 I think we'll get started. I'm delighted to see so many friends, family, members of the historical society and others, library staff, it's a great turnout and we're just thrilled to see you all. My name's Fiji Barnbill and I'm the past president of this organization. And I'm delighted today to introduce Cindy Jones who is the ninth generation of her family to be involved with the Coals Home Farm in North Amherst and she's going to talk today about how they're meeting the needs of, I guess, the present generation. She'll talk about past generations. She's been working through piles of archival records that are in the office in North Amherst. And since I have a long history as kind of an archivist, curator to see someone today in a business setting, sorting through old records just warms the topics of my heart and I think it's great. This has clearly been such an important part of Amherst's history and the region's history that to preserve it and care about it is absolutely wonderful. I think you all know Cindy far better and for many more years than I am, she's going to turn it over to Cindy. Thank her so much for coming. Thank you. Thank you so much. It is funny, the house where my office is has been the home farm since 1768 and everybody left all their stuff. So if you inherit your mom's house, maybe there's a pile of sweaters and some paperwork and some bills. We have bills from 1898 and some paperwork from 1700s and I tried to take pictures of some of it because I didn't want to go through it. I bought archival albums and we could look at it now without destroying it but it's quite a task that my mom started a generation ago and then she handed it back when she decided she wanted to move so all this stuff just arrived in a big building and I tried to figure it out like she did. So do we want less late? So this is the home farm, 134 Montague Road and this is three carts of hay with two horses. I just got out of school and I thought you'd all be talking and I'd have to wake you up so I didn't wake you up. So this is the home farm with our lumber supply a long time ago. Evan and I, Evan and I are the ninth generation of the family to live in this house but the story starts before that. And there's this guy named Egbert who wrote three volume genealogy and it's at the Field Historical Society and he took from the start of Poles in America to 1900 and there is a paragraph about everybody. So the one John Cole came here and then he had kids and these are the kids had kids and this book they had to go to every 40 pages to find three sentences about our line. So he studied the family and he said we're not all that. Like we worked hard and we were good people and we were respected but we weren't great and we weren't smart. No. He stopped in 1900 and I really do think there are three big blips after 1900 that we would get credit for smart and better than useful. But you can decide at the end if we make Egbert proud. So if we're not all that, okay Egbert how is it that we managed to eke out nine generations of a family business? Almost 275 years. And it's pretty easy for the first hundred years because the oldest boy named Jonathan always got everything and all the other nine kids got nothing and Jonathan never locked it up. So the whole farm got passed down to a whole bunch of Jonathan's until about close to now. But after the Jonathan's from the late 1800s on there's David and there were a couple Walters. And what we learned is to evolve the family farm, the home farm for what our generation needed. We learned to get rid of outdated businesses and we learned to regenerate, to use a forestry term of ours, to regenerate the home farm, to regenerate the family business. And to make it more relevant to the people running it and make it more inspiring for us to be as good as great as we can be. So the values that have been passed down in the family are forestry values. We were taught to grow more than we could to sustainably manage our timberland, sure but to buy more land than we'd ever sell or develop to contribute to the community betterment, to give more than we took with the church, the town, to leave behind something better than what we were lucky enough to be a Jonathan and inherit. So the Conquistadors came to South America to find gold and bring riches back to their part of Europe. And our ancestors came from England to get away from a Catholic king and to find religious freedom. And our first seal is of a naked Indian and a banner that says, please come help us. So we thought we were doing the world of favor, like coming here and helping these poor backward savages with whatever life they were trying to live without us. So John Cole, C-O-L-E, came on this boat on 1634 and took a picture of it. And there's a second John Cole in Farmington, Connecticut. So he changed his spelling to one that nobody can pronounce correctly. So our name is Coles. So I'm gonna, the first John, because there are like 18 Johns