Jacobs Farm at 300

 

For sixteen years, I've learned this land by feel.

I know which parts of the fields dry out first after winter and where we can usually plant first in the spring. I know where the deer tend to come out at dusk and can be spotted at dawn, and the spot where, every year, a snapping turtle comes out of Jacobs Pond to lay her eggs. I know which fields hold water after a heavy rain and how the sun sets directly over the farm fields each night on its way to set over Jacobs Pond.

I know this farm through the work of farming it.

And this year, somehow, almost everything came together for the dahlias.

It started with a cold, snowy winter, which gave us unusually good conditions for storing the thousands of tubers we had dug the previous fall. We store them in our minimally heated high tunnel, and a cold winter meant less chance of them drying out in the solar gains of a warm, sunny winter day. Then came a cool, wet spring that extended our peony season and also gave our newly planted dahlias a head start. By the time the soil warmed to around 50 degrees, the fields were ready; our team succeeded in getting most of our 50,000 tubers into the ground by the end of May, which was a big win.

Then the weather kept cooperating.

We had enough rain and enough warmth that the plants grew quickly. By the time the real summer heat arrived, most of the dahlia plants were already knee-high.

Height matters with dahlias. When intense summer heat arrives while the plants are still small, they essentially shut down. They sit there, dormant, waiting for the cooler nights of late August before they really start growing again. When that happens, our whole bloom season can be pushed back by several weeks.

This year, the dahlias beat the heat.

They grew so quickly that their foliage began shading out the weeds beneath them. By early August, we were cutting flowers. And then they just kept coming.

By September, the fields were spectacular.

We plant the dahlia fields in an ombre, so walking through them feels like moving through a carpet of color. We start in the softer, white and blush colors: Cafe au Lait, Sweet Nathalie and Wizard of Oz. Then the rows begin to warm into Peaches N' Cream and all the many soft peach varieties we grow before ending in orange at the old stone wall that divides our fields. On the other side, the next field picks up those warm oranges and moves through pinks, burgundies and reds before finally ending in purples.

There were varieties that seemed especially good this year — Cornel Bronze, Cornel Red, Ivanetti, Bracken Sarah, Oreti Adele, Hillcrest Suffusion, Larke’s Ebbe, Isabel, Café au Lait and Penhill Watermelon among them. But what I remember most is the whole field together. The plants had grown tall and full, the rows had closed in, and everywhere you looked there were flowers.

So, on September 18th, when about a hundred of us gathered in the dahlia field for the first night of our Dahlia Festival, it felt a little magical.

It was our final Sip & Snip series of the season, and most of the people there were women. They wandered through the rows with buckets and clippers, choosing flowers as the sun went down. After everything it had taken to get those dahlias from tubers packed away for winter to a field overflowing with flowers, it was one of those rare moments in farming when you actually stop long enough to look around and think:

We did it.

Early in the evening, we stopped everyone for a toast.

I wanted to toast Henry Barton Jacobs and the 300^th anniversary of Jacobs Farm.

I already knew the basic story of Henry. I knew Jacobs Farm had been in his family for generations and that, when he died in 1939, he had left the property to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, now Historic New England.

I knew his decision was one of the reasons this land was still here.

But standing in the middle of that dahlia field, surrounded by all those flowers and people, I felt the weight of that differently.

None of us would have been standing there if Henry hadn't decided to preserve this place.

That night, we also committed to making donations from the festival to the Norwell Historical Society and Historic New England. It seemed like a fitting way to recognize that Cross Street is only the latest chapter in a much longer story of people caring for this place.

The next morning, the farm felt completely different.

Where we had stood among the dahlias at dusk the night before, families now filled the fields. A tractor pulled a hay wagon in a loop around the farm, with children and parents sitting on hay bales in the trailer. There was face painting and kids picking their own dahlias. Parents talked while strollers bumped over the grass.

Across the street, the Norwell Conservation Commission was holding its own event with a kayak race on Jacobs Pond.

I remember looking around that weekend and thinking about how many things were happening on this old farm at once.

Agriculture. Conservation. Recreation. History. Families. Community.

Earlier that summer, the Norwell Historical Society had also brought the history of the Jacobs family to life here as part of the farm's 300th anniversary and America's 250th, including a play about the Jacobs brothers and the Revolutionary War.

Three hundred years after the Jacobs family first settled here, the place was still full of life.

And that made me want to know more about the man we had toasted the night before.

Who Was Henry Barton Jacobs?

The story of Jacobs Farm begins long before Henry.

In 1726, Joshua Jacobs married Mary James, and they became the first couple to occupy the house beside what we now call Jacobs Pond. Seven generations of Jacobses followed. The family farmed the land, operated mills on the pond, and became part of the history of the place then known as South Scituate and eventually Norwell.

Henry Barton Jacobs was born in 1858.

He grew up here, but his adult life took him far beyond Norwell. He attended Phillips Exeter, Harvard College, and Harvard Medical School. He trained at Massachusetts General Hospital and eventually moved to Baltimore, where he became part of the remarkable medical community developing around Johns Hopkins.

