became Union Carbide. Dieterich bought the farm of a Civil War widow and beginning in 1900, added five dozen additional parcels, creating a sprawling estate with a 1,400-acre working farm, a towering Queen-Anne-style Victorian mansion, a Bavarian-style gate house and bowling alley, two lakes and a guest house by Addison Mizner, later Palm Beach’s leading architect.
But Daheim’s notoriety came later, after a 1929 sale to several directors of Standard Oil of New Jersey, who made it a private hunting preserve. In 1963, the last surviving owner sold the property for $500,000 to Thomas and William Hitchcock, sons of a Mellon-family oil heiress and her polo-playing aviator husband. At the urging of their sister Peggy, they rented it to the man who made it infamous, Timothy Leary, the West Point cadet-turned Harvard professor turned LSD-proselytizer. In his The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, author Tom Wolfe described a brief visit by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to Leary’s “Gothic grounds…the great gingerbread mansion…all towers and turrets and jigsaw shingles.” When Leary refused to interrupt a three-day acid trip to meet them, Wolfe wrote, Kesey dismissed his sepulchral scene as “one big piece of uptight constipation.” And that was before Duchess County Assistant District Attorney G. Gordon Liddy, later a Watergate figure, raided the place, Leary was arrested on drug charges and, under federal surveillance, left the Hitchcock Xanadu, though into the 1970s, it remained a counter-cultural pilgrimage site. “Lots of dramas occurred,” says Billy Hitchcock, who now owns it in trust for his and his late siblings’ children. “What can I say?”
The Hitchcocks restored the place and Tommy lived there and ran it for many years. His brother, who once occupied the Mizner bungalow but now lives in Texas, is seeking its next owner. “It needs to be managed on a day-to-day basis,” he says, adding that the younger Hitchcocks have “no interest. There is no one.” Which sounds like Ken Griffin’s cue.
