DORSEY, Hammond Pendelton

Notes:

After 42 years, couple's remains are reunited
By PETE HOLLEY, Staff Writer

Standing over the freshly turned soil of a new grave at St. James' Episcopal Church, Scott Trapnell Hilleary couldn't help but feel an overwhelming sense of relief.

Forty-two years after his stepfather, Hammond P. Dorsey, died suddenly of a heart attack, he reached his final resting place on Friday beside his late wife, Eleanor "Polly" Trapnell Hilleary Dorsey Dosh.

After years of legal struggle, Mr. Hilleary and his brother John Thornton Hilleary, both of Baltimore, successfully petitioned the Circuit Court of Jacksonville, Fla., where Mr. Dorsey was a legal resident, to authorize the removal of his remains from Baltimore National Cemetery and their re-interment in St. James' cemetery in Lothian.

"I feel peace," Mr. Hilleary said. "It's something that's been hanging for 42 years."

Mr. Dorsey was born in 1898 in Howard County, but moved to Annapolis in 1918 to attend St. John's College.

After becoming a lawyer, he operated the former Pine Crest Sanitarium in East Catonsville, but kept a home near Annapolis.

"He was a wonderful person," said Mr. Hilleary. "He could hardly walk around downtown Annapolis without people approaching him and calling his name."

Mr. Dorsey and Mrs. Dosh, a New Jersey native who divided her time between Catonsville, Epping Forest and West Virginia, met several times throughout the 1930s, but it wasn't until 1949, when they were both separated from their spouses, that their relationship blossomed.

In part because of their mutual passion for the outdoors and other common interests, Mr. Hilleary is convinced that his parents' relationship was an ideal match.

"They respected an admired each other, but I think it was mostly just chemistry," said Mr. Hilleary. "My mother used to say it was the stuff the poets wrote about."

Mr. Dorsey was fond of expressing his affection by repeating the same phrases, such as "Honey, I never knew there could be a woman in the world like you."

Mrs. Dosh's two sons looked forward to summer weekends away at their historic cottage in Epping Forest. It was here, hidden within the wooded, 2-acre property overlooking the Severn River, that the boys gained a lifelong appreciation for nature and their parents' love.

"They were very interested in conservation and planting trees on their property," remembered Orlando Ridout IV, Mrs. Dosh's long-time friend. "They loved to bring in specimen trees from their various adventures together."

In 1961 Mr. Dorsey moved to Florida so that he could establish residency and finalize his divorce, which had been repeatedly denied in Maryland the decade before. The shocking move was one of desperation, a final effort to circumvent his contested divorce and free himself from his first wife.

It was one of the first times Mr. Dorsey had ever crossed the Maryland state line.

When the couple finally married in a civil ceremony in 1963, it felt like decades of struggle and separation had ended.

"He helped raise my brother and me," said Mr. Hilleary. "We thought of him as our father. Everything would have been different if he had lived."

But on June 24, 1963, barely two months into his new marriage, Mr. Dorsey died while driving a tractor to cut wheat on his uncle's 1,000-acre cattle farm in Howard County. He was 65.

To his new wife's surprise, Mr. Dorsey's family had him buried in Baltimore National Cemetery. Mrs. Dosh went on to marry again, but she always considered her second husband the true love of her life.

"I've been married three times," she used to say recalled Mr. Hilleary. "I've had the worst of marriages, the best of marriages and the mediocrity."

So when Mrs. Dosh died in March 2004 at the age of 91, the Hilleary brothers decided to intensify their efforts to reunite their parents. By the end of their year and a half odyssey Friday, the legal and re-internment fees had reached about $12,000.

"The bottom line is clearly that they did love each other and clearly Polly wanted her late husband to be beside her," said the Rev. William H.C. Ticknor, a close friend of Mrs. Dosh who led the re-interment ceremony. Standing over both their parents' graves for the first time, Mr. Hilleary only needed one word to describe how the situation: "closure."

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Hammond married TRAPNELL, Eleanor Milicent in Apr 1963. Eleanor (daughter of TRAPNELL, Joseph IV and KENNEDY, Laura Virginia) was born on 7 Sep 1912 in Upper Montclair, NJ; died on 31 Mar 2004 in Bon Secours Hospital, Baltimore, MD; was buried in 2004 in Saint James Cemetery, Lothian, MD. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]