The moment I pull into the driveway, I can tell there’s trouble. It’s harvest season, when the soundtrack of a typical country day is filled with the steady hum and roar, sunup to sundown, of farm machinery. But here at Liberty Hill, a farm-stay inn in Rochester, Vermont, that is also the working farm of the Kennett family, it is strangely quiet. All four tractors are sitting idle in the yard.
As I get out of my car, I hear the telltale clanging of a hammer against sheet metal, signaling a futile attempt to free up some balky part. I recognize that sound from growing up on a family farm. It’s the song that sings of something jammed or busted. It’s a call for men to gather around a piece of equipment and exchange advice and ideas. Sure enough, Bob Kennett and his son Tom are sprawled under the corn chopper with greasy hands, bloodied knuckles.
As it turns out, it isn’t big trouble, just typical farm trouble. The corn was finally dry and ready for harvest after a rainy summer. But the machine gave out after chopping just a few rows to stubble, leaving the 100-acre field with the look of a half-shaved face.
For an impossible moment, as I cross the farmyard, I expect to see my own dad crawling out from beneath the tractor, his shirt stuck to his back with sweat. But it is Bob who emerges. Short and wiry, dark hair hidden beneath an ever-present farm co-op baseball cap, Bob looks like the guy who might work on your car at the corner garage. And on this day, he is playing mechanic. He has to, because there isn’t anybody else around to do it. Farm services have disappeared along with the farms.
“When we bought this farm 22 years ago, there were 11 farms with more than 600 cows shipping milk from this little valley,” Bob says as he walks toward the rambling 176-year-old farmhouse and pulls a rag from his back pocket. “We’re the last ones now.”
The nearest shop for that particular chopper part is all the way over in Addison, an hour’s drive to the west. Bob has to make arrangements to pick up the part after the shop has closed that evening. So he comes into the kitchen, wiping his greasy hands on the rag before picking up the telephone receiver. The way in which his wife, Beth, thanks him for that gesture leads me to believe that she’s asked him to do that about a million times in their years together. Every time he does, it’s a surprise. And she’s grateful for those little surprises.
Bob arranges to have a part left for him at the shop, and, even though it is almost suppertime, he gets into his truck to make the drive. For him, dinner will have to wait. So there’s an empty chair at the head of the table as we guests fill our plates with thick, crusty slices of pork loin, carrot soufflé, scalloped potatoes, all the while thinking of the homemade apple pie to come. We feel sorry that Bob has to make that drive. We feel bad for Beth sitting alone at the end of the table. We feel as though we are a small part of this farm family drama. Yet I feel a little guilty pleasure, grateful that I don’t have to make that drive over the mountain.
Tonight, Tom will handle the milking by himself. And we leave him to his task. Normally there’s a crowd in the barn for the evening milking. After dinner last night I had followed the soft glow from the open barn door across the farmyard. Inside the huge, five-story barn, Bob had a firm, comforting hand on the haunches of a cow named Sam.
“That’s short for Samantha,” he explained to five-year-old Anthony, who was sitting on a battered stool with his little fingers tentatively wrapped around one of Sam’s teats. Anthony is a natural. He quickly got the hang of milking, and a steady stream of milk rattled against the tin pail.
“Good job,” Bob said, as he trained an eye on Tom, who had taken charge of milking the 80-cow herd that night also. Tom’s technique was a bit more sophisticated than Anthony’s. Instead of a bucket, he juggled four milking machines hooked to a stainless-steel line. He hopped around like a sailor in a squall, trying to keep up. He dipped each teat cup in antiseptic, then slipped the four cups on a cow’s teats. Then he raced on to the next cow, then rushed back four minutes later to remove the cups and scurried on to another cow. Accompanying all this activity was the rhythmic swooshing of milk flowing through the overhead pipeline.
Hearing the hiss of a machine sucking air, Bob tossed a nearly imperceptible nod in Tom’s direction, and the young man was off to another stall in response.
As kids swirled around, chasing kittens, and Tom shoveled manure into the gutters, Bob stayed focused on the chore at hand. “You’re a patient man,” I said to him. He looked up and smiled.
“Well, just as long as the cow’s patient,” he said. “That’s what counts.”
Bob knows it’s all about the cows. His family has been farming for generations, first in New Hampshire, then in western Vermont. After he and Beth married, they decided to strike out on their own and in 1979 brought their two young sons to central Vermont. Their 200-acre parcel, wedged in between the steep, pine-covered ridge of Liberty Hill and the winding White River, is good river-bottom land that’s been continuously farmed since the 18th century. The local dairy farming community welcomed them in; today, it has just about disappeared.
While taxes and the cost of feed, services, fuel, and just about everything else rise, the price of milk stays the same. As the Kennetts saw the farms going out, they realized that they had to do something different if they wanted to keep their farm in the family.
That something different seemed to happen purely by chance. In 1984, a local bed-and-breakfast overbooked for the weekend, but its owners knew that there was plenty of room at Liberty Hill Farm. They asked the Kennetts if they wanted to take some guests in. The answer was yes, and it may have saved the farm.
So if Bob has to work around some flatlanders in his barn, that’s fine with him: “Our guests understand that we have to keep working, that we can take some time to explain things but then we have to get back to business.” And that’s why they come. From the minute they arrive, it’s perfectly clear that this is no faux-farm theme park.
At a theme park, they don’t work from six in the morning until ten at night milking the cows twice a day, feeding them as many as seven times a day, haying, chopping corn. “I let Beth take care of the inn,” Bob says. “I just try to keep the farm going.”
