# Kenneth Newcomer Gilpin

Kenneth Newcomer Gilpin (February 14, 1890 – June 21, 1947) was a military aviator in both World War I and World War II, who served three-terms in the Virginia House of Delegates and bred thoroughbred horses.

## Early and family life and military service

Born in Baltimore to the former Hattie Newcomer (an heiress) and her merchant husband Henry Brooke Gilpin. His father's family could trace their ancestry to the American Revolutionary War and a farm near Bedford, Pennsylvania, as well as the distinguished Brooke family of Maryland. By 1907 his mother desired a country estate, and the family moved to Clarke County, Virginia within four years, after noted Baltimore architect Howard Sill constructed a massive mansion in the America Country Movement style, called Scaleby after the ancestral Gilpin family estate in Britain. Kenneth received a private education suitable to his class, first at Gilman's School, then St. James School. He then traveled to Charlottesville to study at the University of Virginia.
Gilpin met Isabella McGhee Tyson, sister of his Princeton friend McGhee Tyson and daughter of West Point graduate and future Brigadier General and U.S. Senator Lawrence Tyson, when he returned to Charlottesville in 1913 (after graduation) for a party at the University of Virginia near the Officer Candidate's School. They married four years later, shortly before Gilpin (who had privately trained in Plattsburg, New York at a camp for citizen soldiers in 1916, then received a space in the Naval Flying Corps) received orders to fight in World War I as a naval aviator. Tyson was descended from Virginia gentry, and his wife's grandfather had shrewdly exchanged land for railroad stock at the end of the Civil War and became a railroad magnate in Knoxville, Tennessee. McGhee Tyson and his Princetown roommate as well as Kenneth Gilpin all became naval aviators, but neither Princeton man survived the conflict. McGhee Tyson died after crashing into the North Sea a month before the armistice. Gilpin would name one son McGhee Tyson Gilpin (1919–2000) after his friend, and the other Kenneth N. Gilpin II (1923-1996) after himself. Their sister/daughter Betty Brooke Gilpin was born in 1935. Both father and sons would serve in the U.S. Army in World War II, Gilpin as Major in the Air Corps and McGhee Gilpin as captain in Army Intelligence. Kenneth N. Gilpin II became an actor after his military service, as well married Lucy Trumbull Mitchell, the daughter of noted air power pioneer (later Brig. General) Billy Mitchell (1879–1936) and step-daughter of Capt. Thomas Bolling Byrd (1890-1968) whose brother Harry Flood Byrd Sr. (1888-1968) had served as Virginia's Governor and U.S. Senator, and for whom the Byrd Organization was named. Gilpin's granddaughter (McGhee Gilpin's daughter), Drew Gilpin Faust would become President of Harvard University and later write about her experiences of Massive Resistance.

## Career

Upon moving to Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Gilpin bred horses, and was also active in veterans' organization, the Episcopal Church, Blue Ridge Hunt Club, Blue Ridge County Club, Commonwealth Club and Maryland Club.
Voters from Clarke and adjacent Warren county elected him as their representative in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1915, and re-elected him until 1922.
After retiring from politics, Gilpin concentrated on breeding thoroughbred racehorses. He bought Fasig-Tipton, then a venerable auction company (founded in 1898) which had run the Saratoga yearling sales since World War I (their most famous auctioned horse being Man o'War in 1918); on his death in 1958, his son would succeed him, but was less successful and he ultimately left the auction business, instead founding the Stallion Service Bureau in 1960 to act as agent for others, matching thoroughbred dams and sires. Gilpin's most famous stud horse was Teddy, which he imported from France in 1931 and which sired more than 65 stakes winners. Although the Scaleby estate was once 200 acres, by 1941, when Gilpin helped found the Virginia Thoroughbred Association and became its first president, he listed his address as the approximately 50 acre Kentmere estate.

## Death and legacy

Gilpin died on June 21, 1947, during a business trip to Manhattan in New York City. His remains were returned to Virginia, where they were buried in historic Old Chapel cemetery in Millwood. His son McGhee Gilpin would continue the family's thoroughbred breeding enterprises while residing at Lakeville nearby. Scaleby remained owned by Gilpin's descendants until 1986, was placed on the Virginia Landmark Register and National Register for Historic Places in 1990, and is now in the Chapel Rural Historic District. The Gilpin family papers are held by the University of North Carolina.