Psychedelics and the King of LSD: Inside the $65 Million New York Compound With a Trippy History
In the 1960s, an estate in the picturesque village of Millbrook, N.Y., became an unlikely flashpoint in the battle between authorities and someone Richard Nixon called “the most dangerous man in America.”
Timothy Leary, a former Harvard professor and proponent of the benefits of psychedelic drugs, holed up on the roughly 2,000-acre property with his followers at the invitation of the owners, Mellon banking fortune heirs Billy and Tommy Hitchcock. Soon, the Hudson Valley estate became the target of drug raids; there were 90 arrests of people living there between 1966 and 1968, when Leary left the property, according to the book “Old Houses in Millbrook” by the late architectural historian John Foreman.
Leary’s time at the property was “tumultuous, to put it mildly,” Billy Hitchcock, 85, said in an interview. Decades later, with much of the estate remaining in its original late-1800s condition, the family is putting the compound on the market for $65 million. If it sells for close to that figure, the property would set a record for the Millbrook area and the Hudson Valley, said listing agent Heather Croner of Sotheby’s International Realty.
Located about 90 miles north of Manhattan, Millbrook has long drawn some of New York City’s wealthiest families. A 1920s estate built for Margaret Carnegie Miller, the only daughter of industrialist Andrew Carnegie, recently sold for about $8 million, Croner said.
The Hitchcock estate was originally known as Daheim, which is German for “home.” It was cobbled together from 68 parcels of land between 1889 and 1917 by German-born gas mogul Charles Francis Dieterich, according to the book by Foreman, who once lived on the property.
Dieterich expanded a house on the property by adding several new wings and a second, four-story tower. “The result,” Foreman wrote, “was a thirty-eight room Victorian wedding cake, which, despite some vicissitudes of time, survives to this day.”
Dieterich built another mansion at Daheim for his son, Alfred E. Dieterich. That five-bedroom house was designed by the architect Addison Mizner, who later became famous for his Mediterranean Revival-style houses in Palm Beach, Fla. Known as “the bungalow,” the one-story house reflects Mizner’s typically theatrical style, with wood paneling, walk-in fireplaces, hand-painted ceilings and a great room for entertaining.
Dieterich also added a Bavarian chalet-style bowling alley building that still stands today.
“Few cities in America have anything finer to show than the Deiterich estate,” wrote the Millbrook Round Table newspaper in 1900.
The gas mogul died in 1927. His son, whose first wife had run away to France with a coachman, relocated to California and had no interest in keeping the property, according to Foreman’s book. “Alfred Dieterich wanted Daheim like he wanted a hole in the head,” he wrote. The younger Dieterich sold the Millbrook house, and it was used as a private shooting preserve before the Hitchcock brothers purchased it for $500,000 in 1963.
Today, the main house at Daheim looks much like it would have in the late 1800s, said local historian Robbe Pierce Stimson, who lives on the property and has overseen recent upgrades to the estate on behalf of the Hitchcock family. The house has elaborate wood paneling, a carved wooden staircase, stained-glass windows and intricate, though faded, stenciled ceilings. The rooms are large, with high ceilings and ornate fireplaces. The home has also become a receptacle for antique objects such as candlestick telephones and candelabras. In the original scullery-style kitchen, an icebox from the pre-electricity era has one compartment for storing ice and another for keeping food cool. There are 10 bedrooms, including a suite of two bedrooms that connect via a common living room, plus staff quarters, Croner said.
In addition to the two principal residences on the property, the estate includes several guest cottages and a complex of barns. Cattle reared on the property are being sold in advance of a potential sale, Stimson said.
Billy Hitchcock has long lived in Texas. Back in 1963, he said, he was a banker working on Wall Street, and the brothers were originally drawn to the property as an investment opportunity. It was their sister, Peggy Hitchcock, who had suggested he and his brother rent the property to Leary; she had a romantic relationship with the former Harvard professor, he said.
“They only made one Peggy,” Billy said of his sister, who died this year. “She was a real force of life.”
During Leary’s time at the property, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley all visited. “People stayed up all night tripping and prancing around the estate,” according to the book “Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond.” “Everyone was always either just coming down from a trip or planning to take one. Some dropped acid for 10 days straight, increasing the dosage and mixing in other drugs.”
Leary’s longtime professional counterpart, Dr. Richard Alpert, jumped from a second-story window of the main house while high on LSD and broke his leg, the book said.
“Millbrook became the world’s most important site dedicated to the pursuit of psychedelic awakening,” according to the 2018 book “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD.”
Leary eventually drew the ire of then-President Nixon. Raids were spearheaded by then-Dutchess County Assistant District Attorney G. Gordon Liddy, later convicted for his role in the Watergate scandal.
“It was pretty outrageous,” Billy said. “They raided the property one morning and took children out of their beds.”
After Leary left the property, he was imprisoned for a drug charge, but escaped and fled to Algeria. Federal authorities later caught up with him and he served time in Folsom prison next to Charles Manson. When he died in 1996, some of his ashes were shot into space on a Pegasus rocket, according to Foreman’s book.
In the years following Leary’s departure, the main house fell into disrepair due to vandalism and frozen pipes, Foreman wrote. Some of the windows were boarded up, and a fence was built around the house to keep out intruders.
More recently, the property has undergone significant upgrades, said Stimson. Much of the wood and the windows have been restored and the wiring, plumbing and steam systems have also been updated, he said. Still, the property lacks many modern conveniences, including air conditioning.
Operations of the estate were overseen by Tommy, who lived there part-time for years, Billy said. But Tommy died last year, and his shares now belong to nieces and nephews. Billy passed his share of the estate to his children years ago, he said, and the group has now decided to sell.
“This is a really expensive operation to maintain and no one has the wherewithal or the dedication to do that,” Billy said, but added that hopes the property won’t be subdivided or developed.
The highest price ever achieved for a residential property in Millbrook was $18.375 million in 2011, said Croner, though that property was only 286 acres.
Write to Katherine Clarke at [email protected]