The Community Table · Presented by The Churchville Inn

Snipes Farm: Twelve Generations in Bucks County Soil, and a Harvest Meant for the Neighbors

In Morrisville, a family descended from William Penn’s first Quaker settlers still keeps the land, and a small nonprofit farm on it gives away every vegetable it grows.

Snipes Farm and Education Center · Morrisville, Bucks County

In 1687, James and Joan Burgess Moon left England for Bucks County, part of the wave of Quaker families who followed William Penn across the ocean in the hope of living out what they called a Holy Experiment, a place where people could worship and govern freely and the light in every person might be allowed to shine. The Snipes family descends directly from them. They have lived on the present Snipes Farm since 1808, and the people working that ground today are the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth generations of their family to farm in this county, which is a longer line than most of us can trace on paper, let alone in the same soil.

In 2008 the family opened their land to a new kind of tenant, Snipes Farm and Education Center, a nonprofit that calls itself an outdoor classroom and is one of the only sustainability-focused farms in Bucks County. The farmers there practice regenerative agriculture in the plainest sense, with no-till beds, their own compost, beehives, bluebird boxes, a Tiny Forest, and a children’s garden, and every bit of the produce they grow goes to food kitchens and distribution centers in Trenton and beyond. School groups come for field trips and summer camp, and at the edge of it all sits Snipes Woods, fifty or sixty acres of coastal plain forest along Rock Run Creek, one of the very few significant stands of its kind left, home to at least six rare plants.

October is when the farm opens its gates a little wider. The season begins with a Farm Harvest Tour on Saturday, October 3rd, a chance to meet the growers and taste the autumn produce straight from the field, and continues with an afternoon among the hives on October 11th alongside Master Beekeepers Suzanne and Michael Luciano, a morning of first shots with USA Archery instructors on October 17th, and, on October 25th, an afternoon of pumpkin painting, visits with the farm animals, and all the pie a person can reasonably eat. A scarecrow scavenger hunt runs through all of it, and everyone parks and checks in at the big red barn. The full calendar lives with Snipes Farm.

We have spent forty-some years believing a table gets better when there is room for everyone at it, and it is hard to think of a place in Lower Bucks County that makes the same point with less fuss than Snipes Farm does. So spend a Saturday morning walking the harvest rows, or a Sunday afternoon with a slice of pie and a pumpkin half-painted in your lap, and let the day come to rest the way good fall days around here tend to, with the drive home through Bucks County and a quiet evening at our table.

Part of The Community Table series · The Churchville Inn