Lifestyle matters. Through it we express our unique personalities. It can be a way for us to say who we are, who we want to be, or who we are becoming.
And so we named our hat after someone who expressed that kind of unique lifestyle, Linda Stillman Michonski’s paternal grandmother, Anne Stillman, or as we called her “Auntie Anne”.
She was born into one of America’s wealthiest families. Her grandfather made the first Forbes 400 list and was deemed the 12th richest man in the world. But Auntie Anne broke all the molds of eastern societal wealth and privilege and used her wealth to shatter boundaries, defy norms, and a live an outdoor life on the thousands of acres of her ranch in the Canadian Rockies.
Born at the top of Eastern society as the granddaughter of James J. Stillman, who turned Citibank into the first billion dollar bank, his famous partners lavished wedding gifts on the granddaughter of their banker partner. John D. Rockefeller gave Auntie Anne 400 acres on the North Shore of Long Island and his brother, William Rockefeller, gave her the magnificent home they built named Appledore, now the Mill River Country Club in Brookville, Long Island, New York. Meanwhile, James Stillman gave her a string of perfect white pearls worth $1M back then.
At the ranch her five children and now 12 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren enjoyed family pack trips, wranglers breaking-in horses, cool August evenings around a crackling campfire roasting marshmallows, plucking eggs from the hen house, fishing in Fish Creek (hoping no bears came by) and the sweeping sunsets amidst the majestic Canadian Rockies. The ranch was always packed with guests and so she built the Creek House where we stayed with 8 bedrooms to house us all and our friends.
And through those many years Auntie Anne was rarely seen without one of her cowboy hats. Yes, she may have inherited her mother’s sterling silver saddle studded with real turquoise and preferred it to a million dollar set of pearls, but living her own personality was more important. She liked self- sufficiency and so grew vegetables and raised chickens. She was an environmental conservationist long before today’s environmentalists. She practiced recycling and simple living to keep from polluting our world as little as possible. She enjoyed riding her horses with her children and grandchildren, peering into the crystal clear, glacially fed lakes and streams and tried to keep them pure for generations to come.
In sum, she went from Eastern socialite to Western cow girl, or perhaps more accurately, Western horse girl, all to enjoy the open air freedom provided by the thousands of magnificent acres of pasture and mountains that surrounded the Ranch. And for us, her progeny, that lifestyle, was a relief, an oasis from our own troubles growing up, or the divorces that plagued our family. It was a place where generations could express their sexual preferences freely and were accepted by her family.
Auntie Anne created for herself and her family a lifestyle of self-expression, inward reflection, concern for the world around us, concern for those with less, and a place where each person had the freedom to be who they felt they were.
And so we name our hat after her.
Enjoy your lifestyle with our Stillman hat, whatever it may be.
Her wedding announcement to Harry Davison was front page news in the New York Times as was her wedding day. Her husband became the President of the Morgan Bank following in the footsteps of his father, Henry P. Davison, who was J. P. Morgan’s partner.
Together Anne Stillman and Harry Davison purchased a large Ranch in Canada to hunt and shoot animals for the Natural History Museum on New York City’s West Side and even today you can still enter the first main room and see the animals they hunted from the Ranch and sent back to populate the new museum.
But Auntie Anne preferred horse wranglers to servants, her ranch in Canada to a Long Island mansion, and riding and breeding horses in the fresh air and forever views of the Canadian Rockies to eastern life. So when she and Linda’s grandfather divorced, he kept the North Shore estate and she kept the ranch.
