\n<\/p>\n
In November 1940, four children showed up after dark at a stone farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. They arrived by car down a long dirt driveway. The headlights illuminated the tall elm trees surrounding the manor house, and the rooms inside were lit up brightly.<\/p>\n
Brian, Susan, Sheila and Malcolm Barlow, ages 12 to 5, had just endured the blackout of the London Blitz, the German bombing during World War II.<\/p>\n
To protect her children, Violet Barlow, their mother, had placed them on a boat from England to Canada, a 3,000-mile journey. The children then took a train to New York City, where they spent several weeks in immigration limbo, and then got on another train to the small town of Muncy, Pa.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Awaiting them was Margaret Brock, who owned the farmhouse and country estate called Muncy Farms, dating to 1769 and set on more than 800 acres of fields and woods along the Susquehanna River. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Some 85 years later, Malcolm Barlow, the youngest sibling, still remembered the menu that first night. \u201cIt was leg of lamb, brussels sprouts, roasted potatoes and apple pie \u00e0 la Mode,\u201d he said. \u201cA very British dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n
If Muncy Farms remains fresh in Malcolm\u2019s mind today, it is because he never really left. Margaret didn\u2019t just provide the children a meal that night and a respite from the war. In an unusual twist of events and decisions that Malcolm and his siblings would never fully know or understand until they were adults, they never returned to England. Mrs. Brock became their guardian and she bequeathed them the estate. <\/p>\n
At 89, Malcolm is still in the rambling, 11-bedroom farmhouse, as the last surviving sibling. Muncy Farms \u2014 even as Malcolm worked and raised a family elsewhere for four decades \u2014 became his forever home. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is the heart and soul of my dad,\u201d said his daughter, Cricket Barlow, who grew up visiting the property with him. \u201cHis world is the farm.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
He is the devoted caretaker of the property and the keeper of tales so intriguing that they motivated his brother Brian to pen a memoir.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Malcolm relishes showing the farm off to guests<\/a>, as I learned when I visited Muncy Farms, which is in Lycoming County, near Williamsport, and sits well back off the main road down a tree-lined lane that crosses an old iron railroad bridge. <\/p>\n One cold afternoon in January, Malcolm welcomed me into the center and oldest part of the farmhouse. Tall and bald, with a friendly, patrician manner, Malcolm in his green wool sweater and gray slacks appeared the perfect country gentleman. He led the way through a long, wood-paneled library and into the dining room, where he had prepared a lunch of tuna fish salad on a bed of lettuce followed by raspberry shortcake for dessert.<\/p>\n Over the next few hours, Malcolm told the story of his family\u2019s life in England before the war, and of coming to Muncy Farms and learning its long history. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Malcolm said he was born into the finer things: The Barlow family lived in a rented manor house near the coast in Suffolk, England, with five maids and a governess to watch the children. The money came from Violet, whose father ran a toiletries company. She drove a Rolls-Royce. But the outbreak of the war stripped the Barlows of their wealth, as it did to many European families.<\/p>\n In his self-published memoir, \u201cOnly One Child<\/a>,\u201d the eldest of the Barlow children, Brian, describes how the family moved to a small cottage that was once an infirmary for his boarding school after the British Army commandeered their house for a living quarters. <\/p>\n The children\u2019s father, Horace, had a friend in the American consulate, and the family relocated to London with hopes of securing U.S. visas for the four youngest children. A fifth child, Derrick Steedman, born by Violet\u2019s previous marriage, was 17 and nearing military age, so by government policy had to stay in England.<\/p>\n The imperative to get the children to safety became more urgent in September 1940, when the Germans started the relentless bombing. As air-raid sirens wailed and fiery explosions rocked the city nightly, the Barlow family hid in a basement shelter. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The children were sent out of harm\u2019s way through the United States Committee for the Care of European Children<\/a>, which placed several hundred refugee minors with American families to live out the war safely overseas. The group\u2019s chairwoman was Eleanor Roosevelt.<\/p>\n Margaret Brock and her husband Henry, who were childless, pledged to support up to five European children through the evacuee program. <\/p>\n The Brocks met under unusual circumstances: Margaret Burgwin, a socialite in Pittsburgh and daughter of a banker and lawyer, was doing prison welfare work. Henry Brock was in prison.