Tracy Dows, Community Organizer
by Paul Schaefer

Rhinebeck is like no other small town in the Hudson Valley. There is an aura surrounding this town that I’m not sure its citizens see from within the village limits. Those of us who live in towns surrounding it are quite aware of Rhinebeck’s special status, perhaps even jealous of it. When I was a print salesman in New York City and told clients at publishing houses that I lived in Clinton Corners near Poughkeepsie, they had only the vague idea that I was traveling in from somewhere north of Peekskill. But if I said, “near Rhinebeck,” they would say, “Oh, I know Rhinebeck. I plan on going there some weekend.” I would shake my head in bewilderment and wonder why.

Is it that the air is different here than anywhere else in the Hudson Valley? I remember the immediate attraction Rhinebeck had for me when I came here 50 years ago. As a transplanted Midwesterner, it had an Old World feel: nearby castles on the Hudson and village streets where historic figures once trod. This leads me to the answer to the why-Rhinebeck-is-different-question: over time village citizens have preserved its heritage. Here, it’s history itself that’s in the air. Many current and former citizens are responsible for this, but one person now mostly forgotten who had a strong aesthetic and commercial influence on the community and helped bathe it in this positive light is Tracy Dows.

“We had two in help in the house and two outdoors. Pup did most of the cooking.” This is how Deborah Dows described to me the melancholy final chapter of her father’s last days at Fox Hollow Farm just south of Rhinebeck in the early 1930s during the Great Depression. Only Deborah and her father were living at the estate. Tracy’s wife Alice was living in Washington D.C. because of her interest in politics. She enjoyed invitations to parties at the White House during the presidency of Dows’ downriver neighbor, Franklin Roosevelt. It was 30 years after Dows had arrived in 1903 as a young millionaire from Irvington-on-Hudson to marry Alice Olin, the daughter of Col. Stephen Henry Olin. The Olins lived at Glenburn, on property that had been handed down from the Beekman Patent of 1697 to the Olin family through marriage. But Dows was not shy in announcing his presence to his bride’s family. He encircled the Olin’s 60 acres of heritage with a wedding present garland of almost 500 acres that he scooped up and assembled from surrounding landowners. Then he busied himself erecting his own “historic” home, Fox Hollow, his grander version of Washington’s Mount Vernon. Arguably when it was finished, Dows had a more majestic view of the Hudson than any George Washington ever had of the Potomac.

Fox Hollow is now the home of the Daytop Drug Treatment Center, a change in use that Deborah Dows vigorously supported, over the objections of some local citizens, after ownership had long passed from her family. Deb believed in helping “waifs and strays,” as she called the less fortunate. But in its glory days when the staff included “fifteen in the house and thirty outdoors” Fox Hollow was described this way by the novelist Thomas Wolfe in his novel Of Time And The River: “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 vast swards of velvet lawn swept round it. . . . ” Wolfe frequently visited Fox Hollow because of his friendship with Olin Dows, Tracy’s son.

Tracy Dows was closely involved in the design and building of his home for which he hired the architect Harrie T. Lindeberg. It was not finished until 1910, after the birth of his two older children, Olin and Margaret. Deborah was born in 1914, and she was the only child to remember the “big house” as her first and only home when she was in Rhinebeck. She tells how her father was unusual for a Hudson River millionaire in that he personally involved himself in the operation of his extensive farm. She wrote, “My father was a landsman. I adored him and followed him about as he walked over the farm checking the fences and the animals, inspecting the many buildings and directing the workforce.”

He was also hands-on and caring in his dealings with the community. As Deb and others like Wolfe described him, there was no air of the landed grandee about him. In Sari Tjetjen’s book of local history, Rhinebeck, Portrait Of A Town, she quotes the journal of Fannie Mann Sipperly as saying that Tracy Dows loaned her “father a few thousand dollars and wished him God speed” in his new venture into the plumbing business. And then because he couldn’t start a business without an automobile “Mr. Dows took my father to his estate, taught him to drive...

and threw a Flanders into the deal.” (The Flanders was a predecessor to the Studebaker.) Rip Van Auken, a friend of mine who grew up in Rhinebeck, said recently that a fellow worker at Ankony Farm told him that in the 1930s when Tracy Dows was doing his own cooking, he sent a small bus daily to Rhinecliff to pick up unemployed men, paying them to do odd jobs at Fox Hollow like cutting brush. Rip’s informant told him that it was done primarily to help these unemployed men put food on their tables.

