Deborah Dows

A Short, Anecdotal Biography of Deborah Dows, Founder of Southlands

It was a great white house, set delicate and gleaming in frail morning light upon a noble hill that swept back from the river, and it was shaded by the silent stature of great trees, and a vast sward of velvet lawn swept round it, and morning was always there and the tender purity of light.

In his novel, Of Time and the River, this is how Thomas Wolfe described the house at Fox Hollow where Deborah Dows was born.  It was a house built by her father, Tracy Dows, who had come from Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, to marry her mother, Alice Olin.  The Olin family lived at Glenburn, just northwest of present-day Southlands, on sixty acres given by Dr. Thomas Tillotson around 1830 to his favorite granddaughter and Deb’s great-grandmother, Julia Lynch.  Dr. Tillotson, the Surgeon General for Washington’s Northern Armies, was the husband of Margaret Livingston and the brother in-law of Chancellor Robert Livingston, and the Glenburn property had come to him through his wife.  In 1843, Julia married Stephen Olin, a Methodist minister known for his spirited sermons, who became the second president of Wesleyan University, requiring Julia to move to Middletown, Connecticut.  She often returned to Glenburn, where she had taught Sunday school as a young girl by its waterfall.  Julia remained very active in the Methodist church and among her many charitable works was the founding of the Hillside Methodist Church which still stands (now an antique shop) across the highway from Southlands Farm.  Glenburn eventually was give to her son Stephen Henry Olin, Alice Olin’s father and Deb’s grandfather, who was also president of Wesleyan for a time.  It was land that eventually came to Deb and her brother Olin Dows, and through their Livingston ancestors had remained in continuous family ownership since its bestowal in 1686 as a king’s grant. 

Few have made grander gestures to their bride and her family than Tracy Dows, who after marrying Deb’s mother, Alice Olin, bought hundreds of acres surrounding the Olin property at Glenburn, including much of present-day Southlands, and eventually built the house Wolfe so romantically describes.  Deb grew up at Fox Hollow, though there were almost yearly trips to Europe, and boarding school stays she would speak of with distaste, even fifty years after leaving them.  One year she begged her father not to send her back to school and promised that if she could be tutored at home, she would learn to speak fluent German.  It was an unpopular language in the early twenties, just after World War I, and early in her life demonstrated Deb’s choice to go against the grain.  Her father, whom she often said she “adored” and whom she called “Pup,” agreed.  She passed her test, was allowed for a while to stay home and when not busy with her lessons, followed him as he made his rounds on Fox Hollow.  He was a man who cared deeply about the animals and the land, and was intimately involved with managing his farm.  Trailing in his footsteps, Deb learned to do the same.  It was her father who gave Southlands its name.  As is often true with good, honest names, it was derived simply from being the “south land” of his Fox Hollow estate. 

Tracy Dows was as interested in the local community he had adopted as he was in his new estate.  He led the effort to bring the Dutchess County Agricultural Society and the County Fairgrounds to Rhinebeck.  He helped restore the Dutch Reformed Church, the oldest church building in Rhinebeck, and as the owner of the Beekman Arms he brought the architect, Harrie T. Lindberg, who had designed the house at Fox Hollow, to renovate the hotel.  The signature columned porch on the Beekman Arms, designed by Lindberg, which helps make the center of Rhinebeck so picturesque, would not be there if Tracy Dows had not made that effort.  Similar hotels, sagging and unappreciated in small towns in the Hudson Valley, were torn down in the fifties and sixties to make way for gas stations.  Imagine what a different Rhinebeck there would be with a shopping mall situated on the Fairgrounds, and a gas station on the site of the Beekman Arms. 

Deb’s father’s interests went beyond farming and preservation.  He was also a director of the Rhinebeck Bank and Red Hook Telephone Company.  His most creative project was to chronicle his family, the people of Rhinebeck and the countryside of northern Dutchess in highly crafted photographs that both record and embellish the era.  These photos were given by Deb to Hudson River Heritage where they should be available to researchers.  Hopefully someday an exhibition that will derive from them will bring them to the attention of the general public. 

