End of line for historic Old Drovers Inn

DOVER  PLAINS, N.Y. — The Old Drovers Inn, where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton fled from photographers in 1962 and generations of prep school students dined with their parents, has been foreclosed on and will be on the auction block on June 25 at the Poughkeepsie courthouse.

Built in 1750 to put up drovers herding cattle on the trail from Vermont to New York, the inn, outbuildings and more than 10 acres of land will be sold to the highest bidders.  

Two-hundred-fifty years ago, drovers inns dotted the roads of New England.  Most of them burned or closed down long ago, leaving the Old Drovers Inn to cater to a sophisticated breed of traveler who appreciated the beamed bar in the basement with its strong drinks and crackling fireplace, the murals in the dining room, the quaint guest rooms upstairs that had no air conditioning.

Those who ate there remember it fondly.

“We loved going to the Old Drovers,� commented Marilyn Moller, a weekend Lakeville resident. “Good food, friendly bar, a vintage Colonial-era dining room that managed to be informal.�

Despite its legendary candlelit dining room, culinary awards, gleaming wide-board floors, cheddar cheese soup and popovers, the current owners failed to make a go of it.

The inn lost its liquor license in June 2009 and ceased operating sometime that fall.

Rafael Hasid is chef-owner of Miriam, a restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, N.Y., that specializes in Israeli cuisine. Hasid operated the Old Drovers restaurant for its Brooklyn-based real estate investor owners until after Valentine’s Day in 2009.  

“The big crash of the economy was the problem,â€� Hasid said in a phone interview last week.  “People didn’t come.

“I wish it could have worked. The building was so old and so expensive to maintain, and it’s so difficult to get anything fixed upstate.�

Opened as the Clear Water Inn, Drovers was in fact the oldest continuously operating inn in the United States. But because of its name change, The Beekman Arms in Rhinebeck officially claims that honor.  

George Washington never slept there but General Lafayette did, during the Revolutionary War.

John Preston built the inn in the 18th century, and since then it has had only four owners.  The Preston family operated it for almost 170 years, then sold it to the Potter family in the 1920s. They updated the facilities and the Drovers became known as the “21â€� Club of the countryside; its famous turkey hash was created to rival the renowned chicken hash at Manhattan’s “21â€� Club.  

The candlelit dining room was supposedly featured in an Irwin Shaw short story written for The New Yorker in 1940 called, “Free Conscience, Void of Offence.â€�  Some locals say these words were written on the sign over the bar during the era of Prohibition — when Old Drovers served but did not charge for liquor, and depended on patron donations for bar revenues.

Alice Pitcher, who is now the innkeeper at the Lion and Lamb in Barnstable, Mass., said she and Kempner Peacock purchased The Old Drovers in 1988 — and within four years the partners succeeded in having the inn designated as a Relais & Chateaux property, including it among the most prestigious hotels and restaurants in the world. Paul Newman was a regular. Mick Jagger dropped by. Barbara Streisand and James Brolin dined in the library by themselves.

After an acrimonious split of the partners, the property was sold in 2005 to a Brooklyn, N.Y., real estate investor, Boaz Gilad, who is the author of “The Real Estate Millionaire: How To Invest in Rental Markets and Make a Fortune.�

After that, “It was not like it used to be, nothing was happening,� according to Dover resident Joy Godin, whose great-great-grandmother lived at the inn in 1850.

Waitresses complained at Dover Town Hall that their paychecks bounced. There was no heat in the winter. The pipes burst.

“Nothing was repaired because no one was making money,� Godin theorized.

According to Pitcher, the new owners were rarely on the premises —  and didn’t understand the maintenance demands of a “working museum.â€� Making matters worse, they fired the experienced staff. “They had a fantasy about owning history but didn’t pay attention to the details,â€� Pitcher said.

Sometime last year, the owners simply abandoned the property. Dishes and cookware were left out on the counters, food was left to rot in the walk-in refrigerators. All the bedrooms were left neatly made up, as though guests were expected at any moment.

Dessert plates in the kitchen still had bits of cake left on them.

With no electricity in the building, the rooms remained dark and musty and mold and mildew had grown on soft-surfaced items such as chairs and drapes. Even the old wood beams and the massive wood bar were coated with visible spores.

The property is being foreclosed on by TD Bank NA (a subsidiary of Toronto Dominion Bank, Canada’s second largest banking institution), which conducted an appraisal of the contents and of the building itself.

Most of the furnishings and the books in the large library were tossed into a Dumpster —  neighborhood residents climbed in and rescued many of them.

The centuries-old building itself is in questionable condition. An appraisal prepared for the bank indicates that it would cost about $215,000 just to fix essentials such as the septic system, exterior shingles and facades and the HVAC system.

Asked whether she thought the inn and its contents would sell well at auction, Pitcher responded, “How many people are there with money and no brains?