One of Tracy Dows’ favorite ways to involve himself in the community was photography. Photographers are often gregarious men, since they need to engage their subjects, and Thomas Wolfe describes Dows as “easy, friendly, and yet touched with an air of distinguished authority... good-natured seriousness... gruff but genial... ” Tracy Dows’ 22 leather-bound albums containing three to four thousand photographs are picture-book diaries of the early 20th century. There are photos of the Dutchess County Fair, the renovations of the Beekman Arms, farmers working in the fields at Fox Hollow around 1917 with what were then new tractors and many old cars. Dows obviously loved cars. But a majority of the photographs are a record of the vanished life in those “castles” on the river: weddings, tennis being played and children floating on a raft in a swimming pool at Vincent Astor’s Ferncliff Tennis House, and a chronicle of family and social life at Glenburn and Fox Hollow. They are now held by Hudson River Heritage as a gift from Deborah Dows.

In his palmier days, Dows maintained an office and apartment in New York City and spent time at Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia, as well as making numerous trips to Europe, but he was focused enough on local businesses to act as a director of the Rhinebeck Savings Bank, and the Red Hook Phone Company as well as Dutchess Power and Light. Though phone companies and electric companies were inevitably an addition to every community back then, it was unusual for the investors to include one of the cosmopolitan “river people.” More importantly to my mind, Dows was also an investor in Rhinebeck Realty, a corporation of local businessmen who bought property around the edges of Rhinebeck. Because of their interest in local agriculture and in boosting Rhinebeck, Rhinebeck Realty helped bring the Dutchess County Fair to its present location in 1919 by leasing some of its land to the Dutchess County Agricultural Society. Prior to that year, its home had alternated between Poughkeepsie and Washington Hollow. It remains on the same Rhinebeck property to this day.

But Tracy Dows’ abiding interest was the Beekman Arms Hotel. Although he invested in it almost 100 years ago, there are still traces of his presence there today. The copy of a Gilbert Stuart portrait of Margaret Beekman that for many years welcomed guests in the lobby (as a good hostess should) was first placed there during his era. In recent years it has been moved to one of the dining rooms. There are old English prints by John Leach and others in the taproom that once belonged to him. There is also a very old framed photograph of the yacht Mohican that patrolled New York Harbor as the USS AP-117 during World War I. Though I can find no personal connection to this ship, this photograph reflects Tracy Dows’ strong attachment to sailing and the sea and I believe it was first hung above the bar at Mr. Dows’ direction though it now resides on a wall to the side. The historic taproom itself was created out of the old kitchen during Dows’ ownership. He was a man who would have recognized the warmth and ambience of the ancient beams and the soot-stained cooking fireplace.

And of course there’s the facade. The front porch, as Nancy V. Kelly says in her book, Rhinebeck’s Historical Architecture, was built “employing design features of Fox Hollow and Mount Vernon.” I am not the first to say that the hotel is the heart of Rhinebeck, and a principal reason the village still beats with activity today. Without the renovation of Mr. Dows’ architect, Harrie T. Lindeberg, which lifted the less prestigious “saloon” to the level of a distinguished inn, the entire structure might have been demolished as an eyesore and anachronism, as was the Red Hook Hotel in the 1960s. To be replaced with what? A gas station? That was the mood of the 60s: get rid of the old and replace it with the shiny new and practical. Unfortunately, all that remains across the street of White’s Corner, built in 1816 and once the commercial and financial center of the community, is an historical marker. But we can forget that unhappy destruction as long as the “BA,” as Deborah Dows called it, is still there. I believe that it is so important to the village that even citizens who prefer Thai or Chinese cuisine should patronize it at least once or twice a year as a civic duty to insure its continued existence. At the very least, consume a virgin Bloody Mary in the tap room on New Year’s Day. (I have no ties to the hotel nor do I know the owner.).

Another prominent Rhinebeck structure influenced by Dows is the Astor Home. Almost certainly because of Vincent Astor’s friendship with Dows and familiarity with Fox Hollow, Astor picked Lindeberg to design his memorial to his father. The Astor Home on Mill Street was completed in 1913.