Deb’s parents separated, and her mother Alice Dows chose to spend much of her time in Washington, D.C. where she bought a house in Georgetown on O street, not nearly as fashionable then as it is now.  As a young girl, Deb was required to move to D.C. with her mother.  In her telling, the highlights of her Washington years were keeping a pig in the backyard which often escaped and ran down O street, and trying to steal a chair from the White House where the Dows, familiar with the Roosevelt’s as old Hudson Valley neighbors, were frequent guests.  The theft was plotted with friends during a large White House party.  Deb was to be carried out in a chair because she was supposedly to ill to walk.  They never made it beyond the front steps.  On another occasion, when FDR was visiting his cousin Laura Delano in Rhinebeck, and Miss Delano was giving a large garden party to which Deb had not been invited, she determined, knowing the land around the Delano place as well as she did, that she would crash the party.  She slipped through the wooded area behind the Delano’s despite the Secret Service surveillance, was then discovered among the guests and taken before FDR who scolded her for what she had done.  In telling she seemed on the surface to be remorseful, but… Stories like this speak of what a tranquil era we lived in during the early part of the last century, but also of a young Deb who was restless and rebellious under the control of her mother and a life spent in the constant swirl of Washington D.C. social life.  She wanted to escape so she impetuously fell in love. 

 Deb was married in her mother’s Georgetown garden on June 1, 1935, when she was twenty-one.  Her husband was a law student at Harvard and she accompanied him there the following fall.  While he was in school she took private lessons hoping to become a short-story writer, and also classes in Russian, another unpopular language so soon after the Bolshevik Revolution.  The marriage was stormy, lasting less than a year, and she said it took on a ton of violence near the end.  “I was glad my Great Dane “Tute” was there to protect me.”  She fled to Europe, and then around the world sailing form Trieste to Greece and then to Egypt, accompanied once more by her mother. 

The last time the entire family was together was in Cairo in January of 1937.  Deb’s sister Margaret lived there with her Swedish-diplomat husband who was posted in Cairo at the time; her father came from England where he was then living; her brother Olin sailed from the States.  All joined Deb and her mother Alice Dows before the two sailed through the Suez Canal on a trip to the Far East.  Her father died the following year in England, and she never saw her beloved “Pup” again.  This was the last of the long trips that Deb took with her mother.  This was how she described her life up to that point. 

From eleven to twenty-one I saw the world, staying for various amounts of time in thirty-nine countries.  Meeting people of all walks of life, from members of reigning royal families to fellow ‘wanderers’ searching garbage cans in early mornings.  My living accommodations from palaces to haystacks and many other places in between.

After their long trip Deb and her mother returned to Rhinebeck.  Deb, her sister Margaret and brother Olin inherited Fox Hollow, but they were unable to maintain it so it was sold to Vincent Astor.  The “Great Depression” had reduced her father’s estate and he had been renting it out to various private schools since the early twenties.  Deb stubbornly wanted to hold on to all of it, but when she was convinced she could not, she bought back the “south lands,” a little less than two hundred acres, with her share of the sale to Astor. 

Father dead, husband departed, or she having fled him, Deb started to build “The Barn,” later known as “Hog Hollow,” on a portion of the Glenburn estate that she and her brother Olin owned in common.  It touched on the north the two hundred acres she bought back from Astor.  She was only twenty-four, but she had definite ideas about how she wanted to live. 

All I wanted was to stay home, live on the land somehow be able to keep it and make it produce in a way that could last happily for many. 

She remembered her days following her father as he watched over his fields and animals, and this pointed the way.  Beginning with her house, she structured her life close to the land.  The building was designed the way she had seen European farmhouses built, with animals and humans almost sharing the same quarters.  Shaped as a U, living quarters are to the left, a small courtyard with watering trough/fountain is in the middle, and a four-horse stable is to the right.  When sharing a meal with Deb on the courtyard patio, eating your salad, or “grass” as she called it, beneath the grape arbor, one could hear the horses chewing their oats and munching on hay across the yard and see their heads bobbing above the Dutch doors of their stalls.  She would often relate proudly how she picked apart bricks from a fallen down structure north of Rhinebeck, and driving a pony cart, hauled them to Hog Hollow, using the lovely, aged, pink castoffs to floor her sunroom and form its fireplace. 

But living a peaceful life with her animals on a small country estate was not enough.  Inherited along with her portion of Glenburn was a heritage of community service from her father and grandparents.  What she could do might not be grand, but something a young woman of twenty-four with limited income could accomplish. 

In the late thirties, teaching was what I could do.  Land, animals and people were what I understood.  Combining my ability with my interests, the Southlands developed into a unique school aiming to teach all ages respect and love for land and it’s animals both wild and tame. 