<\/p>\n The scion of a prominent Philadelphia family of bankers and industrialists, Mr. Brock was involved in a car accident in Philadelphia in 1923 that killed three pedestrians. The case became a society scandal in the press.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Brock served three years and two months before he was pardoned by the Pennsylvania governor. And Margaret Burgwin quickly became Mrs. Brock. \u201cPROMINENT PHILADELPHIAN, JUST RELEASED FROM PEN, TO WED PITTSBURGH GIRL,\u201d one headline read in June 1926. <\/p>\n The newlyweds moved to his family\u2019s property, Muncy Farms.<\/p>\n The stone farmhouse was built by Samuel Wallis, a wealthy landowner and rumored British spy during the Revolutionary War<\/a> who amassed a 7,000-acre estate. In 1806, Muncy Farms was bought by Robert Coleman<\/a>, an industrialist known as the \u201ciron king\u201d who became Pennsylvania\u2019s first millionaire, and a forebear to Mr. Brock. <\/span>Thereafter, the estate was passed down in the Brock family, though it shrank in acreage over the generations. <\/span><\/p>\n Henry and Margaret undertook a major renovation of the manor house, importing a massive breakfront from a European castle and hand-painted Chinese wallpaper. They filled the home with antiques and art acquired on travels<\/a>, and hired a local farmer and gardener to make the property a working farm. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Framed charcoal portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Brock hung over Malcolm\u2019s shoulders on the dining room wall as he spoke of them admiringly. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He never met Mr. Brock. <\/p>\n In fact, when Malcolm and his siblings arrived that dark night in 1940, Mrs. Brock was grief-stricken.<\/p>\n Three weeks before the Barlow children were due in Muncy, Mr. Brock died suddenly of appendicitis at age 54, leaving Mrs. Brock a grieving widow to care for this brood of strangers. <\/p>\n Malcolm said Mrs. Brock was a generous, optimistic person, despite her personal trials. The children called her \u201cAunt Peg\u201d or \u201cmy guardian.\u201d<\/p>\n As the baby, Malcolm was doted on by Mrs. Brock, with good intentions but to the possible detriment of his older siblings who also needed the attention. Brian and Susan, fraternal twins, were 12 when they made the life-changing journey, and Sheila was 10 \u2014 they\u2019d had fuller lives in England, and felt the loss of leaving more keenly. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMy oldest sister, Susan, always felt we should go back to England,\u201d said Malcolm, adding that she had an unhappy adulthood until late in life. <\/p>\n Instead, Mrs. Brock adopted them, and the Barlows became Americans. She paid for their educations in boarding schools and later universities. Brian served in the U.S. Army, married and had three children and became a schoolteacher in the Philadelphia area. Susan, who never wed or had children, worked as a librarian at a private school, also near Philadelphia. Sheila worked in the 1950s for the New York fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo<\/a> before marrying and starting a family in Miami.<\/p>\n Malcolm served in the Navy and attended Trinity College. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1961, Mrs. Brock, dying of leukemia, called the four Barlows back to Muncy. In her will, she wrote that if it wasn\u2019t a financial burden, they should keep the farm, as an anchor in America.<\/p>\n It was not as glamorous and fortuitous as it sounded. \u201cWe inherited this huge farm and had no cash,\u201d Malcolm, who was 25 at the time, said. \u201cWe were land poor.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Holding on to the estate for decades hasn\u2019t been easy. Initial attempts to farm the land and raise cattle were hindered by drought, a barn fire and bad financial decisions. And there were differing levels of interest in the farm among the siblings.<\/p>\n Malcolm kept his day job: He worked as an executive for a pharmaceutical firm that became GlaxoSmithKline, now GSK, and settled in Philadelphia with his wife, his daughter Cricket and his son Peter. But in 40 years, he never bought a house there, and he returned to Muncy Farms every chance he could. <\/p>\n Muncy Farms is a magnificent property, inside and out, fit for the black-tie affairs that Malcolm still throws every Christmas, as he has for decades. <\/span><\/p>\n The farmhouse is divided into three areas, the oldest, middle section and east and west wings. Malcolm resides in the original part of the house. John Schaeffer, Malcolm\u2019s 69-year-old nephew, Sheila Barlow\u2019s son, lives in the west wing. The two men otherwise share the house.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nFrom Rolls-Royce to Refuge<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Henry and Margaret<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018Rejuvenation\u2019<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n