Coles. So the first Cole, I'm just leaving his name that way just so you know we're still talking about one. So he was in Hartford, Connecticut after Farmington and he came north to what's now South Hadley to Summerland. It was the Hadley settlement. And we landed on the other side of the river what's now Hatfield. So we were first settlers of Hatfield with six families. That is, Han Cole's his actual signature. And because nobody else could read it either, they wrote it. That's good. So, Edward says that treacherous Indians were making us not wanna come north. And he doesn't blame us for not coming north because our house was outside the stockade around Hatfield. I don't know what we did to the other eight families that we left there, but we were outside the fence. So, we went back to Hartford for a couple years and we tried women for witchcraft. Yeah, so, Edward is not impressed yet. Edward said that we were threatened that if we did not get our act together and buck up to the Indian threat, we would lose our land. So we moved from Hatfield and came to, we moved from Hartford and came to Hatfield and we were rewarded by three years of massive Indian attacks, but at least our friends, the Kellogg's, weren't as lucky as we were, but they got kidnapped, taken to Canada and they have Indian heritage now. When they returned, they were with childhood. It was a dangerous time for everybody, at least of whom were the more people whose country this was before we got here. So, John Cole was a founder of the town, so he helped build the church and he was one of the select men because there were eight people in town and there was probably eight select men and eight church members. His son came with him from Hartford and he married Deborah Bartlett. My mom and Sheila wrote this really cool, they devised and wrote a lot of this really cool book and they have some copies in the back of the room and Cindy Dickinson here is going to, Cindy here is going to help us hand these out if you answer the trivia questions first. You get a book, okay? And this is about all the Amherst family farms, including ours. So, John Cole named, married Deborah Bartlett. How did Deborah Bartlett's father die in Northampton at this time? Brown? What? Brown? So, shout it out. Can you get in the head of my work? Baby, how did he die? Me and his girlfriend. Yeah, Mr. Pell gets a book. Okay. The next, Jonathan, was born in Hatfield and he had 28 children and then he went to Central Amherst and he was a select man because there were probably 18 people in Amherst at that time. And there is a restaurant menu which credits his home. So, where was this house, what house was it and to whom did he sell this property? Did his ancestors sell this property according to a menu? First of you guys, it still gets a book. Okay. Okay, so Jonathan calls, they say his house was the Stockbridge house north of the Homestead-Homingamass campus and records show that Cole sold quite a few acres to Mass Aggie to build the college. But my mom's research shows that Jonathan first lived in the back L of the Black Walnut Inn and that makes more sense for our settling North Amherst but there were a lot of Coles' and a lot of Jonathan Coles' so it's up in the air. This is early map. This is on Hatfield. I think I got this from the Hatfield Historical Society. This is the settlement and the town common in Hadley and the allotment of the road to Amherst. The first allotment, the second and the third. And so we were somewhere in there. And that's an Amherst College copy of a North College map. This is the North Congregational Church in North Amherst. It was formed as the first church of Hadley, the third precinct. Jonathan's son, Jonathan, was the first baby baptized there. My dad was the last person memorialized there when it closed and became a Korean church. So we opened and we closed that church. And Jonathan held a lot of offices and he bought the home farm. So now we're finally like at go. Like all that was just background. Now we're starting the store. So 1741, John bought the first parcels of timberland, one on Pulpit Hill where I hope to live and one on the home farm where we ended up building a house. So this is the deed of John selling his land in Hatfield and coming to Amherst. This Jonathan had a son not named Jonathan, the first one in America to get interesting. So David built the home farm house and it started out as a salt box and it had this back end and it had a whole lot of barns attached to it. But I asked Uncle Denny what all this was when he was a kid, this was the outhouse and this was the kitchen because you didn't cook in the house because you started down. I thought it was just me. After the Revolutionary War, David's brother, so Jonathan's other son, Silas, fought on the side of the Brits and we were on the side of the Patriots. I guess you like Catholic and taxes. So he moved to South Amherst and put an E in his name because he didn't want to be confused with