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Jurassic ark, continued


FROM SOUP TO BUCKS

Over the years, Hamilton’s wealth has been variously estimated by Forbes magazine at $930 million to $1.6 billion, with the latest guess an even $1 billion — the same as for her sister, Hope Hill vanBeuren, who has a home in neighboring Middletown.

Both are granddaughters of Dr. John T. Dorrance, a chemist who in 1897 invented the condensed-soup process for his uncle’s Campbell Soup Company. The sisters are part of a trust that, according to Campbell’s proxy statement, controls nearly 12 percent of the New Jersey company’s stock.

Hamilton — or Dodo, as she’s called by friends (a nickname possibly bestowed by childhood companions unable to pronounce Dorrance) — is known as a philanthropist, but details about her personal life are scant. Now in her mid 70s, she has homes in Newport, Florida, and Wayne, Pennsylvania, her base of operations near Philadelphia. Hamilton, who declined, through a representative, a request for an interview, has three children, including Margaret H. Duprey, an SVF Foundation trustee.

The Providence Journal’s G. Wayne Miller, when he was writing a 2000 series about wealthy Newporters, "A Nearly Perfect Summer," wangled a lunch with Dodo.

They dined on asparagus-onion quiche, baked tortilla chips, and a salad with tomatoes FedExed from her Pennsylvania gardens. Dodo and her friend "Oatsie" (Marion Oates Charles) chatted about raising flowers and an upcoming Newport Flower Show, of which Hamilton was chairwoman.

Other bits and pieces show up in news reports. Her husband, Samuel M.V. Hamilton, died in 1997 of cancer. Mrs. Hamilton subsequently donated $3 million to Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University, honoring three doctors who cared for him, and gave $25 million for a university medical-education building.

Kathryn E. Leonard, 59, a one-time public-school teacher, says she got to know Hamilton when she knocked on the philanthropist’s door in the summer of 1997.

Leonard was upset about the "Swiss Village Farm" on Ocean Drive. The parcel — rare, rugged open space in Newport — was suddenly to be auctioned by a federal agency that held the mortgage to the property. Leonard, then a Newport City Council member, says she was afraid the land would fall into developers’ hands and that there wasn’t time for the city to intervene.

The then-councilor says she hardly knew Hamilton, having met her previously at a party, and the butler who greeted her looked skeptical. But Samuel Hamilton encouraged her, and Mrs. Hamilton soon agreed to step into the bidding process, enlisting the help of another wealthy summer resident, A.L. Ballard. Their $1.55 million bid won.

SCOUTING A NEW PURPOSE

Leonard says Hamilton wanted to restore the cluster of historic stone buildings patterned on a Swiss farming community and protect surrounding open space, but wondered what else to do with the property. She asked Leonard for her opinion. This became a pattern as the two got closer, Leonard says. Hamilton would ask about a general problem in the city, and Leonard would act as Hamilton’s "scout" to suggest solutions.

For example, Leonard mentioned that a group was concerned about public access to the Newport waterfront, and the Hamilton Newport Improvement Foundation pledged more than $100,000 for a harbor walkway at King Park; another project organized trips by middle- and high-school students to countries with which Newport has sister-city ties; another established a horticultural program at Rogers High School, training students in landscaping jobs.

Leonard says they’d drive around Newport to look at potential projects (with Hamilton sometimes ducking into a supermarket to check out how Campbell Soup products were displayed). Hamilton later designated her as a trustee of the improvement foundation and began paying her "a small stipend," Leonard says.

As for the Swiss Village, the two women discussed how the property once had been a working farm with livestock, and Leonard contacted officials at Tufts University’s renowned veterinary school in North Grafton, Massachusetts. Leonard had a soft spot for the school because its vets had successfully treated her bull terrier, Patton, for cancer. Conversations with school officials touched on preservation of rare livestock.

Saperstein, the chair of Tufts’s department of environmental and population health, says Hamilton did not jump lightly into the project. "She asked all the right questions," says Saperstein. "She’s not a scientist," he notes, but she has "a great interest in nature," including a passion for flowers, which he saw firsthand while visiting her six greenhouses in Pennsylvania.

In 2002, after four years of discussions, Tufts and the SVF Foundation signed a three-year collaboration, which was recently renewed. The foundation would maintain the farm, bring in animals from around the country, housing them under strict Tufts protocols against disease. Tufts would oversee the harvesting and storage of the germplasm. A two-decade project to save 20 breeds listed as endangered by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy was envisioned.

Which still leaves the underlying question: what makes a mulefoot pig, a Randall lineback cow, or a San Clemente goat worth saving?

The answer, according SVF backers and some national experts, involves a startling loss of diversity in the nation’s commercial-livestock supply.

THE CASE FOR ANTIQUE ANIMALS

Animals favored by modern agribusiness aren’t those happy creatures featured in children’s books. They’re bred to emphasize marketable features: cows that deliver rivers of milk, for example, and pigs that produce uniformly large, low-fat pork chops. Other characteristics, such as resistance to disease or tolerance for heat, have been downplayed, because farmers can compensate with advanced care techniques and medicine. For example, dairy herds are sprayed with water and cooled by fans to help them withstand heat; cows get drugs to help them get pregnant.

"Through better animal health, through better medicine and better control of the environment, we in a way obviated the need to breed these animals for hardiness in resisting negative environmental influences, including disease," says Saperstein. "We have created a very delicate animal."

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Issue Date: September 2 - 8, 2005
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