I make one more claim for Dows. His interest in history made him naturally proud of his wife’s heritage. According to Frank Blanchard’s History of the Dutch Reformed Church, Tracy Dows helped in placing the two marble plaques in the front of the church on either side of the choir that commemorate Colonel Henry Beekman and his daughter Margaret Beekman Livingston (the woman in the Gilbert Stuart painting at the hotel). He was a longtime member of the Dutchess County Historical Society. This interest in local history is likely to have caused Dows to suggest to Wally Foster, the proprietor in 1917, to commemorate that family by rebaptizing the Rhinebeck Hotel with the Beekman family name. (It probably helped that Dows was an investor and would later take over from Foster, who later opened Foster’s Coach House Tavern.)

Tracy Dows died suddenly in England on July 3, 1937. Fox Hollow was given to his children and the Beekman Arms to his wife Alice. The children were forced to sell Fox Hollow, as it was too expensive to maintain. Alice returned from Washington to live at Glenburn with her son Olin, and sometimes with her daughter Deborah at Southlands. She sold the Beekman Arms to a group of Rhinebeck citizens. Later she lived in a cottage near Glenburn that she called the Garden House, where she died in 1963 at age 82.

Tracy Dows’ legacy was passed on to his children. After her father died, Deborah Dows began teaching children to ride on a portion of Fox Hollow Farm that she retained called “the Southlands.” The high point of her riding program was always the Dutchess County Fair Horse Show, which she faithfully attended year after year. She took her pupils to more prestigious shows, to be sure, but none mattered as much as “the Fair.” Deb told me that her father had been one of the fair’s founders, and if she was stretching a point it wasn’t because she didn’t believe it. So much so that, as she told me, she attempted to attend one of the Agricultural Society’s meetings because she felt she had inherited the right to do so from her father. She still believed it when they threw her out. She had been taught by her father that all of Rhinebeck and its heritage were in her genes, and if Rhinebeck had gone to war with Hyde Park or Red Hook or even Poughkeepsie, Deb would have been the first to arrive at the recruitment center on horseback with musket and canteen, ready to do battle.

Her brother Olin felt the same way, but showed his loyalty in subtler ways. Painting the murals depicting the narrative of Rhinebeck history for the Post Office lobby, a WPA project, was not his only project. He served as president of the school board the first years after it was centralized in 1941. Deb said he was so interested in the pupils’ progress that he sometimes visited the art classrooms to see their work. Once in the ’60s I made the mistake of suggesting to Olin that perhaps it would be best to vote against a school budget—I knew he paid high taxes on his home at Glenburn and that his money was relatively scarce. Usually a gentle man, he turned to me with a stern lecture on the importance of education for Rhinebeck’s children. Paying taxes was like doing military service, he continued—inconvenient but something required of a good citizen, a necessary duty. When he died he left money to St. Mark’s, his prep school; to Harvard, his college, and to the Art Students League. That’s the norm for wealthy citizens. Unusually, he also left money to the Rhinebeck Central School system, even though he had never attended the local public schools and never had any children who might have attended either.

When I met Deborah Dows in 1958, one of the first things I was told was that her house was built on property that had been handed down through the family from a “king’s grant.” She wasn’t bragging about her aristocratic lineage. Dressed in her signature, green, mail-order janitorial trousers and work boots while saddling a horse at her Southlands Farm, it was clear that her goal was keeping alive the history of her land. She valued the simplest of objects for that reason. She owned and valued highly a well-used, comfortable armchair that she called the “Roosevelt chair” because FDR had visited her and sat in it just once. Unfortunately, it was lost in a flea market sale or thrown out after she died in 1994, without any attention paid to its provenance. In Deb’s last year, she asked my wife to rescue a Christmas cactus, which she had tended for over 50 years. Why did she want Gale to save it? Well, just because it was very old; it had a history with her. It is so large today, measuring almost six feet across in diameter, that I can hardly find the strength to move it outside in the spring and back inside in the fall, but it rewards Gale and me with bloom from November until April. Various branches choose to flower as if they were dedicated to a particular holiday season: one large branch at Thanksgiving, another at Christmas and the last few stems at Easter. For us it’s not just another plant; it has a small aura of age and memory that only we can see. In a small way it is something like Rhinebeck—a village that blooms with layers of historical remembrance every season because many citizens, like Tracy Dows, helped preserve its heritage.