ERWINNA, Pa. — Five and a half years ago, Stephen McDonnell, the founder of Applegate Farms, the company that made cured meats seem like health food, collapsed on a street in Florence, Italy. It was Christmas Eve, and he and his wife, Jill Kearney, their three daughters and other family members were on their way to midnight Mass when he suffered a catastrophic right-brain stroke.
Later that morning, as vascular surgeons performed the operation that would save his life, Ms. Kearney thought, among other despairing things, “I don’t know how to run a meat company.”
As it happened, she didn’t have to. Mr. McDonnell, a charismatic workaholic who had turned a tiny bacon smokehouse into a nitrate-free behemoth, spent the next six months rehabilitating his brain by doing SAT-like problems and puzzles every day. The next spring, he sold Applegate to Hormel for nearly $800 million.
CreditVincent Tullo for The New York Times
As Ms. Kearney put it, “Our ship came in — at the same time that it sunk.”
On a stormy morning in mid-June, Ms. Kearney and Mr. McDonnell were recuperating from the Hatch, an annual puppet parade and performance that Ms. Kearney’s two-and-a-half-year-old arts organization, ArtYard, holds in Frenchtown, N.J. — the picturesque borough near the Delaware River made famous by Elizabeth Gilbert, who settled there after her “Eat, Pray, Love” success. Burly, driven and mischievous, Mr. McDonnell is now uncharacteristically playing a supporting role.
Applegate’s sale has meant being able to pay for the kind of stroke rehabilitation he has needed, as well as the reimagining of this 83-acre property, which once belonged to S.J. Perelman, the humorist and screenwriter; his wife, Laura; and her brother, the novelist Nathanael West.
Perelman bought the place with money he made working on Marx Brothers movies, and satirized it in a collection of essays called “Acres and Pains.” (He was no fan of country life, noting how “a corner delicatessen at dusk is more exciting than any rainbow.”)
The sale has meant seed money for ArtYard, a community-minded organization Ms. Kearney long wanted to form; its headquarters are in a warehouse where Ms. Gilbert and her ex-husband once sold Indonesian furniture. Ms. Kearney grew up in Chicago, where her father, a sculptor, and mother, an administrator, ran the Contemporary Art Workshop, which offered studios, exhibitions and programming by and for young artists, out of a former dairy-processing factory.
The family spent summers in Provincetown, Mass., where Mr. Kearney also had a studio and foundry, hanging out with Norman Mailer and others. When his fourth wife Beverly’s Citroen, a gift from Ernest Hemingway, stopped running, Ms. Kearney recalled, her father flattened it with a bulldozer and turned it into a giant weather vane with the face of Charles de Gaulle.
Her father remade another expired automobile into an earwig, and held a funeral for it, with a festive bonfire and readings from the Bible by Mary Heaton Vorse, the author and activist, and Edward Bonetti, the poet.
“This is what the grown-ups were doing when I was a child,” Ms. Kearney said.
In what would have been her junior year at Harvard, Ms. Kearney left Cambridge and got a job as a ticket taker at a movie theater back home. She fell in love with the janitor, who was also a poet, and he followed her back to college, where he supported his writing habit by selling chains that proclaimed, “Oy Vey,” which he advertised in The New Yorker.
After she graduated, he persuaded her to move with him to Hollywood. “I wasn’t that interested in Hollywood,” she said, “but I wasn’t very good at saying no at the time.”
She knew no one there, except for Walter Beakel, a former drinking buddy of her father’s. He was a talent scout and agent who in his younger days had been a member of the Compass Players, the comedy improv group in Chicago that would become Second City.
Mr. Beakel got her an interview with Fred Roos, who was Francis Ford Coppola’s producer. Mr. Coppola was looking for someone to read scripts as a regular moviegoer might. It was a terrific first job in the film industry: In her two and a half years there, Ms. Kearney was a driver for Jean-Luc Godard and a witness to George Burns’s will (for which she received a cigar in thanks), and she met Tom Waits, David Lynch and Wim Wenders, all of whom had offices at Zoetrope, Mr. Coppola’s production company.
All the while Ms. Kearney kept thinking, “I’ve got to get out of here.” Working in the movie business was like stepping in gum, she said.
Mr. McDonnell, who grew up in Peapack, N.J., one of nine children and a neighbor of Jacqueline Onassis, had attended the idealistic and progressive Hampshire College in its 1970s heyday, playing Ultimate Frisbee. He is not the only natural-products mogul to have attended the school. Gary Hirshberg, a founder of Stonyfield Organic, the yogurt and dairy company, was also on the Frisbee team.
And Jeffrey Hollender, a founder of Seventh Generation, spent three semesters there before dropping out. That Hampshire’s renowned social consciousness would manifest in entrepreneurship made sense to the writer Chip Brown, another alumnus, who pointed out “the educational mode of the school — a student takes responsibility for his or her own education — is essentially conservative.”
After Hampshire, Mr. McDonnell worked at Ford as an analyst, and then he went to Harvard and earned a master’s degree in organizational behavior. He worked for his brother-in-law, the Irish glassmaker Simon Pearce, at Mr. Pearce’s company, until both men decided they would come to blows if this arrangement continued.
In 1987, Mr. McDonnell bought a small bacon smokehouse in New Jersey, which burned to the ground a year later (too many years of bacon fat, he said). It was at this point that he met Ms. Kearney, who knew one of his sisters, and they fell in love over a series of family weddings.
