There’s a reason we didn’t choose a name that just describes what we sell. Legacy Acres at Stearns Brook Farm is about people as much as it is about land.
My Nana was the matriarch of our family, and this property brings together land from her father’s family farm and her husband’s family farm. I grew up across the street from her. We were close, and I lost her around my sixteenth birthday. Some people leave you recipes or photographs; she also left me a way of thinking about what home can be.
The land has worn many hats
Our family raised dairy cows. They grew potatoes in Milan and Shelburne. They worked timber and operated a gravel business. That isn’t an idyllic storybook version of farming. It’s people doing whatever work the land and the times called for, and then getting up the next morning to do it again.
Milan itself has a long and interesting history. New Hampshire records describe its earlier name, Paulsburgh (also recorded as Paulsbourg), and its incorporation as Milan in 1824. The Androscoggin River and the surrounding working landscape helped shape the town’s growth. An inventory from the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources describes how Milan Corner developed along the Androscoggin River, while the Grand Trunk Railroad helped West Milan grow around the mid-nineteenth century. And Stearns Brook isn’t simply a name we made up for the farm—it’s a real local waterway, documented in New Hampshire’s bridge records where East Milan Road crosses it. The town-history inventory and NHDOT bridge report are small windows into a landscape with a long memory.
The seventh generation
Our grandchildren are the seventh generation connected to this ground. As we build the next chapter of the farm, I picture them learning chores, discovering where their food comes from, and coming up with their own ideas about how a day on the land ought to go. I suspect their ideas will involve a little more fun and a little less work than the adults planned.
I don’t expect their childhood to look exactly like mine, or like my Nana’s. It shouldn’t. But I hope they’ll remember where their food came from, the people who worked before them, and what it feels like to belong somewhere.
That’s why we call it Legacy Acres. Not because the work is finished, but because we get to keep adding to the story.
Photos from the farm
