Page 34 - The Hunt - Summer 2021

“The ranch was running
up until the day it sold. That
was our D-Day, the day we
got rid of the cattle.”
—King Ranch cowboy Rocky Dillow
Rocky Dillow’s parents let his oldest brother name him. And so he did— after Allan “Rocky” Lane. Lane
was the voice of television’s talking horse, Mister Ed. He also starred in a series
of cowboy movies in the 1940s and ’50s.
Born in 1949, Dillow was raised on
King Ranch in the crosshairs of its Doe Run Division in southern Chester County. As fate would have it, he became a real-life cowboy. “It came on slowly, but we knew it was happening,” says Dillow.
Dillow is referring to the exodus of the Texas-based King Ranch. While it was here, it shaped this portion of the county from 1946 to the mid-’80s, when its lands were sold in a well-chronicled series of management strategies orchestrated by the Brandywine Conservancy. “To hear all the scenarios about what might happen to the property—Disneyland coming, the damming of the Laurels to make a lake—it was scary,” Dillow says. “But the ranch was running up until the day it sold. That was our D-Day, the day we got rid of the cattle.”
Nearly four decades removed from those days, Dillow is back in the saddle again, so to speak—though he’s more likely to be found in a four-wheeler or on foot. Today, ranching has returned to the same Chester County acreage, thanks to the dedication and determination of Lisnageer Farm’s Bill Fairbairn, who’s leasing the still-intact King Ranch feedlot and pens on 120 acres off Doe Run Road for his unique export operation. The colors have returned, too—in the form of Fairbairn’s herd of
120 purebred Black Angus, which are run in
The herd in action.
32 THE HUNT MAGAZINE summer 2021