Reese Denny Alsop Gilder Palmer
b. 1951
Lifelong Steward of Four Brooks Farm

Living guardian of the Gilder Palmer legacy; has lived, worked, and sacrificed at Four Brooks Farm for more than four decades.
For more than four decades, Reese Denny Alsop Gilder Palmer has lived, worked, and sacrificed at Four Brooks Farm. He inherited the responsibility of daily labor, land management, caregiving, repairs, and the emotional weight of maintaining the ancestral home. He has no children, which makes the preservation of this property even more essential to continuing the family's legacy.
Reese remained on the land through every hardship — weather, isolation, illness, financial strain, and decades of caring for both parents. His life's work has been the protection and survival of Four Brooks Farm.
In recognition of forty-five-plus years of farming, land stewardship, and caring for both Gilder and Anne Alsop Gilder Palmer through illness and old age, Reese was promised all of Four Brooks Farm by his parents. This inheritance was not merely symbolic — it was a direct acknowledgment of his lifelong labor and responsibility.
Today, Reese remains the living guardian of the Gilder Palmer legacy and the central figure in the ongoing effort to preserve Four Brooks Farm as a museum and cultural sanctuary.
Four Brooks Recollections
Readings & reflections from Reese
Reese D. A. Gilder Palmer reads Richard Watson Gilder's poetry and speaks on five generations of stewardship at Four Brooks Farm.
▶Reese D. A. Gilder Palmer Reads "The Poet" by Richard Watson Gilder
▶Reese Gilder Palmer Reads "Builders of the State" by Richard Watson Gilder
▶Reading "A Special Duty To One's Comrade Soldier" by Richard W. Gilder
▶Reading The Gettysburg Address — Memorial Day Tribute at Four Brooks Farm
▶Reese D. A. Gilder Palmer: The Oracle of Four Brooks Farm
▶Reese D. A. Gilder Palmer: Caring For The Gilded Age