Last hurrah for historic Liseter Hall Farm
Home to top race horses, hunters, Welsh ponies, and show horses since the 1920s, the du Pont family’s Newtown Square, Pa., farm will likely give way to a developer’s grand scheme
by Michael Yockel.

About one-third of the way through Seabiscuit, the 2003 screen adaptation of author Laura Hillenbrand’s bestseller, the equine hero prepares to square off against a stellar field in the 1937 Santa Anita Handicap.

“The horse to worry about,” Seabiscuit’s trainer, Tom Smith (actor Chris Cooper), tells the horse’s jockey, Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire), “is Rosemont.” As his words trickle out, a bay draped in a blue cooler trimmed in gold with “Fox­catcher Farms” stitched in gold script ambles past on-screen.

Cut immediately to the horses loading into the starting gate, and the camera hovers for a few seconds on Rosemont’s sapphire blue silks with a gold fox emblazoned across the rider’s chest. Moments later, in a dramatic finish, Rosemont, spotting Seabiscuit 10 pounds, catches his chief rival in the final jump to win by a nose, just as he did in real life.

Foxcatcher Farms stable, Rosemont, and those distinctive blue-and-gold silks belonged to William du Pont Jr., one of Thoroughbred racing’s bona-fide Brahmins. Active in the game since 1921, when he campaigned his first race horse, Foxcatcher, in timber events, William (Willie) du Pont Jr., scion of the fabulously wealthy Delaware banking/gunpowder manufacturing family, already had established a reputation as a knowledgeable horseman via Shetland ponies as a boy, and, as a young man, via show horses, hunters and steeplechasers.

Du Pont’s Rosemont, his 1923 Travers Stakes winner Wilderness, his filly Fair Star (top juvenile money-earner of 1926), and many other successful race horses were trained in the 1920s and ’30s at the vast and verdant Liseter Hall Farm, located 15 miles west of Philadelphia in Newtown Square, Pa. There du Pont lived with his wife, the former Jean Liseter Austin, in a sumptuous, three-story Georgian mansion that was a replica—right down to its four-columned portico—of Montpelier, the magnificent central Virginia estate built by James Madison Sr., father of the fourth President of the United States, in 1760, and purchased in November 1900 by du Pont’s father, William Sr. Born in England in 1897, Willie du Pont grew up at Montpelier.

William Sr. built Liseter Hall for Willie and Jean in 1925 on more than 600 acres of land given to the couple as a wedding gift in 1919 by Jean’s father, William Liseter Austin, an executive of Baldwin Loco­motive Works. Willie’s race horse operation, including a half-mile training track, began there in earnest as soon as the couple moved in, thriving until the late 1930s, when du Pont relocated his stable to his family’s Bellevue Hall estate in Wilmington. The du Ponts divorced in 1940, but Jean Austin du Pont maintained Liseter Hall Farm until her death in 1988, at which point Willie and Jean’s son John Eleuthere du Pont assumed stewardship and renamed it Foxcatcher Farm.

Liseter Hall/Foxcatcher boasts a varied history. In addition to its early renown as a launching pad for Rosemont and a passel of other prominent race horses, over the intervening years the farm has functioned as a home to hunters, show horses, jumpers, champion Welsh ponies, Standardbreds, prize-winning Guernsey dairy cows, a pack of pure-bred beagles, the Thoroughbred stallions Two Davids and Tricky Mister, a museum devoted to an extensive collection of restored antique carriages, and a training center for Olympic wrestlers, pentathletes, triathletes and swimmers. Also, notoriously, it served in 1996 as the venue for the high-profile murder of Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler David Schultz by a deranged John du Pont and the two-day siege by a police SWAT team that followed the killing.

In the future, if a Haver­town, Pa.-based development company has its druthers, the farm’s mansion, training track, and more than half of its 30-some barns, sheds and outbuildings—at least one of which dates from the early 18th century, and nearly all of which have been spray-painted flat black—will be replaced by a “high-end, age-restricted adult community.”

“Oh, this was quite a place in its day,” noted Charles (Chuckie) King Jr., who has lived and/or worked at the farm for most of his 52 years. King succeeded his father, Charles Sr., in caring for Jean Austin du Pont’s horses before starting his own operation, Foxwatcher, on the premises in 1980. “Right here,” he said, pointing to a long ridge of stone blocks slightly protruding from the ground just outside the farm’s main barn, where Two Davids, Tricky Mister, and a host of broodmares, 2-year-olds, yearlings and weanlings reside, “you can see what remains of the foundation of Willie’s indoor galloping track, one of the first in existence, a quarter-mile in circumference.”