He traveled widely, became involved in the fight against tuberculosis, collected books and art, and lived much of his adult life far from the Massachusetts farm where he had been born.

And yet he held onto Jacobs Farm.

As the 300th anniversary approached, I wanted to understand more about Henry and, particularly, what he had actually said about the future of this place.

Eventually, that curiosity took me to the Baltimore probate records.

I found Henry's will.

What struck me was how specific he had been.

Henry left the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities his 'homestead and lands, pond, water privileges, house, stable, barns, sheds and all buildings' on the property, in trust for public and charitable purposes.

And then he explained why.

He wrote that he was making this disposition of his ancestral estate in order to preserve it as a memorial to his Jacobs forefathers, specifically mentioning the house and barn built by Joshua Jacobs in 1726 and occupied continuously by generations of the Jacobs family.

That was when Henry became much more interesting to me.

Here was a man who had left Norwell, gone out into the world and lived a life completely different from the generations before him — and yet, near the end of his life, he was thinking very carefully about what would happen to this place after he was gone.

He was even thinking about the handoff itself.

In the final months of his life, Henry anticipated that some time might pass between his death and when SPNEA took over the property. He made provisions for the farm to be maintained and its expenses paid during that interval.

Henry was making sure someone would be caring for the place even after he no longer could.

The People in Between

There is a tendency when we tell stories like this to jump from the person who preserved a place to the people who occupy it today.

But there are almost ninety years between Henry's death and that September night in our dahlia field.

Historic New England - then SPNEA - became the steward Henry had chosen. Eventually, as Henry envisioned in his will, the Town of Norwell acquired the property, and different parts of the larger Jacobs landscape came to serve different purposes: historic preservation, conservation, recreation, education, and agriculture.

The Norwell Historical Society has preserved photographs, documents, family histories, and memories that allow people like me to understand what happened here before we arrived.

And many other people and organizations have cared for this place along the way.

When the Town and SPNEA created a management plan for Jacobs Farm in 1989, it protected the historic buildings while also envisioning them being used. The plan contemplated tours, educational programs, farming demonstrations, festivals, and other activities, and called for the hay fields to continue as open agricultural land.

Years later, community farming returned more fully to Jacobs Farm through Norwell Farms, after the Town voted at the 2009 meeting to start a Community Supported Agriculture program.

And eventually, flowers came too.

That's how Cross Street Flower Farm became part of this story.

Not the beginning.

Not the end.

Just one chapter.

A Working Farm

Thousands of people drive past Jacobs Pond and Jacobs Farm every year. Some walk the trails or visit the historic farmhouse. Many probably have no idea how this land came to be preserved, or how many people and organizations have cared for it over the generations.

Today, Cross Street gives people another way to experience Jacobs Farm: as an authentic working, sustainable farm.

You can walk into a field and cut a flower that was grown here. You can watch tulips emerge in spring and see the fields change through the summer. You can pick tulips with your children in the Spring or stand among thousands of dahlias in September.

And you see the less beautiful parts too.

Tractors. Irrigation lines. Muddy boots. Harvest buckets. People planting, weeding, cutting and hauling.

The landscape isn't simply something to look at. You get to experience what it feels like when land is actively being farmed.

The same is true of the old barn.

The 1989 management plan describes the main barn as a favorite of Henry Jacobs. Today, on a Saturday morning, that barn shop is once again full of people. Flowers come in from the fields. Bouquets are made and sold. People gather there as part of their visit to the farm.

I especially love seeing it filled with people. It has become a community gathering place, but it is also still connected to the agricultural life happening just outside its doors.

A building Henry knew still has a job to do.

I like to think Henry would be pleased by all of it — the history being preserved in the farmhouse, people walking the woods, families enjoying Jacobs Pond, children learning about nature, his old barn filled with people, and fields being cultivated again.

Of course, I can't know that.

Henry died in 1939, and I don't want to put words in his mouth.

But I do know something he actually wrote.

Alive, Growing & Useful

Elsewhere in his will, Henry was writing about something completely different.

He was leaving a collection of medical books, medals and prints to Johns Hopkins. He wrote that he hoped the collection would continue as a 'live, growing and useful' part of the library, rather than becoming merely a dead collection.

He wasn't talking about Jacobs Farm.

But when I read those words, I couldn't stop thinking about this place.

Alive. Growing. Useful.

Three hundred years after Joshua and Mary Jacobs made their home here, Jacobs Farm is still being preserved.

But it is also being used.

Things are being planted and harvested. Children are riding through the fields. People are learning its history. Wildlife still crosses it. The barn is full of people on Saturday mornings. And every year, thousands of people get to experience a piece of land that has somehow remained a farm in the middle of a changing town.

When I think back to that September evening now, I think about the dahlias.

I think about that ombre of color stretching across the fields. I think about all those women walking through the rows with their buckets. And I think about raising a glass to someone who had stood on this same land long before any of us and made a decision whose consequences he could never possibly have known.

Henry made sure there would still be a here.

For this particular moment in Jacobs Farm's 300-year history, we get to be among the people caring for it.

And someday, it will be someone else's turn.

Alive. Growing. Useful.

Photography by Amy Spirito Photography