us. And he wanted people to be able to pronounce his name. So that's Andrew Coles. And this is an account book of ours in the office from the 1700s, it's crazy what is in this office. Oh, but there's like, there's one of them? Yeah, this is all prayers. Like he's writing his bills. He's like, oh, Lord God, besiege shall you. He was serious. This place was founded around the church for sure. 1786, more accounts, crazy that we have this. When David died, these are his estate expenses. They paid one guy to build his casket. And his name was Ingram. Yeah, and cotton trimming, that was a dollar. Yeah, it's crazy amazing. So after he left Hatfield and settled at the home farm, where I still had my office, we were located somewhere other than Amherst. Where were we located? For a book. Nope? Notre-Dame? Nope. Is there a night? Nope. Is there a night? Sarah gets a book. Ooh. So Coles never changed locations. He's still Hatley. And yeah, so from 1727 to 1759, this was the third crazy of Hatley and that's where, what we lived in. And today in 1768, I think it became Amherst. This is an early map of Amherst after it became a town. So now they start to have pictures and not just write examples. So John Nicole's continued to manage the timber business. So we had the timberland from the first John Nathan Coles in 1741 and that's what built his house, David's house. And this Johnathan divided Shoesbury House from Amherst. We brought the sawmill to the woods because that was easier than bringing trees to a sawmill. Then after the wood was sawed, we brought the wood to the home farm and that's where it was sold. Their son, Johnathan, was big into the church. And he married Sarah Marsh Dickinson and that's a relative of Emily Dickinson. And he ran the business out of the same home farm house that I run in the same business out of today. And these are his property taxes from the early 1800s. Isn't that amazing? This is a church collector. And Amherst tax bill had three lines. One was for the state, one was for the town and one was for the church. That is amazing. Yeah, look, we've been subscribing to the Gazette for 200 years. No, isn't that cool? And the Amherst record too, Amherst seats for that. And I actually, I couldn't find a documentation but I was trying to find out if we ever owned slaves and I was just horrified to research it. And not only did I find no evidence of this but we have subscribed to the abolitionist publication for a couple generations too. So thank goodness we're not unfortunate to Native Americans and not black people too in our history, I mean, good heavens. Walter Dickinson Coles was the child of the last Jonathan and Edward would have loved him. So this guy was born at the right time. He was born at the industrial revolution and he was somebody who could fully take care of that. He became the biggest onion producer and lumber producer in the state of Massachusetts. He went to UMass and learned road building and he had a company called Coles and Tiles which built bridges and roads across the Northeast and in Amherst. He built the rock quarry at the notch because he wanted to build a trolley system and he had the timbers but he didn't have the bedding and he had to manufacture the bedding. He was a state rep and a select man. This is the longest timber bridge in the world after the 38 Hurricane Drew in the last one and WD Coles helped build it in New Hampshire. This is Edda Uney of Shootsbury and she married WD Coles. They helped build the North Amherst Library. Is that a cool picture? And that's Riverside Park on the right. And actually Riverside Park began and the name started because they needed trolley ridership on weekends and this was a destination like the Pellum Orient Springs that you could get on and pay your money and make the trolley viable seven days a week. This is early receipt with some early delivery trucks before blue trucks at the store. Another early truck. I can't, I don't know if anybody knows trucks but this to me looks like it's scooted on a train track but because of the front wheels but I know I knew what I'm talking about. I know, look at the back. That's like, yeah. The front of the tourney. They are but they look like they go on tracks. See this? So Emily bought lumber from WD. This is Austin and it is receipts. Henry Hills bought lumber from Walter and there's one funny one which basically proves that people have been complaining about our building materials for 200 years. Henry Hills says he delivered to be another load of wet lumber. Walter's, stop it. It's gonna dry lumber next time. It's pretty funny from Henry Hills. This is Walter Dickinson. He is in a number of pictures in his suit jacket and hat, pretending to actually work building his trolley alone. Yeah, this is him. This is like the eighth sister before, yeah, before WD's rock crusher took it down and now the Vallejo Grange has seven sisters probably, I'm joking, but where is that now? But this is the notch