In the 1920s and ’30s, Liseter Hall was considered the ne plus ultra of Mid-Atlantic horse facilities. In addition to the indoor galloping track, the farm featured a large barn for race horses; a 40-foot-wide by 120-foot-long indoor riding ring, still used by King for breaking and schooling; the half-mile training track and its adjacent combination viewing stand/water tower; a breeding shed, which continues to host matings for Two Davids and Tricky Mister; a hunter barn; a show horse barn; a loading barn with ramps for transporting horses to competition; and a grassy, half-mile chute that connected the training track with the race horse, hunter and show horse barns. At the time, all of the farm’s structures bore an approximation of du Pont’s Foxcatcher silks: yellow with blue trim.

“It was beautiful, a lovely place,” recalled Jean Ellen du Pont Shehan, Willie and Jean’s daughter, now 82, who grew up at Liseter Hall. “When I was little, I used to walk the timber course in the front field with my father, and I would have to run every inch of the way because he had a mile-eating stride.”

At five feet, nine inches tall and 132 pounds, Willie du Pont cut a gaunt figure, on the ground or in the saddle. An expert rider, he galloped many of his own Foxcatcher runners at Liseter Hall, where he also broke and schooled yearlings. To augment his operation, he purchased 540-acre Walnut Hall Farm in northern Virginia in the mid-1920s, where he set up the stable’s breeding division. In 1926 he relocated his pack of foxhounds from his boyhood home at Montpelier to 1,000 acres he bought in Fair Hill, Md., riding there as Master of the Foxcatcher Hounds for three decades until 1957, when he segued into a joint-Master arrangement with his daughter Jean.
His Foxcatcher stable, mean­while, sent out an array of Thoroughbred winners: In addition to his Santa Anita Handicap triumph, Rosemont took the 1935 Withers Stakes, beating that season’s Triple Crown winner, Omaha; *White Clover II scored in the 1932 Suburban Handicap; Dauber accounted for the 1938 Preakness; and Ruler—du Pont’s first homebred stakes winner—won successive runnings of the Brook Steeplechase in 1929 and 1930.

With the dissolution of his marriage in the late 1930s, du Pont packed up his indoor riding ring and main barn from Liseter Hall, and shipped everything, including his race horses, to the 328-acre Bellevue Hall, whose main house he retrofitted to resemble Montpelier (an apparent obsession), and where he built a one and one-eighth mile training track. Foxcatcher didn’t pause to catch its breath, as du Pont’s homebred Fairy Chant was named 1941’s champion handicap distaffer. Later, his Parlo copped handicap filly and mare honors in 1954, and Berlo, a granddaughter of Rosemont, claimed the champion 3-year-old filly title in 1960.

Equally active behind the scenes, du Pont applied his equine connoisseurship to race track design, fashioning a handful of hunt and steeplechase courses throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, notably the one at Fair Hill, for several decades now the site of an annual meet for both jumpers and flat racers. In the mid-1930s, he designed Delaware Park’s one-mile dirt oval, as well as its original pair of stee­plechase courses; he also put together the group of busi­nessmen who financed the track, while helping to author the legislation that brought racing to the state.
When the Thoroughbred Club of America paid tribute to du Pont in 1948, it characterized him as “a man who can run a bandage, exercise a horse, ride a race, design a stable, breed a top-class runner, build a race track and write a perfect piece of legislation.”

LISETER HALL UNDER JEAN AUSTIN DU PONT
No less adept than her husband with horses, Jean Austin du Pont showed her first pony at the 1907 Devon Horse Show, winning a blue ribbon and a trophy, and proceeded to return for 78 straight renewals, ultimately amassing thousands of ribbons, trophies, cups, plates and whatnot that filled glass display cases and decorated the walls at Liseter Hall. Many of those were for her Welsh ponies, widely acknowledged to be the best in the United States.

“She raised section-A Welsh ponies—the smaller ponies,” explained King, who cared for the horses from the time he was a boy. They stood four feet high at the withers. She began breeding and raising them at Liseter Hall in 1928, and at one time, King continued, “She kept as many as 250 of them on the farm, with 50 new foals each year.” Well into her 80s, du Pont appeared at the Devon show driving an antique carriage pulled by a team of four matched ponies, and assembled a much-admired collection of carefully restored carriages, wagons and other horse-drawn conveyances in Liseter Hall’s carriage house.