So teaching began.  Like many small businesses, its first customers were friends and children of friends she knew from her days at Fox Hollow.  But she didn’t recruit among friends only.  She was not interested in exclusivity.  She welcomed girls and boys who had to take the Route 9 bus down from Red Hook as warmly as those who were delivered by chauffeur.  And the riders she loved best were those that worked hard at it: she would challenge those with natural athletic ability, and give encouragement to the ones who were too fat or too thin or just too inept to look graceful on a horse, but wanted to ride very much nonetheless. 

The riding school got off to a start in 1938 and the wildly unique place it is came into being.  There was only a small barn at first, later known as “the pony barn,” that housed all her horses except those stabled at the house.  World War II came shortly thereafter making it difficult to expand.  There was no indoor riding ring until 1949 when Deb bought a war surplus Quonset hut and turned it into an indoor ring.  It was the first indoor ring in the Hudson Valley.  Those who learned to steer around it’s narrow corners will not forget it.  It was not that long.  It seemed all corners, but a rider learned to forget about that while playing Deb’s games in gymkhana: balancing mothballs on wooden spoons and trotting with no reins; jumping off your horse at the sound of a whistle and scrambling for a farmer’s milking stool playing her version of musical chairs; a bruising game of red rover on horseback soon banned too dangerous; a game of puncture the balloon with each rider armed with a straight pin and a balloon tied around the neck—the last one with inflated balloon won; for little kids-sitting on a pony eating a bun on a string while making your animal stand still.  There were others, all designed to make tense riders relax, forget themselves, their fears and have fun.

All around you there was plenty to delight any child or adult who loved animals: a long-eared Nubian goat named Banana and a lit-cigarette-eating goat named Tabasco that wandered freely up and down the aisle between horse stalls leaving deposits that kept student barn managers constantly busy; a Sicilian donkey named Pagiacci who in the evening, under a spotlight, would tuck his right hoof, bow and then trot into a half remembered circus act.  At one time there were over a hundred horses, ponies, brood mares, stallions, donkeys and cows on the property.  And over the years so many dogs- mutts, a Bouvier, Great Danes, a Doberman, a Greyhound, English Bulldogs, Skye Terriers, a bloodhound named Emmet after the local BCI man, even a Pekinese.  Some of them had the run of the house; others were declared outdoor dogs, though it was never clear why as it seemed none of them were reliably housebroken. 

 Some of the poorer students would exchange work for lessons.  They would help with haying, and of course mucking, and those foolish enough to say they knew how might end up milking the brown-eyed, long-lashed Jersey cows that lived at the South Barn at the far end of the property.  Fresh, high-fat Jersey milk was much prized in the kitchen. 

Deb often did cooking herself for the help that lived on the place and for students lucky enough to be invited for a meal, but over the years various cooks tried to stem the chaos in this gathering place for dogs and children, and cook an organized meal.  There was Mrs. Katzenhammer, better known as Mrs. Katz, who though German in name was Hungarian, and loved to use the creamy Jersey milk to make sour cream she could use in her rich European culinary style.  Cream was curdling in pots and bowls and on flat surfaces high and low , just out of reach of the dogs.  Animals were butchered, this was a working farm, and the freezer was filled not only with roasts and steaks but all the edible animal organs including liver, sweetbreads, tripe, even brains.  Meanwhile, in the years of the seven-year locusts, Deb would be seeking Mrs. Katz’s advice on whether to roast or sauté  the critters that were chewing all the leaves off the oak trees along the river.  Sauteeing was deemed best and they were served skewered with toothpicks at parties for friends.  Passed personally by Mrs. D., it was best to ratchet up your courage as if you were about to jump a six-foot fence, chew them quickly, swallow, and remark how pleasantly crunchy they were. 

Cooks came and went frequently—not even the stalwart Mrs. Katz could endure the pace for too many years.  Another notable lady was an ex-convict out on parole who was, Deb whispered intriguingly, “a murderess.”  She couldn’t “boil water” when she came but Deb immediately realized she was intelligent-gave her cookbooks to study and within a month fancy dishes began to appear.   Eggs Benedict with homemade Hollandaise sauce became a favorite.  This gentle, soft-spoken murderess ( we assumed she did in an abusive husband or boyfriend) went on to find useful employment as a short-order cook in a diner. 