where Lane's rock quarry is. WD sold that to Lane. This is downtown. So this is the Bay of America. And this is WD Coles. And this is them building the trolley line right uptown with timbers and rocks. This is the same picture from a different angle. So you're looking down, when you just looked up, the town hall is now over here, and this is the common building the trolley line. This is my office, 134 Monogy Road, the home farm, Hobart House, trolley tracks. And when that was redone, WD changed his house from a saltbox to a colonial with an L built a couple of forges, but the front porch was a waiting station for the trolley. And it's nearly in the highway today, but I guess that was intentional because you want it right next to the tracks. So, Sarah, I think we found it the first bit. I looked it up, the North Amherst Village Improvement Society, which you and I researched on a time ago. It was to make North Amherst a more desirable place. They did things like building repairs, sidewalk, shoveling, public lawn mowing, bridge repair, but their biggest thing was they put oil in the street lights and made sure they were on from sunset till sunrise. Pretty cool. First bit. Walter was a slumman. This is uptown, I'm thinking, somebody knows better than I do. Is this a North Amherst common and we're looking toward UMass so this is the store and this is like the house of teriaki now. I'm thinking that's this new store. So, Walter Dickinson-Cole's with William H. Walker, my husband's great-grandfather, valued homes in the cotton together and Chuck's family lost their sawmill and brist mills because they were in the Swift River Valley, but it was a western mass effort to figure out how to flood that Swift River Valley. This is the trolley coming out of the notch and the Joe Larson Memorial trolley stop at UMass. W.E.D. left all his passports in the house. And they're stamped from everywhere. And this is a story that Tarantula's and trekking into the middle of the jungle and going, this isn't the Pamela Canal story, but holy cow, the trips this guy took before it was really easy to do that. And this was in the Boston Globe. The Boston Post is pretty amazing. So, they didn't name their kid Jonathan because it was a girl and Sarah Cole's was, I think she was cool because Uncle Denny says I remind him of her, she was hard ass. And she got things done and I think she's cool. So, she married Jerry Denison Jones who was a mass Aggie student from Nova Scotia and he ran the sauna. Cool. Yeah. She bred Dalmatians and peacocks and sheeps and all kinds of things, but her big thing was cows. She had a big dairy farm that was in my grandson's and teak barn and in the Atkins barn. And she had these giant cans of milk. There's one right back here with a husband's name on it. Right back there is they would ship those self to Holyoke on the trolley. Well, it still ran. And they said it had like whipped cream on the top layer and I just can't even imagine she's shipping milk on the top and not having whipped cream on the top. This is Sarah in front of our barn. She had, I guess she had a locket and on one side was Uncle Denny and on the other side was a dog. And those were her favorite people. I don't know who was first. But she watched her animals. There's a little ball of nuts in the back. This is the reading she went to of the Dickinson family in 1888 and that is some building in Amherst, I don't know where. This might be Sarah Cole's. Walter's on the road. Is he? He's here somewhere. The little boy in the front. Oh really? Yeah, next to her. Cute. So this is Gerald. He was a state rep and he ran the sawmill and he did well at the timber company. Who's Jerry Jones' name for? My cousin. Gerald. Yeah! Forget about that. Lots of books. Gerald. Okay, so Sarah and Gerald helped start with today the Fisher home because Mrs. Fisher was a church and she left her house and money and directions. And they executed them. That house was not handicapped accessible for old people. So they ended up moving it, I think, to the end of Hobart Lane. And it looks like this house, I'm guessing. And building a modern one by Tom Curley in the 60s, which my grandfather, Walter, helped do. And we love them. They're our favorite longtime charity in Amherst. That's Sarah in front of the home farm where I work today. This is her very business. So that is the Atkins Barn. This is the manure shed, which we found evidence of when we built the parking lot at Atkins Barn. This is the Atkins Barn that's falling in that we were rebuilt and these barns don't exist. And this is my office. All right, this is the front of her power which is now where you go get your Atkins stuff like cider domes. And this is a manure shoot, maybe, again. This is a view down to that out of the top floor of the house where my office is, the home farm house. So today the trolley barn is here and I think this is the onion barn that's left. And these are gone now. And this is the Atkins area. So