An Old Farm on Blind Brook

I just visited a beautiful spot on Blind Brook, near the head of Milton Harbor, in Rye. It’s an old farmstead that some preservationists are trying to keep from being developed. There’s a modest Greek Revival farmhouse from the 1830s set back from the road and obscured from it by a tangle of trees and vines and shrubs, a barn built in the 1880s, and a long chicken coop-shed running parallel to the bank of the brook. The brook is lined with salt marsh – Spartina alterniflora and Spartina patens – and the tide was up when I was there. A small rowboat bobbed in the water at the base of the bank. In the mid 1800s, the owner operated a small farm there and owned two market sloops in which he’d run produce, presumably to New York City.

Even now it’s a peaceful spot, the brook placid, the grasses still green, and despite the noise of hammering from a house being built across the way, quiet and beautiful.