Having an ex-con in the kitchen was not surprising.  Deb took in unfortunate animals and humans equally.  There were two refugees from the Hungarian Revolution.  A destitute widow with a small boy who came to stay for several years.  She helped care for Deb’s old nurse from her Fox Hollow days, Margaret Heyerdahl, better known as Greta, whom Deb had brought home when she was old and ill and no longer able to work.  In addition to the cook, there were other ex-cons.  They came by arrangement with the local parole officer whose daughter rode at Southlands.  One parolee named George showed up one day, and was so familiar with Southlands from the grapevine at Greenhaven Prison that he knew the names of the horses, and where they were stalled the first time he came into the barn.  None ever caused any problem though Deb mentioned having one nervous night when a highly volatile Tony, who had been jailed because he murdered a man in anger, planted a ladder outside her bedroom window, clambered up like an impassioned Romeo and declared his love.  No Juliet, but rather Beatrice, Deb managed to talk him down. 

Deb’s interest in stray animals, stray children and lost adults continued until she died.  She hosted an annual Christmas Eve party serving roast goose that she prepared herself.  Her guest list included anyone she knew who did not have a family to go home to for the holidays. 

Deb was married again in 1959 and became known as Mrs. Thomas.  Greg was handsome and a good dinner companion, but he didn’t understand Deb’s love for the difficult life she led.  Why not stay in bed eating bon-bons rather than deal with sick animals, frozen and broken water pipes, the constant danger of animals getting out on the highway, a dusty riding ring, a damp, freezing cold, metal, indoor ring, and staying up till midnight trying to balance the books and pay the bills.  Deb worked twelve hour days.  She tried to make the marriage work, sticking with it for several years, but it was doomed to fail.  She reassumed the name, Mrs. Dows.

She now began to look ahead to the time when she would not be there, and this is what she said about starting the foundation.

In July, 1983 TSF was born taking over the land and business I had started.  TSF is a teaching operation.  That is how we began and how according to our charter, we must continue.  S’lands farm survived for fifty years, TSF should survive for another fifty not losing sight of the original aims.  I am tired, I have worked hard for many years.  I want to enjoy my last few years knowing S’lands is in good hands.  I want to live and die here.  I have never wanted to `keep up with the Jones’.  I knew I couldn’t.  TSF can’t either.  We must do the best job we can with what money we have and money is not something we have in quantity. 

Deb’s health became a serious problem when she was in her early seventies.  Hard outdoor work, long days, and smoking unfiltered Camel cigarettes brought her bad colds every winter that often turned into pneumonia and finally into congestive heart failure.  She came back from several near fatal stays in the hospital, getting out of the house as soon as she could, going back out to tour her beloved Southlands in her electric golf cart.  But she was always thinking of the future. 

The land will live on somehow.   Now no longer threatened by future development.  Hopefully now also able to keep on being productive for the good of many.  But if it is to survive well for the next fifty years we must concentrate on its uniqueness and not let it become just another riding stable, breeding farm or sales barn.  As the world changes we must remain the same, changing only slightly with the times but staying small, keeping our versatility of activity, being the best in teaching of riding and horse sports and instilling in our students a respect for and love of the land and all its animals.

Deborah Dows died on June 29^th 1994, she is buried in the Rhinebeck Cemetary in the Dows family plot next to her beloved nurse Greta and with her father, mother and brother Olin. 

-          Paul J. Schaefer

Author’s Note:

I first spoke to Deborah Dows on the phone in June of 1959, when I asked her to schedule me for a riding lesson.  She said that I could start the following week, but that she would not be there and that Gale Quinn would be my teacher as she was in charge of Southlands during her absence.  My first lesson was from Gale, and I rode on trustworthy “Snorter.” 

Deb returned a week or so later from her trip to Wyoming where she had married Greg Thomas.  I met her then.  I continued taking lessons from Deb that fall and winter and when Gale returned fulltime to work for Deb the following spring after her graduation from Skidmore College, we began to date.  As Gale was living at “The Barn” (Hog Hollow), I was often at the house picking her up or returning her home, and soon I was invited for meals and became part of the “family.”  We were married the following year and lived in the “South House” while Gale worked full-time at Southlands.  She had ridden with Deb since 1948, and I write nothing about Mrs. Dows without her verification, though any errors are mine. 

Click here to read a letter from Deborah Dows to the charter members of The Southlands Foundation in January, 1988.

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