they had a son, they named it for her father, Walter. Edgar would've loved him too because he did big things and he was pretty amazing. Trivia, where is this photo taken? We'll put it on your own, looking for the tour. Yes. And you're probably right over the river. This is the Ellen Story Beach. You guys get to collect books. Am I already on the book? Okay. So this handsome dude is my grandfather and he was amazing. Sarah Hartman, he says he met at church in Ohio but I really don't know if that was true. She came to Mount Holyoke and they got married after she graduated and after she went to faith path secretary of school to get useful and get a job because Mount Holyoke didn't do beads. Amen. She worked for the editor of the Springfield newspaper as a clerk. He is an inspiration to Evan because we have a workforce affordable housing dream for Amherst and he was a founding member of the housing authority in Amherst and he built a great example of workforce affordable housing that's market rate. Naturally affordable without subsidies. He built the first electric sawmill perhaps in the country and he developed the Amherst Water Company which is now your water supply. It was a private business first. So when did it become easier to bring trees to a sawmill than sawmills to trees? Do we have a year or a reason? Trucks. Trucks, part of it. Yeah, so if you look at the sandborn insurance maps of North Amherst at this time, there's a row of electricity in the middle of nowhere. And it was for the sawmill here on Coles Road. Before that, there was an electrical house across the street for the trolley that in the trolley depot. So how did we have electricity starting in 1940 and a trolley before that I didn't do enough research to tell you? That anybody knows. Was the water power generator on no river? No, this was electric but it was Eastern Brook where the, yeah, I think there was a water generator but it could have been, it must have been, huh? On Eastern Brook. I don't think there'd be enough water to regenerate electricity for the trolley. Back today. But it would be, it was the depots, right? And the electric house was next to Eastern Brook north of Coles Road. So that's a chestnut tree cutting the hard way. Still had not invented the chainsaw. That was still rough. So this, I think, is the first example of forced affordable housing, market rate affordable. These are nice, small house slots with branch and gates on them and they are going to be affordable forever. They were World War II by your first house when you're out of the war. And still today, a lot of first time, last time home buyers like it there. I hope in my lifetime, Everest will allow zoning by the bedroom, not by the house. So if you have a two acre lot and you can build a four bedroom house on it, why can't you build four one bedroom houses on that same lot? And those will always be affordable. And we will not have to have to eat restrictions and donations from places to be able to have teachers and firefighters live where they were. I don't understand why policemen don't have balls anymore. This is a belt from 1956 for the policemen's ball program. And so I told you at the beginning that the reason why we stayed in business is because every generation had stopped the unaffected business of the past and it did what meant more to them, what made more sense for their generation. As soon as Sarah died, Walter auctioned all our cows and cut the timbers out of the Atkins barn. It stored long units of lumber in it. And when we converted it to Atkins, we had to go put posts back under the leaves because it was falling in. Somehow it stayed up all those years. Barns are amazing. That's grand. People in North Amherst Post Office. He had a farm that ran from our home farmhouse to the Hadley Daugher. 116 bisected that in his lifetime. He was a director of the fair and he was one of the partners in Elder Jones Lumber, which is the same location as leader is today, except it was turned around and the head of the store was where the lumberyard restaurant was and that is why it was called the Lumberyard Restaurant. So, Denny, Walter and Sarah had three kids. My aunt and uncle, Denny and Gert and my dad, Paul. And I could go way out with the branches of this family tree. But I am just going to focus on my dad to be an ab because we're close to a half hour. We have to be. So, he died, we have to down his bottom two. This is Denny and dad and Gert and their grandmother's cow on Coles Road. And Chico and she and Denny and dad. That is my dad. He married his high school sweetheart, Ruth Elwin. Congratulations from UMass in the brand new Cape Cod lounge of the Student Union, which is going to be done this year. She is a distant relative because she is from the South Amherstee Coles family. Dad did manage the family timber and real estate business of the same home farmhouse that eight generations had before him. He built Riverside Park, which is on the Riverside Park