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.
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.
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.
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.
Some 85 years later, Malcolm Barlow, the youngest sibling, still remembered the menu that first night. “It was leg of lamb, brussels sprouts, roasted potatoes and apple pie à la Mode,” he said. “A very British dinner.”
If Muncy Farms remains fresh in Malcolm’s mind today, it is because he never really left. Margaret didn’t 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.
At 89, Malcolm is still in the rambling, 11-bedroom farmhouse, as the last surviving sibling. Muncy Farms — even as Malcolm worked and raised a family elsewhere for four decades — became his forever home.
“It is the heart and soul of my dad,” said his daughter, Cricket Barlow, who grew up visiting the property with him. “His world is the farm.”
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.
Malcolm relishes showing the farm off to guests, 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.
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.
Over the next few hours, Malcolm told the story of his family’s life in England before the war, and of coming to Muncy Farms and learning its long history.
From Rolls-Royce to Refuge
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.
In his self-published memoir, “Only One Child,” 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.
The children’s 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’s previous marriage, was 17 and nearing military age, so by government policy had to stay in England.
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.
The children were sent out of harm’s way through the United States Committee for the Care of European Children, which placed several hundred refugee minors with American families to live out the war safely overseas. The group’s chairwoman was Eleanor Roosevelt.
Margaret Brock and her husband Henry, who were childless, pledged to support up to five European children through the evacuee program.
Henry and Margaret
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.
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.
Mr. Brock served three years and two months before he was pardoned by the Pennsylvania governor. And Margaret Burgwin quickly became Mrs. Brock. “PROMINENT PHILADELPHIAN, JUST RELEASED FROM PEN, TO WED PITTSBURGH GIRL,” one headline read in June 1926.
The newlyweds moved to his family’s property, Muncy Farms.
The stone farmhouse was built by Samuel Wallis, a wealthy landowner and rumored British spy during the Revolutionary War who amassed a 7,000-acre estate. In 1806, Muncy Farms was bought by Robert Coleman, an industrialist known as the “iron king” who became Pennsylvania’s first millionaire, and a forebear to Mr. Brock. Thereafter, the estate was passed down in the Brock family, though it shrank in acreage over the generations.
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, and hired a local farmer and gardener to make the property a working farm.
Framed charcoal portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Brock hung over Malcolm’s shoulders on the dining room wall as he spoke of them admiringly.
He never met Mr. Brock.
In fact, when Malcolm and his siblings arrived that dark night in 1940, Mrs. Brock was grief-stricken.
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.
Malcolm said Mrs. Brock was a generous, optimistic person, despite her personal trials. The children called her “Aunt Peg” or “my guardian.”
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 — they’d had fuller lives in England, and felt the loss of leaving more keenly.
“My oldest sister, Susan, always felt we should go back to England,” said Malcolm, adding that she had an unhappy adulthood until late in life.
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 before marrying and starting a family in Miami.
Malcolm served in the Navy and attended Trinity College.
In 1961, Mrs. Brock, dying of leukemia, called the four Barlows back to Muncy. In her will, she wrote that if it wasn’t a financial burden, they should keep the farm, as an anchor in America.
It was not as glamorous and fortuitous as it sounded. “We inherited this huge farm and had no cash,” Malcolm, who was 25 at the time, said. “We were land poor.”
Holding on to the estate for decades hasn’t 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.
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.
‘Rejuvenation’
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.
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’s 69-year-old nephew, Sheila Barlow’s son, lives in the west wing. The two men otherwise share the house.
Like Malcolm, Mr. Schaeffer came to Muncy Farms as a child. After Mrs. Brock died, his mother returned to settle the estate and regroup after a divorce. When Cricket Barlow got divorced in 2015, she stayed with Malcolm for a year while she got her life back together.
“That’s when I really appreciated the farm as a place of rejuvenation,” Cricket said. “I understood why Mrs. Brock said, ‘If you can keep the farm, you will always have a home.’ It felt like home for me.”
As a young banker in New York and Washington, D.C., Mr. Schaeffer used to drive up to Muncy on weekends. “This valley was all farms — no mall, no car dealerships like today,” he said. “Very pastoral. That is a hard thing to get out of you.”
Today, Malcolm and Mr. Schaeffer are co-owners of Muncy Farms. They lease the fields to grow corn and soybeans and rent out four houses on the property for additional income, building on the agriculture business that Malcolm and his three siblings began when they partnered with a local man to run the farm profitably and allow them to maintain the estate.
Susan was the first sibling to die; her share passed to the remaining three. Then Malcolm and Sheila bought out Brian’s share before he died in 2014. When Sheila died in 2020, Mr. Schaeffer inherited his mother’s portion.
Malcolm and Mr. Schaeffer, both divorced and retired, no longer have the demands of career and family, allowing them full-time allegiance to Muncy Farms.
A Mother’s Decision
The uncle and nephew were talking in the unlit dining room. It was originally a summer kitchen, and never wired for electricity. Today, dinner parties held there are lit by candelabra and sconces. “It’s like eating in the 1700s,” Malcolm said.
Mr. Schaeffer excused himself and Malcolm offered a guided tour of the rest of the house. Framed family photos were arranged atop a grand piano in the library.
One photo, dating to the 1970s, was a group portrait of all five Barlow children, including Derrick. He became a glider pilot during the war and was present on D-Day. Though Derrick made his home in England, he visited his half-siblings in America on several occasions, including at Muncy Farms.
On a nearby bookshelf sat a double picture frame — one side was a black and white photo of Mrs. Brock, the other a photo of Violet Barlow, Malcolm’s mother.
It seemed an appropriate time to address a mystery: How did a temporary arrangement for the siblings become permanent? Under the refugee program, evacuated children who came to America returned home to their families after the war.
In Brian’s memoir — and in Malcolm’s telling — there are several explanations.
Though the many letters that Violet and Horace Barlow wrote to their children at Muncy Farms did not reveal it, the couple’s marriage came apart during the war. Too old to serve in the military, Horace was unable to find a job or useful role for himself and grew further depressed at the dissolution of his marriage. In 1943, he died by suicide. The children did not learn of his cause of death until years later, from letters sent to Mrs. Brock by their aunt.
By 1944, Violet was living alone in a London hotel and working for an organization similar to the American Red Cross. She also became a military driver, an exciting job that liberated her from the traditional gender roles of wife and mother.
There were other circumstances to consider. Violet, in her letters to Mrs. Brock, makes clear she believed the children had a better future in America.
For Malcolm, at least, being separated from his birth mother was not a wounding outcome. “I never had much association with my mother,” he said, citing the nannies and lack of physical affection shown by his birth parents. “She was a bit of a stranger.”
After the war, Violet visited her children at Muncy Farms and befriended Mrs. Brock. In one more twist, while crossing the ocean aboard a ship, she met an American man and married him and ended up living in Connecticut.
Returning the photos of the two women to their place on the shelf, Malcolm said, “Aunt Peg became my mother.”
Of all the estate’s residents, going back to the 1700s, Malcolm has now lived there the longest.
It will be up to a future Barlow family member to steward the property as Malcolm has — or perhaps sell and move on.
Steven Kurutz covers cultural trends, social media and the world of design for The Times. More about Steven Kurutz
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