![]() ![]() Even in his teens, Davis exhibited some of the independence that would make life in Vermont a natural fit. (Davis doesn’t merit a mention in the index of his father’s autobiography, which covers both life on the farm and overseas postings in Turkey, Russia, India and Japan.) His mother also was a writer, and in her own book about life on the farm, she mentioned how she would attach a bell to Davis, so she could hear where he was, and send him outdoors with the dogs, so when she called them back in, Davis would toddle after them, Julie Fago, a friend and neighbor of the couple, said.Īn adopted child, and the youngest, Davis often was sent to boarding schools while his father worked abroad. ![]() Both of his parents were writers, absorbed by their tasks. They called the place Scrivelsby after the name of his family’s ancestral home in Lincolnshire, England, founded in the 12th century by Sir John Dymoke, Marshall Dimock wrote in “The Center of My World,” an autobiography. He married his second wife, Gladys Ogden, in 1940, the same year he bought an old 360-acre farm in Bethel. Marshall Dimock was an economist and political scientist who served as assistant Secretary of Labor from 1938 to 1940 under Frances Perkins, an architect of the New Deal reforms enacted at the end of the Great Depression. If there was a model for the life Dimock and Weber built together, it might be that of Dimock’s parents. “They were also our closest friends,” Kellogg said. “Victoria, in particular, just loved the natural world.” “It meant everything to them,” longtime friend DeRoss Kellogg said of their attachment to their land. But Weber and Dimock were vigorous, buoyed by their work on the land. Weber was 75, Dimock, 76.įor some people, that’s a ripe old age. 13, 2022, in a fire that gutted their home. They also made a mark in Bethel, leading the renovation of the Town Hall, serving on the Town Meeting Committee and, in Weber’s case, writing much of the Bethel Operator’s Manual, a guide to living in town. They took care of Dimock’s parents, lived sparely and groomed their acreage on either side of Christian Hill Road. ![]() Over the next 50 years, Weber and Dimock devoted themselves to a deeply rooted way of life. After a short time they returned to the car, Victoria took her bags out of the trunk, said goodbye to her friend, and essentially never left Scrivelsby again.” Nevertheless, it was one of the most romantic things I have ever seen. Of course, I couldn’t hear what was said. They spoke briefly and then walked off into the woods behind the house. “Even from a second-floor window, I could sense the electricity between them. Rick Kendall, a friend of Davis’ who was staying at Scrivelsby, witnessed the encounter and described it in a tribute video to the couple: It’s unclear how much they’d been in touch between their years in California and that late summer day in Vermont, but something fell into place. 2, 1972, Weber and a friend were on their way to Canada for a vacation and decided to stop in Bethel to visit the Dimocks, not knowing Davis was there. His parents, Marshall and Gladys Dimock, lived on an old farm in Bethel that they called Scrivelsby. This was in the 1960s.Īfter living in California and performing alternative service as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, Dimock came back to Vermont in the early 1970s. BETHEL - Victoria Weber and Davis Dimock first met when they were in college, he at Pomona and she at Pitzer, two small liberal arts colleges in Claremont, Calif., east of Los Angeles. ![]()
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