trolley stop. But today it's a 1970 strip mall and 48 apartments find it. And it's not known to you because there are no behavior problems there because they have graduate students and adults living there and it's off the radar, but it's a beautiful place to live. And a couple of units are available if you're lucky. Dad built Coles building supply in 1980 because he wanted to provide the rest of the building materials people were asking for when they came to the sawmill. And when Aunt Gert came home in 1986, he backed off, went back to the home farmhouse, ran that side of the business and gave Gert his baby. And she did a great job. Dad put a new planer and a timber sizer in and he built a dozen town roads with Bob Patterson, his partner in Patterson Jones, soccer drive area, Cherry Lane extension, Evelyn Lane, lots of those that houses streets in that neighborhood they built. That's Dad and the planer and Dad's sawmill and what the yard looked like. So this is the harp. That's the new trolley garden there. That's Dad, that's my office today. I sit in the same place. This is his Billy's Pie store and his sawmill, the planing mill and the lumbered logs and lumber on Coles Road. That's an ad for everything he did in 1978. That is Bob Boone and he shipping lumber to Ireland for caskets and that little monkey is Evan. You can't tell. That little monkey's Evan. That's me and Andy and Grant. And we grew up playing on foundations and in construction equipment and we found it was so cool and we still do, we have all the sandbox to prove it. But it was so exciting to just understand the past of our family history and what came before us and what was possible in front of us. We grew up working in Dad's store, at a mullet and it was cute. We were told, don't even think about coming back until you get more useful because you're not useful yet. So Evan, we're over the top and got a degree in wood technology for new masks that's super useful, worked at another Billy's Pie company, learned the ropes there before coming home to help Gert and Dad run the retail store and I was working for non-profit organizations in DC. Dad thought I was so good at non-profits I should come home to the family business because the lumber and land company was not making any profits in the early years, yeah. So it was perfect for me. So every kid in the family had to scrape and paint this four-sided wood to get fence right here that is like the one at the North Hammer Cemetery and the first order of business when I got home is I took out that wood fence and I put in these bushes. Many more Evan's kids don't have the joy of learning the family business the same way. They should, thank you. So this is us, right when I came home. So we take our opportunity and responsibility very seriously. We didn't just start cutting trees and building solar farms and bulldozing sawmills. We thought about it. What do we have? What has been before us? What should be in front of us? What are all the things we have to work with? What's the best thing we could possibly do with each one of them? So there are places where there's no broadband or cell service. Let's figure out what the highest peaks are. We have to pay for gravel to build roads. Maybe we have that on our own land. Goshen stone, boy it's worth a lot if you could pay to take it out which you can't but that's an interesting thing to know where it is. There are amethysts on our land. Amethysts work was named because they found purple things in it. Amazing. We thought about what outline open space should be protected and not ever developed. And we worked, Kristen DeBoer of the Kessler Land Trust is our hero. She actually pointed this out and helped us do the right thing in our men land. We're really proud of our partnership with her. There are parcels that we identified on water and sewer in here downtown Amherst and Derrick downtown North Amherst that really should be contributing to the community that all of a sudden we say Amherst needs. War workforce housing, a place for alumni to come back and retire, relive the best years of their life and leave all their money to UMass because every dollar UMass gets, Amherst benefits $16. So our goal, besides workforce portable housing is to get alumni who mostly live within two hours of Amherst to come back and retire here. We looked at wind power and solar power potential, failed with wind, succeeded with solar and we consider, we have a 30 acre parcel half mile north of UMass and it loses money every year. Is this a good thing to do or should we maybe discontinue an outdated business that is thankless and do something that's more productive in this day and age? So after 10 years of fire or rebuild, a lot of effort, instead of waiting till dad died to auction it off, we auctioned it while I watched and he was okay with understanding that this was in the past and that something else was in the future and I think he saw it with us and the benefit of having worked