‘Vassar Farm’ a piece of history, more than just a farm

Vassar's beautiful thousand-acre campus does not end at the South Commons and New Hackensack Road. Across Route 376 lies Vassar Farm, an important part of Vassar College since 1904.

The name Vassar Farm is a bit of a misnomer, as the College itself has not operated the the 527.5-acre property as a farm since the 1950s. Up until that time, however, Vassar Farm supplied the College with a majority of its produce.

From the beginning, working of the Vassar Farm was a regular part of campus life; the female students, nicknamed "the farmerettes," helped grow the crops themselves. At the Eastern States Exposition of 1917 a "living exhibit'"of five Vassar students displayed their farming acumen and methodology.

Throughout World Wars I and II, the Farm sustained Vassar, and the farmerettes were an invaluable part of the College's economy.

By the mid-1950s, however, the Vassar Farm had shut down. Under the advice of an efficiency expert, the College decided that the Farm was diverting funds from its primary focus: education. The farming ceased, the cattle and other livestock were slowly sold off, and the land lay unused for almost two decades.

"To the best I can tell, nothing really happened there until the '70s," said Field Station Manager Kelly Van Kamp, who helps manage the Vassar Farm and serves as a liaison between the College and non-Vassar tenants on the property. "I'm sure people used it to walk on it…[but] there isn't really mention of it until [the College] put out a call for proposals for what we should do with it."

Margaret Wright, then a professor of biology at Vassar, proposed that the land be designated an ecological preserve, so 270 acres, or approximately half of the land, was put to that purpose. The other half was designated mixed-use. Later, more of the land was designated as a preserve, leaving approximately 100 acres to mixed-use.

Since then, the mixed-use portion has seen a wide variety of tenants and uses. In 1978, the first mobile home lab was set up on the mixed-use terrain for science field work, and since then, the site has slowly but steadily become an integral part of science studies at Vassar.

The Priscilla Bullitt Collins Field House was built in 1995; classes in the departments of geography, earth science, chemistry, biology and geography make use of the farm and the station for lessons, observations and experiments, as well as maintaining and monitoring the land.

The rugby team started using the field by the barns for practice in 1976, the first year that the College recruited for its two-year-old rugby team. Although it was one of the few full-size rugby pitches in the Metropolitan Rugby Union, "the field was severely rutted and had several scarcely-buried rocks as prominent geographic features," recalls Vassar alumnus and former men's rugby captain Charles Williams '80.

"At that time," Williams wrote in an e-mailed statement, "the rugby team was also offered the use of a dilapidated sheep pen for purposes of storing equipment and changing," but after trying to shovel out a floor that "turned out to be more dung than dirt," the team switched to using a corn crib, a tradition which continues today.

And rugby is not the only sport played on the Farm. Vassar cross country moved its course to the trails two years ago, and several local high school cross country teams use it for meets as well, according to rugby Coach Tony Brown. A local American football team also practices on the field, and the Empire State Games have been held on the Farm as well.

Indeed, the Farm is now part of a large community that spans both Vassar and Poughkeepsie. In the 1980s, the City of Poughkeepsie was allotted three acres for leaf composting on the Farm. In 2002, Vassar contracted with Greenway Environmental to create a larger composting site for organic waste from Vassar and the larger community.

In 1999, the land became a farm once more, thanks to the Poughkeepsie Farm Project. The project, which began as a group of 70 Poughkeepsie residents on three acres of the Vassar Farm, now grows 60 tons of produce annually. Through its food share program, 25 percent of the food that members grow is distributed to underprivileged Poughkeepsie residents. The Poughkeepsie Farm Project also works with local schools to educate middle and high school students about nutrition and agriculture. Vassar students can intern with the project through the Field Work Office.

So farming has reappeared on the Vassar Farm, though it now makes up less than 20 acres. As for the preserve, it has been allowed to grow naturally, as generations of Vassar students studiously observe it and many others simply enjoy it.

A series of trails weaves through the rest of the preserve, on which Poughkeepsie residents, Vassar students included, can often be seen jogging, biking or walking their dogs. Aerial shots of the Vassar Farm capture its progression from dense forest to cleared farmland, then back to the forested land that now dominates the preserve.

The Vassar Farm has not always been a farm per se, but for almost a century it has been, and will continue to be, an important part of Vassar itself.