Cool Hollow Flower Farm is located in Washington County in western Maryland.  It sits at the edge of a historic district made up of stone homes and barns dating back to an early settlement. The Newcomer brothers Christian, Peter and Wolfgang were Swiss Mennonites who moved to this area from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, about 100 miles to the northeast. Their family built a number of farms in Beaver Creek, Maryland and then spread out around the county. The stone farmhouses and barns in Beaver Creek all sit loosely around the former grist mill known as Doub's Mill.  The first mill on this site was built by a Newcomer around 1785, but it burned and was rebuilt in the early 1800s in the form we see today. The farms in this settlement were begun in the late 1700s and most of the buildings are examples of the German vernacular style. Our farm is one of these. The front of the house has no symmetry and the front door is not fancy.  The windows sit within thick stone walls and there is no staircase visible inside to awe visitors. Rather there is an enclosed small staircase in a corner, built with a door to keep heat downstairs in the living area. This was a humble home meant for utility with four rooms downstairs and four small rooms upstairs. The more substantial structure on the property was the barn. It was built first and is much larger than the house.

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The barn suffered serious damage over its many years and we believe it was hit by a tornado in the mid 1800s judging from the repairs to its framing. It was originally built sometime after 1780 and was then extended in the mid 1800s. Today it is used only for storage, but until the 1990s was a working barn. 

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The people who lived here during the 18th, 19th and almost all of the 20th century were farmers and their most important occupation was making the land provide them with food and a living. There is a stone smokehouse which is older than the house and a summer kitchen which stands to the right of the house, built sometime in the 1850s, probably having been re-built at least once due to fire. Summer kitchens were meant to prevent heat and fire from being in the main house and they sometimes burned down and had to be re-built. Our house did have an inside kitchen, which is not common in houses this age. By looking at the structure of the house we can see that it was always a room on the back of the house which had a large cooking fireplace, no longer there.

Over two hundred years many alterations have been done and we have pieced together the story of the house from accounts of those who lived here in the early 1900s and from the information the structure itself has yielded. At some point in the 1800s the owners of this land donated the property for the Church of the Brethren building and graveyard which sits on the corner of White Hall Rd. and Beaver Creek Rd. The people who lived in this house rest there on the land their family settled. We've enjoyed learning about how families lived here over time. Living in a home that was built to last is a wonderful experience and gives us a feeling of being a part of a long narrative. 

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We are interested in understanding the lives of the native Americans who first used this land and who were largely forced out of this area by the first European settlement in the early 1700s. The French and Indian War from 1754-1763 took place all along the colonial frontier lands, including in this area, and brought renewed conflict between the settlers and native people. When this war ended settlers flooded over the mountains and established permanent settlements. Just as today, Hagerstown sat on old and established roadways. Indian trails became the wagon roads used by settlers and today these paths are our interstate roads.

 

Our farm sits in part of the Great Appalachian Valley which extends from Quebec to Alabama and in Maryland is generally referred to as the Cumberland Valley (it is the storied Shenandoah Valley just to our south). This large and fertile valley is believed to have been kept mostly open through various means of land management by native people, to be used as a large hunting ground. Buffalo, deer, bear, fox, and beaver were abundant. The land was shared between various tribal groups, including the Iroquois confederation, Algonquian, and Sioux. By the late 1600s native people were forced out of the eastern parts of Maryland and some had moved over the mountains. In 1715 smallpox decimated the groups living along the Potomac River and by 1722 most were forced out entirely. We have heard stories of farmers finding numerous arrowheads when plowing in the spring, right up until the 1960s. We can only assume that groups of people moved along Beaver Creek at one time, especially because of the many productive fresh springs which are near us. Unfortunately there is little visible evidence left of their life here, but they are remembered and we hope that future scholarship will produce more understanding of the lives of those who came before us. 