with my dad for 10 years in North Amherst in the home farm that we've been in since 1741 is he never left. I feel like I'm working with my dad every day still. He's just in the next room and it's a pretty amazing thing. So I'm now, he's checking out what we have going forward. So like every generation before us, while we manage the Timberland, we are rebuilding the home farm to meet our generation's needs. So our ninth generation goals, okay, so the internet age, you can get everything online, why do you need a downtown? Well, would you get your date online and what do you do with it? So text. Well, you take your text together, where are you going to do that? So I feel like malls took over downtown and now the malls are kind of dying and now they're becoming amusement parks and we're really missing personal connections and there's an ideal downtown that I remember from living on Amity Street when I was a kid and I want that back. So Evan and I are building the Mill District which is going to be at the center for commuters, for retirees, for young professionals to want to stay in town after they graduate and it's going to be amazing because you can walk to the river rec and watch a baseball game or go swimming, walk on trails to lever it from your door. You can watch the post office library, we have a grocery store right out front and we're opening a general store, Walter's general store right below the new units of the park and it's opening in August. So restaurants, services, everything's going to be there and I think you guys are going to like it. I think Edwards can like it. We also want to increase energy production. So we have a good start on the Mill District. We completed the largest private conservation project in Massachusetts history. I think you're my dad died and we named it for him. We are expanding our sustainable forest products with solar energy and we're really proud of that. There's Sarah in this room and this is the dedication of the Palsy Jones Working Forest. It's the mountain range behind here. It's five and a half acres, five and a half square miles of managed forest that won't ever be developed because it's conserved. This is Coles Road today. So this is the trolley barn. I believe version of, that everybody believes all these new covers are sitting in there. I have lunch in there. Hey, did you know this was a trolley barn? So the center had a 300th or something recently and we built a plywood trolley for the parade. And I asked the town if I could put it as a bus stop and they said yes. So pretty soon we should probably build a metal one because a plywood parade probably won't last forever but it's so cool that there's a trolley, next to the trolley barn. And so we're trying to build this amazing downtown that there's Ice Cream on No Atkins, Sarah Poles' Cow Barn. This is North Square. This building opens in July and this one may be October, November. 130 units of apartments owned by Beacon Community Development who made all my dreams come true in two years and said 30 because we were going a year and a half to build this, a couple million dollars. Year and a half to build this, $2 million debt that maybe other kids will pay off someday. And Beacon said we'll put $49 million into building a town square. 22,000 square feet of retail, which Poles will own and program as the ideal downtown. And we will build 130 units of people who will shop in your stores, about there. And we will target seniors and young professionals. So I called, bingo. So in one year our ideal downtown is being built on the south side of Poles Road. And we are very excited. We were worried at first that the Atkins would lose some customers because of the traffic. So our friend Hannah said why don't we build a mini job site, Sandbox, where kids can get all excited about construction. And we invited the Jones Library to read Sandbox Storytime once a week all last summer. And it was a huge hit. So kids are like totally brainwashed with how cool construction is sometimes. And first responders, they're four subjects that I approved for the library. So it's first responders, diversity, how cool farming is, and how cool construction is. So that's what the books are, this library library, if you take kids. And there's a door so cats can't get in. But if they do get in, it's peace stone so they don't like to poop in it. Sandboxes are bad that way, and this is good. This is great. So there are construction trucks you can put on a hard hat and there are plans for North Square. You can build it with us. No matter how old you are, you can drive Jake's great food. So this is an area of the whole home farm that's close building supply, trolley barn. What is to come? Town Square can be closed off so that all this is a flea market or an art show. We're not just building buildings and leasing them out. We're trying to build community. Building community is the whole goal in this internet age. A place where experiences happen. So we have