Swine Fever

From Peabody to pigs, the Cotswolds Art & Antique Dealers’ Association fair will have much to enjoy

IT is confusing that there were at least three 19thcentury American Peabody families who were famous for their charitable activities—and they don’t seem to have been related to one another. To Britons, the best known of these philanthropists was George (1795–1869), who set up the Peabody Trust that still provides affordable housing in London and the South-East.

He spent much of his career in England and was briefly interred in Westminster Abbey before being shipped for permanent burial in his native Salem in Massachusetts. The other families were in North Carolina and around Boston.

One of the latter was Amy (Amelia) Peabody (1890–1984), who was brought up to be a ‘lady of society’, but became a sculptor and pioneering advocate of solar power. From the 1920s, she bought farms around Dover, Massachusetts, where she bred race horses, white-faced Hereford cattle and Yorkshire pigs.

In 1948, she commissioned the architect Eleanor Raymond to build the solar-powered Dover Sun House and, in 1981, she founded the Amelia Peabody Pavilion, with a large animal clinic.