George Weymouth, Conservationist, Horse Enthusiast and Bon Vivant, Dies at 79
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Version 0 of 1. In 1967, George Weymouth, a member of the du Pont family and a longtime fixture in fox-hunting, polo, steeplechase and carriage-driving circles, learned that the pristine meadowlands near his home in Chadds Ford, Pa., were going to be developed. “We heard that Disney was coming to buy the lands, then that a nuclear power plant was under consideration,” Mr. Weymouth, known by the nickname Frolic, told The Hunt magazine in 2011. “There was also talk about building a new town of 10,000 people, similar to Columbia, Md. The land developers were thinking of damming up the Buck Run and building lakeside lots. It was unbelievable.” With F.I. du Pont and William Prickett, two friends from the Cheshire Foxhounds, a fox-hunting club in Unionville, Pa., Mr. Weymouth bought two parcels totaling 47 acres and created the Tri-County Conservancy, which became the Brandywine Conservancy. It is now one of the largest land trusts in the United States, overseeing more than 62,000 acres in Chester and Delaware Counties in Pennsylvania and New Castle County in Delaware. Mr. Weymouth died on April 24 at his home in Chadds Ford. He was 79. The cause was complications of congestive heart failure, Andrew Stewart, a spokesman for the conservancy and museum, said. Just months after he bought the parcels near his house, a former gristmill along the Brandywine River came up for sale, and Mr. Weymouth financed its purchase at auction. After restoration work, the conservancy opened the mill in 1971 as the Brandywine River Museum (now the Brandywine River Museum of Art) to preserve and display the work of Andrew Wyeth, a close friend of Mr. Weymouth’s, as well as other members of the Wyeth family and local artists. He served as chairman of the conservancy’s board from its founding until his death. In the early 1980s, Mr. Weymouth worked with the conservancy and a group of local investors to acquire most of the former King Ranch in Chester County, Pa. An outpost of the King Ranch in Texas, it was once known as “the finest finishing school for cattle in the East.” After a long period of tricky negotiations, during which Mr. Weymouth put his home up as collateral, more than 5,000 acres of the ranch were acquired in the form of easements for $11.5 million, with a prime section of about 800 acres, known as the Laurels, going to the conservancy outright. George Alexis Weymouth was born on June 2, 1936, in Wilmington, Del., and grew up in nearby Greenville. His father, George Tyler Weymouth, was an investment banker. His mother was the former Dulcinea Ophelia Payne du Pont, known as Deo. He acquired the nickname Frolic after a family dog that died soon after he was born. He began riding horses as a boy and went on to train and ride show horses, hunters, racers and polo ponies. After graduating from St. Mark’s School in Southborough, Mass., he entered Yale, where he led the polo team to a national championship in 1957. He was not, by his own admission, much of a student. “I couldn’t read and write or spell,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2007. “I still can’t. I don’t know anything but painting pictures and being on a horse.” Nevertheless, he graduated in 1958 with a degree in American studies. That year he played for an intercollegiate polo team in a series of invitational matches and tournaments in England. A last-second goal led to a heartbreaking defeat against a team sent out by the Maharajah of Cooch Behar, but the Americans rallied to beat Cambridge University and eventually win the Gloucestershire Cup. While playing at Windsor, Mr. Weymouth struck up what became a lifelong friendship with Prince Philip, whose portrait he later painted, and who over the years allowed him and his carriage the free run of the royal park in Windsor. After buying an 18th-century stone farmhouse on 225 acres in Chadds Ford in 1961 and renaming the property Big Bend, Mr. Weymouth began collecting antique carriages, which he drove daily. A back injury made riding impossible — he walked with the aid of crutches dating from the Civil War — but he learned to handle four-horse teams expertly. “Driving four horses is not as simple as it looks,” Robert Longstaff, Mr. Weymouth’s longtime coachman, said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s really an art, and he was exceptionally talented at it.” Mr. Weymouth was fond of long-distance carriage expeditions, clocking thousands of miles in the United States, England and France. On one occasion, he took a weeklong trip from the Knickerbocker Club in Manhattan to Saratoga Springs, N.Y., startling residents in Harlem as he passed through and stopping for the first evening at the Tarrytown estate of the banker David Rockefeller, one of his closest friends. For nearly 40 years he played host every May to a carriage parade from his house to the annual steeplechase races in Winterthur, the former du Pont estate in Delaware, followed by a celebration and pig roast at Chadds Ford. In his teens he became friends with Andrew Wyeth, later his neighbor in Chadds Ford, who taught him the technique of egg tempera painting. Mr. Weymouth became an accomplished painter of portraits and landscapes, and a co-conspirator when Mr. Wyeth, in 1971, began painting and drawing his neighbor Helga Testorf, often in the nude, a project he kept secret from his wife. Mr. Weymouth stored the 240 works, later known as the Helga pictures, at his house for 15 years. The secret became public when Mr. Wyeth hinted at the existence of the pictures in an interview with Art and Auction in 1985 and sold them to a collector a year later. A bon vivant and a character, Mr. Weymouth was a toff of the old school, with a global network of friends in high places. He rarely turned on a television, in part because he never mastered a remote control, or light switches, for that matter. He preferred candlelight. Computers he regarded as an abomination. Mr. Weymouth’s marriage to the former Anna Brelsford McCoy ended in divorce. He is survived by his companion, Carlton Cropper; a son, McCoy du Pont Weymouth, known as Mac; a brother, Eugene; a sister, Patricia Weymouth Hobbs; and two grandchildren. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in its 2007 profile, cautioned readers that Mr. Weymouth was “more than an amiable dilettante, amusing swell and flamboyant eccentric” before cataloging his conservation efforts. But Mr. Weymouth did not seem to mind the characterization. “Yes, I love good living,” he said. “Why have a bad time? It’s such a beautiful world, and every day is my oyster. No one has had more fun out of life than I have.” |