She also kept hunters, which she rode sidesaddle in boots and breeches with a skirt, at the nearby Radnor Hunt and other regional events; bred and raised a matched pack of 13-inch-high beagles (as opposed to the breed’s usual 15-inch dogs), showing them at various meets and competitions, including the Westminster Dog Show at Madison Square Garden in New York City; and, from her teens, attended to a prize-winning dairy herd started by her father on the estate shortly after he acquired the land in 1916. As for race horses, well, she left them to Willie, before and after their divorce.

He remained active right up until his death at age 68 on December 31, 1965—“Daddy had impeccable timing,” joked Shehan, “taking income tax into consideration”—with Foxcatcher Stable’s Perfect Sky capturing the California Derby at Golden Gate Fields earlier that year. A spectacular Fasig-Tipton dispersal sale of 51 Foxcatcher horses—stallions, brood­­mares, yearlings and horses of racing age—held at Timon­­ium less than two months after his death set new sales records for the era, featuring the highest price ever paid for a horse at auction up to that time: $235,000.

Three of du Pont’s children—John du Pont, Jean du Pont McConnell (as she was known then) and Evelyn du Pont Donaldson—and his sister, Marion du Pont Scott, snapped up 21 head, with John paying that $235,000 for the 9-year-old mare Berlo, in foal to Cohoes. En toto, he spent $767,000 for seven horses, including $215,000 for the 4-year-old filly Rose Trader. The four du Ponts shelled out a total of more than $1.5 million. (As King pointed out, however, the big winner that day was Rokeby Stable’s Paul Mellon, who bought only one horse, paying $175,000 for the 7-year-old broodmare All Beautiful, a daughter of Parlo in foal to *Ribot. That spring she foaled Arts and Letters, Belmont Stakes winner, 1969 Horse of the Year and a notable broodmare sire.)
Eventually, Willie du Pont’s various horse farms were sold, too. In 1966, daughter Jean bought Walnut Hall in Virginia, hanging on to it until 1978, when she moved to Coral Gables, Fla. The State of Maryland purchased Fair Hill in 1974, converting the sprawling estate—by then 5,700 acres—into an equine training complex and a natural resource center. Two years later, the State of Delaware acquired Bellevue Hall, turning it into a public park and banquet facility.

Back at Liseter Hall, Jean Austin du Pont maintained her ponies, hunters, dogs and cows, while son John set about attempting to inaugurate a breed­ing/racing operation. At the Timonium dispersal sale, trainer Frank (Downey) Bonsal, advising John, had told reporters: “Mr. du Pont is just getting started in the business. He likes fox­hunting and beagling, and now he has bought himself some breeding stock.”

John, however, fared poorly. The pricey Berlo produced for John only two foals, neither whom raced. And while he experienced some minor successes on the track with horses he bought from South America through Florida-based trainer Arnold Winick, du Pont never seemed fully engaged by the sport. He liquidated his holdings by the late 1970s.

Associating with Olympians for the modern pentathlon (riding, swimming, fencing, shooting, running) and triathlon (swimming, shooting, running) gave John du Pont more pleasure, and in 1966 he constructed an Olympic-sized pool at the farm, while founding and funding what he called the Foxcatcher Swim Club. Those interests flagged, too, and in the 1980s he turned his attention to sponsoring U.S. Olympic wrestlers, devoting his time, energies and, most important, money to the task. By the time Jean Austin du Pont died at the age of 91 in August 1988, John had established a state-of-the-art wrestling training center, sparing no expense.

But untethered from his mother, du Pont gradually became unhinged: He heard things in the walls; believed that intruders entered the house through tunnels; persuaded himself that, somewhere in the mansion, a device existed that sprayed an oil that could make people disappear; called in a ghost-busting psychic and a holy-water-dispensing Catholic priest for consultation; and ordered a big dig in an area behind the house in an effort to locate the body of a maid who once worked at Liseter Hall, convinced that she had been murdered. Simultaneously, he continued to pour millions into supporting the wrestling team, inviting many of its members to live—as well as train—at what he now called Foxcatcher Farm.

Du Pont’s condition steadily worsened. He suspected aliens were spying on him. He believed mechanical trees grew on the property. He claimed to be the Dalai Lama, the president of Bulgaria and the Holy Child. On one occasion he drove a car with a wrestler passenger into the farm’s pond. He amassed an arsenal of guns and ammunition, always packing a piece on his person. Finally, in late January 1996, his dementia turned violent as he pumped three bullets into his friend Dave Schultz, a 1984 gold medal Olympic wrestler who served as a coach for du Pont’s star-studded Team Foxcatcher wrestling club. One year later, a jury, after dismissing at the last minute a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity defense, convicted him of third-degree murder, and shortly thereafter he received a sentence of 13 to 30 years in prison or a mental-health facility.
He is incarcerated at Cresson State Prison near Altoona, Pa.; the earliest possible date for his release is January 2009.