Beth (picture Joanne Woodward playing a farmwife) has graciously slipped into the roles of innkeeper, cook, host, and raconteur. She will tell you the story of how hostages from the Revolutionary-period Royalton Raid were held captive for a night on this very property. She’ll explain why Liberty Hill Farm milk is free of bovine growth hormone. And, if you’re a repeat guest, she’ll make sure you get your regular room when you check in.
The house itself didn’t require any additions to become an inn. With 18 rooms, there was plenty of space the family wasn’t using. And once the attached woodshed and bunkhouse were modernized, the house contained seven guest bedrooms. Now it can hold a dozen extra people without seeming crowded.
The farmhouse is, well, homey. It’s a big, old place with butternut woodwork, old-fashioned wallpaper, mismatched furniture, and lots of corners, cubbyholes, and sitting rooms to explore and escape to. In the parlor, the upright piano gets more use than the television. You won’t be afraid to put your cup of coffee down on the table without a coaster. It’s a weathered oak table that’s been in the family for years. But people aren’t drawn here for deluxe accommodations. They come for the hospitality, the companionship, and the food.
From midafternoon on, the kitchen is filled with the aroma of fruit pies and homemade bread baking, and maybe a pot roast. “I always serve a roast or turkey, and several vegetable dishes,” Beth says. That turkey might be fresh from son Tom’s farm, the vegetables from his huge garden. Or there might be corn on the cob from a neighbor’s fields.
Beth learned to cook not from her mother but from her grandmother and from a neighbor, Lena Quillia. “Lena wanted to see to my education as a farmwife,” Beth says. “She really encouraged me to feed people going-home-to-visit-grandma kinds of meals. I try really hard to serve old-fashioned New England meals, but I also know that people’s tastes have changed. So I always make sure that there’s some kind of protein dish for those who don’t want meat. Saturday is often baked ham, but I always do macaroni and cheese, baked beans, and sticky buns. Whenever I do leg of lamb, I have pasta or some other kind of dish to go with it.”
No one is shy about digging in or asking for seconds. There is plenty to do to work off the calories. You can pitch in with the chores—feeding the cows and the calves, gathering eggs from the handful of chickens that roam around the farmyard, or even trying your hand at milking. If Tom is heading off to his place to pick tomatoes or squash or peppers, he may let you tag along.
There’s also the possibility of making yourself scarce during the day. There are plenty of trails to be hiked in the nearby national forest or apples to be picked at another local farm. In the winter, it’s an easy drive to the ski slopes. And in the summer, you can grab an inner tube from the barn, walk down to the bridge, launch yourself onto the White River, and have a leisurely float to the Kennetts’ private beach.
But there is something else that brings people here and makes them want to return. It’s something subtle but ever present, like the faint scent of the animals in the air. It’s the sense of fellowship. It’s a sense of experiencing—even belonging to, if only for a weekend—a disappearing way of life, where sons work shoulder to shoulder with fathers; where husbands and wives fret over an ailing animal or celebrate a sunny fall day.
Just a few hours at Liberty Hill brought back that feeling for me. I grew up on a farm, and I remember the satisfaction of pushing away from a good meal to head back out to work in the evening. I remember the pride that comes from working long hours in a family business. It’s a heroic feeling that most of us never get to experience, even vicariously, these days. But at Liberty Hill you are quickly drawn into the drama of a family trying to maintain a farm under difficult conditions.
When bob returns from picking up the chopper part, he wolfs down a plate that Beth has fixed for him and then checks on how the milking is progressing. Next, he has to get back in the truck and drive to New Hampshire—an hour in the opposite direction—to pick up some medicine from the vet. He’s got a single cow with an infection that needs treatment before it spreads to the rest of the herd. This time he brings Beth with him to help him stay awake for the drive.
Left to our own devices after dinner, a few of the guests walk through the fields to the river. The moon is not up yet, but the stars are bright enough to light the dirt road.
As we walk, Christina Hall tells me how her family first came here with four other families from New Jersey on a field trip sponsored by a preschool class. All of those families return annually, and the Halls make at least three other trips a year back to Liberty Hill. “We love the Kennetts,” she says. “They have become good friends.”
Two years ago, the Paradiso family joined the Halls. Tracey Paradiso admits that she wasn’t sold on the idea at first. “I thought we might be bored,” she says. “But we have not been bored for a minute.” The kids, she adds, are in the barn all day, playing with the kittens and feeding the calves. Yesterday, they spent three hours playing hide-and-seek in the hayloft.
More than once, couples have met by chance at the farm, become friends, and returned for reunions. Liberty Hill is like the grandmother’s house we all wish we still had. In fact, one couple insists that their children call the Kennetts Uncle Bob and Aunt Beth. Even business travelers stay here for the sense of returning “home” after a day’s work. “You get such a feeling of being taken care of,” says Christina.
When we get back to the house, the Kennetts have still not returned. Later, as I doze off in the soft bed under a thick comforter, I think of Bob and Beth driving back from the vet’s in New Hampshire, their truck’s headlights illuminating the twists and turns of the country roads. Maybe they talk about farm finances; perhaps they make plans for how they will manage when their younger son, David, graduates from college and joins the business. Or maybe they don’t talk at all. Maybe they just enjoy that time alone together in the cab of the truck.
In bed, I listen for the sound of the truck tires crunching on the gravel driveway, and as I drift off I imagine I can hear the comforting sound of my parents talking softly in the next room.
Liberty Hill Farm
511 Liberty Hill Road
Rochester, VT 05767
802-767-3926
www.libertyhillfarm.com