Hampton Style - May 9, 2008 -

Kristina Davison's interest in the neighboring Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories comes with some amount of precedent on both sides of her family. Her grandfather founded the Perkin-Elmer Corporation, which later spawned the company Celera Genomics, an integral part of both the Human Genome Project and the creation of the Hubble Space telescope.

She also finds brainy leanings within the five generations who have lived at Peacock Point, the ancestral home of her husband, Harry. His grandparents' scientific curiosity led the couple to bag many of the great animals now housed in the Museum of Natural History; Kate Davison was particularly proud of having brought in the Bengal tiger using a 500-guage shotgun while on safari in India. Brave women in the family were accompanied by equally swashbuckling men. In 1916, Kate's husband Trubee made Peacock Point the training site for "The Yale Unit," a Navy-sanctioned airborne militia he created from two dozen of his Yale classmates. This was the nation's first makeshift air force, conceived in the midst of WWI, when millionaires were uniquely qualified to envision aviation-fueled combat (they were among the few people who owned planes back then, and largely the only ones who knew how to fly them). Charles Lindbergh was a great friend of the Davisons and chose to set down at Peacock directly after landing his famed trans-Atlantic flight in 1927.

The family patriarch, Harry Davison, told his children that without a constant place, there can be no family rituals. He hand-tooled Peacock Point to create that sense of belonging for his descendants. Some 98 years after the compound's creation, family rituals include the annual luncheon Kristina conceived of eight years ago to benefit CSHL, widely regarded as one the nation's foremost research labs. With the help of the women pictured left, she will gather family and friends on June 22; the ladies luncheon will include the lecture "Organic or Not," a discussion on genetically modified food and organic food designation. Kristina's husband Harry, meanwhile, will host a barbecue for the husbands and children just down the path. It's a long, lazy afternoon of locals enjoying the best of what this community came up with over the course of the last century: taking time to enjoy the good life with good friends.