After his arrest, du Pont initiated the breakup of his family’s Newtown Square establishment. Eight years earlier, only two months after Jean Austin du Pont’s death, her remaining Welsh ponies, 91 of them, were sold at auction, as stipulated in her will. Many, including a 7-year-old stallion who went for $90,000, were purchased by her son and John’s brother, William Henry du Pont. She had given her beagle pack to Billy King (Chuckie’s cousin), longtime huntsman for the Radnor Hunt, in the mid-’70s.

Piece by piece, John jettisoned the remainder of Liseter Hall/Foxcatcher. First to go: his mother’s dairy herd, nearly 70 Guernseys, in the fall of 1996. Next, the dairy farm itself, sold by the Delaware Museum of Natural History, which he formerly headed, in January 1998. Since then, the land, where Jean Austin du Pont’s cows grazed contentedly for the better part of the 20th century, changed hands again, and now is slated to become the campus for a relocated prep school, as well as a community of new million-dollar-plus homes. That left only the 400-plus acres of Foxcatcher Farm.

BLACK BARNS SIGNAL FARM’S FINAL DAYS
Over the years, the colors of the farm’s barns have reflected the operation’s shifting ownership, beginning with William du Pont Jr.’s yellow with blue trim. Post-divorce, Jean Austin du Pont re-did them in white with green trim. Upon his mother’s death, John restored the barns to his father’s colors. But following his murder conviction, he issued a strange decree: Gripped by a paranoia that burglars would descend upon the farm and loot the place, he decided to “paint everything black,” explained King. “He said, ‘That way, they will disappear.’ ”
A cadre of workers followed du Pont’s eccentric directive. But rather than first scrape the peeling barns, the usual procedure, they merely spray-painted about two dozen structures matte black, including an old stone house where King once lived, the training track’s viewing stand/water tower, and the main barns. The project was abandoned just before all of the buildings were finished.

Du Pont’s wish for Foxcatcher’s buildings to “disappear” is about to be granted, at least in part. This past March the Rouse Group Development Company agreed to purchase the farm’s remaining 416 acres from du Pont for an undisclosed amount (speculated as $60 million), and in June it unveiled before the Newtown Planning Commission its intent to build what it terms “a high-end adult community” called Ashford on the property—650 “age-restricted” homes. According to the scheme outlined by Rouse Group officials before the planning commission, the gated community will permit only residents 55 and older, who will live in five different types of housing, ranging from single-family homes (at approximately $1 million apiece) to manor homes consisting of 10 units.

Additional plans call for dedicating 260 acres to open space, while preserving 95 percent of the farm’s existing trees, as well as sparing the Georgian mansion, two horse barns, two greenhouses, a pair of homes, a springhouse, a smokehouse, and the carriage house. All other structures, painted black or otherwise, will be leveled. (Through its attorney, Rouse Group officials declined comment for this article.)

More than a few Newtown Square residents have voiced alarm about Ashford.
“It’s very distressing to me,” lamented Jan Elston, a native of the town, a board member of Newtown Square Historical Preservation Society and co-author of the society’s book Early Beginnings of Newtown Square. “They’ve promised open space, but it’s not even going to be visible to the residents of Newtown. I’m very concerned about the streams and the springs that originate on that property. It’s pristine property, the same as it was in colonial days. It’s never been disturbed.” (In fact, Pennsylvania patriarch William Penn laid out Newtown Square in 1681 at the intersection where the former du Pont estate begins.)

Foxcatcher’s sale effectively ends the du Pont presence in Newtown Square. And given the ongoing development of housing on adjacent farmland previously owned by others, the area’s rural character will soon change dramatically.

“They’ve been wrecking my town for year after year after year,” Elston said of developers, “but at least you could go in some directions and still see green.” Now, with the advent of Ashford, “That’s not going to happen anymore.”

With the clock ticking, King already has begun a search for a new farm as a venue for his Foxwatcher; alternatively, he might decide to manage an existing horse operation for someone else. “It will be sad to leave,” King admitted, looking out over the farm’s training track.

For her part, Jean Ellen du Pont Shehan, who grew up at Liseter Hall soaking up horsemanship from her gallop-them-yourself father and sidesaddle-riding mother, remains philosophical about the demise of the estate. “It’s a tremendous area there, a lot of open wild land,” she noted. “But cities are moving out, communities are developing. Of course, I can remember when it was all country there. It’s sad. I would hope that all of the main structures wouldn’t be pulled down, but if they are, they are. There’s nothing I can do about it.”