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Millbrook’s Hitchcock estate listed for sale at $65 million

Millbrook’s Hitchcock estate listed for sale at $65 million

Behind this stone Bavarian gatehouse at the entrance to Millbrook is the 2,079 acre Hitchcock estate with a listing price of $65 million.

Christine Bates

MILLBROOK — The famous Hitchcock estate was listed for sale on June 25 by Heather Croner Real Estate, Sotheby’s International.

The property was assembled beginning in 1889, by German-born acetylene gas mogul Charles F. Dieterich, a founder of Union Carbide, who named the complex Daheim, German for “home.”

The property includes over 2,000 acres of farmland, forest and lakes as well as the storied 1889 10 bedroom, 6 bathroom main house of 14,000 square feet and 10,000 square foot guest house designed by Addison Mizner of Palm Beach fame in 1912. Also on the grounds are a tennis court, inground pool, gatehouse, original barns, Victorian bowling alley, carriage house, 3 bedroom cottage, and two farmhouses.

The large rectangular property has frontage on four roads and is unencumbered by conservation easements. Currently the full market assessment according to Dutchess Parcel Access is $29 million. If sold for the asking price it will be the highest priced residential sale in the history of Dutchess County.

The estate, which has been owned by Peggy Hitchcock and her brothers for over 60 years, was described as “ground zero of psychedelic awakening” in the 1960’s when the owners, inheritors of the Mellon banking fortune, invited Timothy Leary of LSD fame to the property in 1963. Reportedly Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley all stopped by to participate in the goings on. After raids by Dutchess County Assistant District Attorney Gordon Liddy, the Hitchcocks asked Leary and his followers to leave in 1968. The mansion later fell into disrepair but has recently been renovated.

Christine Bates

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Millerton wine shop owner organizes charity wine tasting for local child

Millerton wine shop owner organizes charity wine tasting for local child

Millerton Wine & Spirits owner Chris Jeans has organized a charity wine tasting to benefit the family of Crew Slater, a Millerton native with congenital kidney disease. The wine tasting is set for Thursday, Oct. 29, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Pasture Kitchen on Route 44 just east of the Village of Millerton.

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MILLERTON — Two local business owners have joined forces to put on a charity wine tasting benefitting Millerton's Slater family.

Crew Slater, a 5-year-old Millerton native, needs a kidney transplant to survive congenital kidney disease. Millerton Wine & Spirits owner Chris Jeans and Pasture Kitchen founder Austin Cornell have organized a charity wine tasting at Pasture Kitchen on Route 44 next Thursday, Oct. 29, from 6 to 8 p.m.

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Cornwall Historical Society celebrates Connecticut’s Black patriots

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On Saturday, Oct. 24, at the Cornwall Historical Society, author and genealogist John Mills will breathe new life into the stories of some of Connecticut’s more underappreciated patriots. The reason these heroes were forgotten? They were Black.

At a time when white colonists were fighting for their own liberty and political independence, many Black men who fought alongside them remained enslaved. Some risked their lives only to return to bondage. Though enslaved people were promised freedom from both sides of the Revolutionary War in exchange for their service, Great Britain, too, was still deeply dependent on slavery. For Black people in America, the war presented both extraordinary risks and uncertain paths to the freedom that white colonists were demanding for themselves.

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Madi Long
You only get one or two of these soul connection dogs, so I do this in his honor.
— Stephanie Saetta

Stephanie Saetta has spent much of her life caring for others. A physician at White Plains Hospital, she has another calling at home in Salisbury — one that has four legs and a wagging tail. She runs Charlie Chicken Bone Sanctuary, a nonprofit dog rescue that brings dogs from overcrowded pounds and the streets of Texas to foster homes in northwestern Connecticut, where they can begin again.

The sanctuary is named for Charlie, the dog who taught her how special a bond between a person and rescue animal can be.

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Big ideas come to Lenox for inaugural field festival

Big ideas come to Lenox for inaugural field festival

Hunter Runnette, founder and board chair of field, has spent years fostering arts and cultural programming in the Berkshires.

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What do joy, gardening, artificial intelligence, the American experiment and the creative process have in common? Quite a lot, as it turns out, at least when some of the world’s most compelling thinkers get together to talk about them.

From Friday, Oct. 23, through Sunday, Oct. 25, Lenox, Massachusetts, will host the inaugural field festival, a three-day gathering of writers, artists, scholars and cultural figures at Shakespeare & Company. Billed as a festival of ideas, entertainment, learning and discovery, field brings together an impressive roster of voices to explore everything from the deeply personal to the profoundly political.

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The Pink House AM is serving up community

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Rubin started teaching yoga classes at the Union in West Cornwall, a space designated by the town of Cornwall as a community hub with couches, Wi-Fi, occasional events and a growing yoga class schedule. She was adjusting well but missed one important thing about city life: a casual coffee shop.

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Sons of Astro are musicians, friends and bandmates — in that order

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The Sons of Astro will be at the Common Pub in Housatonic on Oct. 24 and the 2nd Home Lounge in Winsted on Nov. 14.

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No matter where they are in the world, musicians seem to find other musicians. There’s a shared language, a shared experience of being on stage and performing, and a shared enthusiasm for making those melodies by themselves or together. Such is the case with Norfolk and Brooklyn-based cosmic Americana band Sons of Astro.

That magnetic musicians’ bond drew Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mike Cobb into the orbit of singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Matt Statler. The two neighbors took to each other right away and were soon playing open mics together. As an ethics professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Statler made the case that if he sat in for Cobb’s set and Cobb sat in for Statler’s, they could play together and double their stage time. Clearly, these men wanted to make as much music as possible. That became a little harder when Cobb and his family moved up to Norfolk, Connecticut.

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