25 December 1937 Issue, page 11
For some year we’ve had in mind a Christmas visit to Dr. Charles V. Paterno’s country estate, Windmill Manor, at Bedford Hills, and this week, learning that he was to be there and could give us a little time, we drove up. The Doctor has 1,500 acres at Bedford Hills and in 1922 he began the planting of 1,500,000 pine and cedar trees of various species, completing the chore in a few years. We are sorry to have to report that his evergreens have attained such size that they are not salable any more, at least alive. That was the original idea. The enterprising Doctor, who has a medical degree but never had a patient, bought the saplings at a penny apiece, and over a period ending in 1932 sold little Christmas trees in red cans at the rate of thirty or forty thousand a year. They retailed at $1.50 each, including a label reading something like this (the Doctor couldn’t recall exactly): “I am your little Christmas tree. Take good care of me, because if you do I’ll grow bigger and stronger, just like you.” The kids ate this up and Dr. Paterno had a profit annually.
He still has 600,00 trees left. Although the Christmas-tree market was cut off when the trees attained ten feet, the Doctor’s ingenuity wasn’t. There are sixteen miles of bridle paths at Windmill Manor and he set about transplanting 200,000 pines to their flanks. The big idea was that pines are resinous and turpentiney and horseflies are violently antipathetic to resin and turpentine. The result is that in mid-summer, when other Westchester equestrians and their mounts twitch and flinch as the flies buzz merrily, the Paterno guests (the Doctor does not ride himself) jog along in pine-protected comfort. Moving 200,00 trees cost $70,000, but the Doctor doesn’t regret a penny of it. The reason for his may be that he has evolved another scheme, a rather grand-scale one. It’s pretty much of a secret still, but we learned a little about it. Things being what they are generally, the Doctor and some of his outdoors friends are working on a project to turn Windmill Manor into a sort of sportsman’s paradise, right in Westchester. Some four or five years from now – it will take that long to get the place ready – the Doctor expects to reveal to the public a vast playground with facilities for what he considers the four major sports: riding, fishing, golf, and aviation. There are two golf courses already and a third is to be built. Lakes are being created; one has been stocked with 50,000 brown and speckled trout. In due time there will be an aviation field and hangars. One feature of the club will be a blimp taxi service to and from Manhattan with a ship departing from each end every fifteen minutes and a landing field somewhere near Fiftieth Street. We could tell you a little more about his, but you wouldn’t believe it.
Dr. Paterno hasn’t lived at Windmill Manor for the last two or three years, preferring his smaller place at Greenwich, but he runs over there frequently to watch progress. He has two or three hundred men at work now. He drove us by a recently complete concrete dam and noted happily that the lake basin is filing up nicely. We saw several of the windmills from which the place takes its name. There are nine of them all told, each capable of pumping three hundred gallons per minute in a fair breeze. They are not ordinary steel windmills but have huge, colorful stone and wooden towers. No two are exactly alike. We also saw a few of Dr. Paterno’s twenty-five deer. The Doctor is trying to domesticate four that were born last June, and if he succeeds he plans to hitch them to a sleigh and, some Christmas when there’s snow, drive them right down Fifth Avenue.
Link: Additional information & photos of Windmill Farm
Link: More information on Dr. Paterno’s Greenwich home
