All photography accompanying this article is courtesy of Joel Petra of DDREPS and Bailey Roubos of Drone Hub Media.
History is taking place in the heart of Ancramdale, which straddles the southern border of Columbia County in New York. For the first time ever, a 2,150-acre farm, Mill Farm to be precise, is being offered for sale for the historic price of $90 million. The farm includes a pristine and historic Revolutionary Era grist mill, over 10 residential houses, over 15 barns and other structures, almost 20 miles of the most incredible riding trails in all of New York State, and hundreds of acres of working farmland, surrounded almost entirely by conservation lands. This unique farm is steeped in history as it continues to make history.
For the sake of full disclosure, I must begin by sharing that I grew up on Mill Farm. As a child in 1989, I moved to the rural farm in southern Columbia County with my family, and to say that there was a night-and-day difference between it and my home country of Iceland would be an understatement. But I quickly adjusted to my new home and before long, playing in the Punch Brook stream with my brother, weed-whacking the fenceposts around fields that seemingly went on for miles, fishing from the pond above the waterfall, riding Icelandic horses on the miles of trails, stacking hay in the Dutch barn on hot summer days, mucking the 24 horse stalls every weekend, ice skating on one of the small ponds, and cutting burdock when we were bringing fields back … this all became the stuff of my childhood. …