Her Hollywood friends were aghast. The sausage man, they called him. Back then, there were no hipster butchers or nose-to-tail eating. No one spoke of grass-fed beef or pondered a future in healthy, nitrate-free lunch meats. Meat, as Mr. McDonnell said, was the enemy of the natural-foods world, which was all about vegetarianism.
“We were reviled,” he said. “When I told people what I did, it was a conversation killer. I wanted to be in seafood, like smoked salmon. That’s got an edge to it. Hot dogs, not so much. You couldn’t have picked anything less interesting. I was a pariah to myself.”
But Ms. Kearney admired him. Raised by artists, she appreciated that he made something tangible.
“I thought it was fascinating from the beginning,” she said. “It was a long time before it became fascinating to other people.”
He smelled like smoke, she said.
Mr. McDonnell recalls walking into his mother’s kitchen with an armful of bacon and encountering Ms. Kearney making coffee. “She was so beautiful, I almost dropped the bacon,” he said.
They were married at Mr. Pearce’s glass blowing studio in Quechee, Vt. Ms. Kearney made centerpieces out of papier-mâché and Wiffle balls that she painted to look like planet Earth and topped with tiny brides and grooms, as if they were standing on top of the world. Mr. McDonnell’s family read passages from the Bible; Ms. Kearney’s friends read from the works of Dr. Seuss.
They lived in New York City at first. Ms. Kearney was working for a movie producer in Manhattan. Mr. McDonnell was commuting to Applegate’s headquarters, then in Flemington, N.J.
Soon after their second daughter was born, however, Ms. Kearney found a 200-year-old farmhouse in nearby Bucks County that was close to a Quaker school. From the barn on the property, she would begin hosting dance, literary and theater events, many of them fund-raisers for political or social justice causes.
Baby-steps philanthropy, she called it. (She had also briefly worked the sausage line at Applegate, sat on its board and written copy for its packaging. “A potpie poet,” she once called herself.)
Mr. McDonnell was a pioneer in working from home, spending just one day a week at Applegate’s offices. He was lauded as “The Remote Control CEO” in “The 4-Hour Workweek,” Timothy Ferris’s book about wealth and productivity, which described a bucolic scene: Mr. McDonnell in his flip-flops checking spreadsheets.
What the book doesn’t portray, Mr. McDonnell said, is the “30 little fingers underneath my door.”
“It would have been less frustrating if he hadn’t been working from home,” Ms. McDonnell said. “We had three kids under the age of 4, and I felt abandoned a lot.”
The farmhouse where they had raised their daughters felt bereft when they left for college. And Ms. Kearney wanted to expand her arts and philanthropy events. The Perelman property had passed through several hands since and been on sale for a while, and she loved it. It had a huge red barn she thought might work for her events, a little farmhouse and various outbuildings, including a piggery where Perelman had written.
But after the stroke, she said, “it seemed overwhelming. Like a really dumb idea. But then I thought the landscape would give Stephen something to do that he loved.
“At our old place, he knew where every branch on every tree was,” she said. “He could prune those trees in the dark.”
The reworking of the place and Mr. McDonnell’s rehabilitation have gone hand in hand, with the help of William Welch, an architect whose last project was a stone house made to look like an old Irish estate for Emily Scott Woods, a founder of J. Crew. An idiosyncratic historicist who works on one project at a time, designing everything himself, from the landscape to the light fixtures, Mr. Welch draws by hand, and employs no assistants. His slow process suited theirs.
With the blessing and encouragement of Frenchtown officials, who had struggled to find funding for an arts center, Ms. Kearney bought Ms. Gilbert’s old space, along with a house to put up artists. She also recently bought the site of a former egg hatchery, which will soon be the new ArtYard performance and exhibition space, in a 16,000-square-foot building designed by Mr. Welch and others.
The red barn, stripped of red cladding, and with a tractor shed built out as an addition, would be their new home. Using salvaged materials, Mr. Welch made modest-size rooms on the lower level of the barn. The upper level, which a previous owner had filled with a greenhouse and rented out, was emptied of that structure and left wide open. From the ceiling hangs a curious and wonderful piece Ms. Kearney found on eBay: a cast of a whale’s skeleton made by a man who follows fossil hunters.
“They could have gone anywhere,” said Mike Tyksinski, who owns the local hardware store and was a vulture in ArtYard’s birds-themed Hatch parade. “We could not be more fortunate that they decided to stay here and invest in our community.”
Growing up in Provincetown, Ms. Kearney said, you never just had a barbecue, you had a funeral for a car. That celebratory weirdness is her inspiration for ArtYard.
“The world has become such a lonely siloed place that no one even remembers how to do this kind of thing,” she said. “You have to be intentional about it now, which can seem in the beginning contrived. But once you do it, it feels like the most natural thing in the world.”
After the stroke, a neurosurgeon told Mr. McDonnell he would never regain the executive functioning skills needed to run a company. “I was like, ‘Dude, I’m not that smart but I know how to multitask,’” he said. “I had a whole bunch of people telling me to wait, that I would be fine in six months. I had to bet that what the doctor was saying was correct. I’d always talk about selling, but I was never really going to.”
The lesson of the stroke was “slow down,” Mr. McDonnell said. “The good news is I had the stroke. Now it’s all about letting go and giving versus getting and receiving. It’s Jill’s turn now. So the path is clear, though I’ll go kicking and screaming the whole way.”
