Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in one of LandVest’s properties? We invite our owners to tell us a bit about their experience, what they love about their homes and some of their history. The owner of Greenrange Farm in Sudbury, Vermont, shares how he found, and what he loves about, this exceptional family recreational retreat/farmstead sited on 592+/- acres located in the southern Champlain Valley.
The Great Getaway
We were looking for a remote property in the Rockies but with my 24/7 career, the commute time did not make sense. Vermont was a reasonable drive from the NYC area so we decided to look there for a property with the views, trails, and wildlife that we wanted in our search out west.
We saw Greenrange on a rainy fall weekend in 1993 and fell in love with it right away. We purchased it soon thereafter and couldn’t have been happier. It’s close to skiing, Lake Champlain, the Green Mountains, and Middlebury – a quaint New England college town.
Greenrange has been used for weekends away, entertaining friends, pig roasts, holiday gatherings with our crew of 19, bird hunting weekends, and for lazy August vacations for one and all….
The Abounding Nature
Special features include: several 300-year-old white oaks, the Wolf tree, the last hill in the Taconic range, beehives at the north house barn, sledding behind the dairy barn, spooky night walks in the Sugar Woods, summer nights in the Bull Barn to be serenaded by the coyote family, 4:30 AM in the Sugar Woods to hear the hoot owls calling and replying from distant trees, the old slate quarry, 80+ old field apple trees, walking the blazed boundaries on the full property, always-changing Green Mountain views, migrating snow geese, river otters feeding on the ice at the pond, the stray curious moose, harriers hunting mice in the fields……
The Favorite Room
The Sun Room in every season – summer hay, winter snowstorms, fall colors, manicured fields, and magnificent long views.
The Favorite Spot
After 26+ years – everywhere! The fields, the trails, the woods. If you love the outdoors, you will fall in love with Greenrange Farm.
The History
The property began as a sheep farm in the mid-1800s and evolved to hay production for NYC, with railroad tracks crisscrossing the area to move hay to Lake Champlain, to the canal system, and on to the Hudson bound for New York. Around 1900, the dairy barn was constructed on the site of a spring which has run continuously, feeding the pond. It’s the primary reason Greenrange is in this location.
The Sawyer and Whittaker families owned the property through the 1970s. Tom Whittaker built the dairy farm into a successful enterprise and began breeding polled Ayrshire bulls which, prior to artificial insemination, were sold around the world to exceptional profit for Greenrange. Tom later became a cattle auctioneer after his polled bull franchise was replaced by artificial insemination. The farm continues to produce organic hay for the local organic beef farmer who supplies organic beef to several Whole Foods locations in Fairfield County.
The Things We Love
- Distant views
- Hiking to the far ends of the property
- The wildlife
- The acres and acres of wildflowers
- The night sky and the Aurora Borealis
For more information about Greenrange Farm or other properties in the Burlington Vermont area, contact Wade Weathers at wweathers@landvest.com.
