Betty and Bradley Cohn
BROOKLINE — For fifty years Elizabeth Riera Cohn (1917-2014) was the secretary and treasurer of the NewBrook Horse Show. The horse-loving Philadelphia blue-blood transplanted to New York City was recruited as secretary by George Ware while she was on a weekend stay at his West River Camp.
In 1965 she and her horse-loving husband, patent attorney J. Bradley Cohn (1920- 2004) bought West River Lodge and its stable of riding horses. Betty Cohn, a corporate librarian, would blithely ride her Morgan, Sir Lancelot, down Pent Road (now Ellen Ware Road), reins in one hand, a Newport cigarette in the other.
After George Ware's passing, Betty Cohn also became the show's de facto manager but hired one as a figurehead for show day, said Sue Lathrop, who once performed that duty. As a teenager in the 1960s Lathrop attended her first NewBrook show with her father, a doctor who bred and showed Morgans.
Betty and Bradley Cohn, who for years was the show's announcer, used to host multi-day Spring and Fall trail rides where riders were met in sylvan settings with a uniformed waitress who served “luncheon” on white tablecloths set with the dining room service.
Every New Year's Eve, the couple hosted an open house soiree at West River Lodge.
After the midnight toast, the couple would head out to the barn to bring their Morgans into the house, Lance, up the porch steps, through the office screen door into the living room to stand before the brick hearth and Lippman Hawk into the kitchen to drink champagne from the giant silver George Gobel trophy he'd retired at the National Morgan Horse Show in Northampton, Mass. for winning a trotting race three years in a row.
Terry and Nick Keizer, current operators of the re-named West River Inn Bed and Breakfast, have embraced that equine New Year tradition.
George C. Ware
In a 1969 profile of George C. Ware, Brattleboro Reformer editor John S. Hooper called him a great horseman. He described how in 1967, at age 87, Ware was called upon by former Gov. Deane Davis, himself a horseman, to drive a team of Morgans hitched to an antique carriage at Montreal's Expo '67 as part of the Cavalcade Americana extravaganza Davis organized.
Ware accepted and performed before 25,000 people a day.
“That was some horse show!” he quoted Ware as saying.
Hooper, who boarded his Standardbred mare at West River Camp's stable, noted that Ware made his own harnesses. And when Ware was Brookline's Road Commissioner in 1905, Hooper wrote, he would groom the roads behind a six-horse hitch.
George C. Ware bred and trained a four-in-hand team of grade Morgan horses, Chick, Chuck, Seagin and Tristan. All four brothers and their sister, Princess, lived into their thirties and were buried at the lodge beside their dam, Regina.
People remember him leading his Thoroughbred mare, Regina, with a foal beside her every year down the Pent Road to be bred again to Anna Ela's famous Morgan stallion, Sealect, at the Townshend Morgan Farm.
The NewBrook Horse Show, his creation, honors him with the George C. Ware Trail Horse Class.