the library, common read books. These are kids enjoying these places. This is a soil science for the construction explaining how cool it is to be a woman in construction to the kids who get free ice cream for listening to a story time in the library. And the library is a sandbox. This is the opening of Atkins. We still, if anybody needs farm animal and fruit vegetable costumes, we have so many. But we'll bring them out again. And this was a lot of fun. And that's swamming with his rear arm this year. But it's a cat, so that's not quite true. There are 19 farm animals like the couch there that we can find if you go to Atkins. This year, we're gonna conserve 2,000 more acres. And these acres are gonna protect Amherst water supply and the province water supply. We're naming it after Grant. This is the history of our home farm. Add saunel, new saunel. Woo-hoo! This year. This is the history of our farm street. Still doing the same stuff, it's just easier. Same land sustainably harvesting it for almost 300 years. So our plan is to continue to diversify the forest product production with solar farms, finding development partners for more parcels near North Square. We're gonna increase the timber base and sustainably manage it. We will build market affordable housing in my lifetime, in this town. And we are gonna satisfy the needs of our community today without jeopardizing future generations' ability to satisfy their needs. We have been here. We respect the past. Any questions? This is wonderful. Thank you. Do you have a lot of printouts? Sure, there's a John Gennadik's print of what the saunel looked like a couple years before it closed. It's a beautiful art paper and take one. There might be other things back there. I bet you could win a book if you said something to keep to my mom and Sheila. So the point is all this material, and that on the screen, wind up. It's not at the Jones Library, it's not. They're newcomers. We have a really good archive. I have fireproof safes that I'm organizing all this in. I've been told we should have a museum someday. We've given some things to the Jones Library. We've given some things to the Historical Society. I don't think they can handle it. We have too much stuff. Yeah, so we'll figure it out. Don't get thumb drives for sure. What about the UMass Library? They're archives. They're even newer. Yeah, they're pretty hard. Yeah, that's true. We'll work on that. I know mom's donated things to UMass Library, and that's a good idea. You mentioned the count books. How far back in time do they go, and what time span do they cover? 1,700 to 1,950. That's so far back. No, that's a goldmine of local history. What are you going to do with those? I'm trying to archive them. I'm trying to figure out exactly what. Right now, I have Ziploc baggies full of receipts from 1880, 1930, and 1950. Just baggies full. Yeah, UMass Special Collections would be very interested to help out with that. They really need the attention of a professional conservator. That can be arranged. I'm open to it. I would like to work with them myself once they become available. Oh, sure. The cool thing to me, today I was going through looking for more interesting tidbits to share, and there's David Coles listed the value of his property when he died for his wife's inheritance. And so how much a pouch is worth, and how much a basket of food, or sometimes a crazy detailed list of values in 1970. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. It is good resource. I'll have to talk to my mom and see what she thinks, because she's my advisor on everything in store. The registry of probates in Northampton might, I don't know how far the deeds go back to the 18th century. I don't know if they have probates, but there might be a fair number of generations of the states there. You're just trying to make your deed research easier. Yes. So Sarah was the first woman who was kind of actively involved in the business, but she probably wasn't the face of the business just because of the time, is that fair to say? Yeah, she ran the farming side of the business, which is her son ran the farming and the lumber side of it. He was an only child too. She was a mom and ran the farm, and her husband ran the scary sawmill and timberland all over the place. So that makes sense that at the time, she was pretty powerful. So your generation is the first generation where you, Beth, will you just kind of face a company? Can you just say what one of them is? The Lambs company? Yeah, no, and I was impressed, because my mom raised my dad well. He was, I was brought up to think that I could be a mom president of the United States at the same time, if that's what I wanted to do, and she convinced dad of that, and he felt confident in my ability to manage the timber and real estate part of the company after him, and I don't know that a lot of other dads in that generation would have done that, and I credit mom for making the environment happen.