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I first came to western Maryland in the early 1990s while visiting friends. At the time I lived in California and was in the middle of graduate school. I was brought out here to see a favorite shop in an old barn across from Doub's Mill. That shop has been gone for years and the building has been beautifully rehabilitated into a church. For those who remember this place you will know what a wonderful experience was created by the shopkeepers. I was taken with the beauty of the place and never dreamed that I would find myself living up a gravel driveway just steps from that shop in just a few short years. It was absolutely the farthest thing from my imagination. Life can be very surprising.​

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I have always had a love of old houses and when we came to Maryland from the west coast in 2000 I hoped to have a chance to rehabilitate a historic property. We began to actively search beginning the Christmas of 2002. This search took us all over the county to dozens of old farms, but when we came to this place on a cold, snowy February day in 2004 we knew we had found the place for us. It looked terrible. Every building on the property was in disrepair and the house had been vacant for years. The roof on the house was failing and windows were broken. Pipes inside had burst. But my husband and I both saw the land and situation of the house and barn and knew this was what we had been looking for. It is truly a beautiful location and we have never regretted our decision, even though it took many more years to get the house rehabbed and to make this into the family home that we envisioned.

 

I had been interested in gardening in a serious way since my early twenties.  My parents and grandparents all loved to grow flowers and we had a carefully tended backyard in our southern California home. When I was in graduate school I spent what little time I had reclaiming the garden behind my own house, turning it into a little paradise. We had been lucky enough to purchase a house with an established "old" garden, with good bones and beautiful shade trees, fruit trees and plantings of roses and amazing succulents. That was my first attempt at gardening and in the mild winter climate of southern California I was able to grow roses with almost no effort, and indulged in growing sweet peas in winter, dahlias in early summer, along with many Mediterranean plants. I fell in love with growing plants then and it is something I have never lost the love for. When I came to this farm and saw that I could grow flowers, plants and trees freely on a totally blank canvas I looked past the broken buildings and saw what could be. 

 

In 2007 we completely renovated the entire house, inside and out. My parents were able to buy the house next door and my father and I worked together to do a lot of the work in the older part of the house. Without his help we could never have attempted the work necessary to live here. We added a modern kitchen and made the house into a wonderful home. The house had only been updated for modern living for the first time in 1974, so we didn't have to remove much, but were able to improve and add on to what had been done. Up until 1974 the house had had no indoor plumbing and only had electricity and a faucet in the kitchen. When we arrived there was still a pipe in the creek that had gone directly up and through the wall into the kitchen and had only recently been disconnected.  This was a home that had served many families for generations without modern conveniences. Living here we often think of those people who came before us and the work they put into these buildings and this land.  When we look at the perfectly straight corners of the stone house and barn, made up of huge stones which have sat here for over two hundred years, we know there is no amount of work we can do which equals what they did here.

 

 In the old fields we've created perennial gardens and flower growing beds on an ever expanding basis.  Half of the land is wooded and protected by easement and will never be used for farming, while the other half is open fields, with Beaver Creek winding around two sides of the land. In the low lands we've planted hundreds of trees, some of them now almost twenty years old and getting to be tall and mature. 

 

The farm is in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains and there is still undeveloped farmland between us and the mountains. The creek supports a variety of wildlife including brown trout, deer, foxes, mink, coyote, snapping turtles, black bears, river otters, a wide variety of birds including wild turkeys, blue herons, egrets, blue birds, many song birds, barn owls, bald eagles and, yes, very active beavers in the creek.  We strive to be good stewards of the Chesapeake Bay watershed and always keep the creek in mind as we choose what to do on our land. The Antietam Creek Watershed Alliance and the Beaver Creek Watershed Association undertook a major restoration project a number of years ago along the banks of our creek, which vastly improved the health of the stream.  When we first arrived the banks of the creek were bare and eroding, but because of the extensive work done by these organizations the creek is now lined with shrubs and trees which shade the water and provide a healthy temperature for the spawning of brown trout. Sadly, in 2023 a heavy summer storm allowed dangerous chemical run-off from the nearby interstate into the creek which killed off the brown trout for a long distance, including along our section of the stream. Many years of work on the creek were wiped out in one afternoon. It will be a long time before the brown trout population is what it was before that summer.

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This land was worked continuously for over 200 years before we arrived and still has tremendous potential due to its rich clay soil. Through careful farming practices we hope to leave it even better than we found it.  We are fortunate to live in an area surrounded by many successful and knowledgeable lifelong farmers and we are able to learn from them. It is wonderful to see this previously fallow farm land once again providing for our local community.

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