Developers regularly called and made their bids. Even customers, distressed by the for-sale sign on Clinton Street, stopped by to inquire about the farm in recent months.
Jason ‘Jay’ Clapp had the same reply each time: “We’re not interested in selling.”
He’d worked beyond the farm as a mail carrier, like his father, and in the body shop of a local auto dealer. He spent three years trucking, braving miles of congested traffic to haul 100,000 lbs. of steel into Boston. The sedentary, solitary road aggravated him.
Clapp Family Farm, however, has always had the opposite effect.
“I have no desire to be off the farm, this is my happy place, you know. This is where I want to be,” he said.
What Jay and his wife, Bridget Clapp, decided to sell was the small single-story house with cedar shakes where they previously lived, caring for his late parents, Bob and Barbara LaValley Clapp, as their health declined. The house, which abuts the farm, was sold in July, alleviating some of the couple’s financial worries and infusing their business with renewed vitality on the year of a monumental anniversary.
After his parents’ passing, the couple moved into the main farmhouse. They lived out of the guest bedroom during the first year, unable to bring themselves to disturb his parents’ belongings.
Stashed away in an inconspicuous folder and nearly forgotten, tax stamps revealed the precise longevity of the farm: The oldest record Bridget could find traces the Clapp family’s acquisition of the farm to July 2, 1925.
“It was like a waxy paper they used to type on, and I found it in one of the folders. And I went, ‘Oh my gosh, I wish we were paying those property taxes!'” Bridget laughed. “We’re proud. We’re really proud that we’ve been here 100 years.”
When Jay considers all those decades, a lifetime of memories rushes into clear view.
He recalls the bleached-blond hair of his boyhood glowing white in the summer sun and the raucous fun of each birthday party.
He remembers himself as his father’s “sidekick,” a shadow trailing behind his plow and plucking earth worms from the ground for fishing or riding in the back of his Chevy pick-up truck on top of 52 bales of hay, ducking under branches as they traveled rugged, old backroads.
“We’d be out bucking up wood in the woods together, you know. It was just always hard work, but we always enjoyed it together,” he said.
Jay and Bridget, the third generation of Clapps farming on Clinton Street, are now putting their own imprint on the farm.
His grandparents’ farmstand was a little hut with a red door that flipped open with the tug of a cable rope. When Jay’s parents took over the operation, it was eventually converted into an enclosure for their ducks.
During the ten years they spent caring for his parents, Bridget brought back the farmstand, selling fresh produce and her own jams and pies and sourcing from local vendors anything she and her husband couldn’t grow or make themselves.
All the while, they handled two mortgages and kept the remainder of the small Concord farm business afloat. Times were often hard.
“We were so financially strapped we were close to foreclosure,” Jay said. “Selling that house negated that. It gave us a new start.”‘
With the sale, the farmstand, formerly attached to their old home, moved up to the farm itself. The simple change in setting doubled their sales.
“When we moved over here, we just figured we’re just moving across the driveway pretty much,” she said. “But down there it wasn’t as bright, and it didn’t have the same backdrop and everything. Most people say it just fits, it’s a farm.”
A parade of spotted guinea hens scampered past Bridget, foraging for pests, as she talked. The cows that normally roam free on the Clapps’ 15 acres huddled together in a patch of shade.
Customers enjoy seeing the gears of the farm turn, she said.
The Clapps have also put the money from the sale to good use, purchasing a pavilion for seasonal displays or flowers and pumpkins and a shed with indoor refrigeration to help extend their season.
In light of the farm’s centennial, these reinvestments bring Jay and Bridget both hope.
“When this happened, it was a new beginning,” he said.