Colin and Paula Cabot put faith in a varnished ideal as they turned off of Pittsfield Road and onto a dirt path in Loudon, navigating by dead reckoning to Sanborn Mills Farm for the first time in 1996.
Migrating east from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where they had towered over the Skylight Music Theater, the couple thumbed the pages of a real estate brochure and bristled at elaborate houses up and down the northern tier of New England. They craved, instead, a bucolic fixer-upper — envisioning 10 acres and a run-down cape they could tailor to their wants — but the search had proved challenging.
A friend, distinguished in the southern New Hampshire arts scene, enticed them to view listings in Peterborough and Sharon. “They asked us whether we were boat people or golf people,” Colin recalled, “and we said, ‘We’re out of here.'”
Relegated to the real estate brochure’s back cover, Sanborn Mills, however, was advertised as home to a working gristmill, sawmill and blacksmith shop built in 1829 — such things appealed to Colin, whose father had restored mills in the Canadian region of Charlevoix, but also proved to be “a total lie.”
“It wasn’t working at all. It was cobbled together and falling apart,” said Colin. “It was a bad day when we showed up. ‘Sure can’t get out of it now.'”
The historic farm was rumored to have been mired in acrimony and familial infighting during the 20th century, surviving in spite of years of benign neglect. Eleven buildings comprised the compound, and only one had a roof that wasn’t leaking. The sawmill had not been modernized since 1891. Trees stretched 12 feet above the farm’s two dams, which by Colin’s estimation, were just about “ready to blow themselves apart.”
Their next thought triumphed over their doubts: “‘Why not save this place?’ And that’s what we did,” Colin said.
Thirty years later, the Cabots’ purchase of Sanborn Mills has crystallized as the pivot-point heralding a new era for the once-derelict property, rescued into meaningful use as the setting of a flourishing artisan craft revival. The farm’s visionary founders now plan to step away, limiting their involvement after decades of intensive investment.
The transition has already started, like a candle that can’t be unlit: In September, Colin relinquished the reins of the nonprofit’s day-to-day operations to a new executive director, Mike Molla, former president of the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design. Molla’s delicate responsibility is to wean the nonprofit from a founder-led model towards greater self-sufficiency.
The Cabots expect to settle into a home in Cornish soon, their move delayed by renovations. The offices abutting their residence on the farm have increasingly encroached on their living space as their staff has burgeoned, but Molla is happy for them to linger. He benefits whenever Paula lends a refined eye to the farm’s landscape design, and Colin gradually shares a lifetime of institutional knowledge.
“Looking at what they’ve created, this has been not only their home but their passion and their vision,” said Molla. “You look at lots of businesses and organizations that are generational, an adult son or daughter takes over the business. There’s lots of lessons to learn, and very few folks like me will ever get to have this opportunity.”
The property harbors legends of its own: Large weather events that eradicated neighboring mills, like the great New England hurricane of 1938, left those at Sanborn unharmed. Later that century, the farm would risk withering from within. Bernice Richardson, who married into the Sanborn family, is said to have maintained such a notorious feud with her son, John, that by 1997, when the Cabots moved in, they noticed deadbolts on either side of a door in the main house to keep the warring parties apart.
In 1998, with major work underway to rehabilitate every building on the farm, the Cabots’ vision came into focus: Through their farming practices, classes, and the preservation of historic structures, they would articulate life at Sanborn Mills in 1835.
“It was a sort of manifesto. We said, ‘We want to become an educational institution and teach people forgotten tracks,'” Colin said. “We started doing classes and stuff. We would take advantage of the materials that we have on the farm and turn it into something that you make with your hands.”
In 2003, Sanborn Mills hosted its first public workshops: laying dry stone wall foundations and barn raising. The subsequent years saw exponential growth in programming, overseen by program manager Marsha Grizwin, arriving in April of 2022 from the world of textile design.
At the time, the farm was forging forward in spite of the pandemic, erecting a dye studio adjacent to a natural dye garden. They held 52 craft workshops that season; this year, the farm is offering 130, ranging from forge welding, broom-making, upholstering and yarn processing to vegetable gardening and flower arranging.
Over the past four years, Grizwin has worked to attract renowned instructors and eager learners to Sanborn Mills’s pastoral corner of Loudon without deviating from the founders’ intentions. On the second floor of the Sanborn Barn, above the woodworking workshop, the ancient art of tinsmithing has seen a resurgence under Grizwin’s auspices. Colin provided the inspiration for the workshop, as well as the equipment, which for 10 years, sat in an attic gathering dust, seeming to wait for Grizwin’s initiative.
“We joke and say we’re a 30-year start-up because it’s true. When Colin and Paula purchased the property in the late 90s, it was always with the intention of creating a nonprofit craft school. It was Paula and Colin’s vision to set that in motion right away,” she said. Growth has continued to be grounded in functional craft and utility. “We don’t teach drawing and painting just to teach it, but we teach it if it relates to the site because we are about fostering a sense of place here.”
The farm’s footprint reflects its rapid expansion. In 2020, Fifield Hall was built to house looms and spinning wheels, as well as a dormitory of seven bedrooms available to accommodate students. All told, the farm now houses 20 buildings, and Grizwin forsees more construction to support future workshops.
The next several years’ growth will be achieved under different conditions. Colin and Molla envision the nonprofit’s endowment covering the cost of building maintenance, enabling staff to focus on “revenue-producing” events — like the NH Food Alliance’s statewide gathering — that help keep the wheels greased.
Partnerships will be vital to the farm’s continued local relevance. The last month has seen a fledgling collaboration with Canterbury Shaker Village emerge, with the goal of keeping the museum’s historic gardens in active agricultural production after the departure of tenant farmers. Sanborn Mills’s staff have already turned their focus to fruit and vegetable production, bringing in oxen to till and prepare the land. Next year, they plan to reactivate old Shaker tincture gardens and orchards with help from UNH Extension.
“We’re two organizations along the same path, knowing that we both have a shared purpose,” said Garrett Bethmann, communications and engagement manager at Shaker Village. “We’re at this place where this ground is able to be put into active production, and we’re able to offer it a sandbox for them.”
Another frontier, the variety of the programming offered at Sanborn Mills, has also entered Molla’s sights: As other institutions expunge diversity from their vernaculars, the new executive director has been contemplating the perspectives excluded from the farm’s prioritization of artisan crafts worth preserving.
“Looking at racial diversity, there are Indigenous communities that have been part of the kind of practices that we’re doing here that we’re not preserving or teaching or sharing,” he said. “How might we look at what would be the African American connection to farming and agriculture and making that is different than the kind of programming that we’re doing now, that’s almost colonialized in a number of ways?”
At his desk in the main house, Colin reclined and swept aside a curtain of silvered hair. He made apologies for his faltering memory, yet retold the farm’s history in scintillating detail.
He’s moved on from a personal project once before in his career, and he said he feels at peace with doing it again.
“When we left the theater in Milwaukee, I was in charge for 25 years, we sort of had a nice party and kissed up and said goodbye. Interestingly, they’ve changed the name of the theater twice, and they’re now doing shows that I would never touch with a 10-foot pole, but the place is helping. It’s doing what it should be doing, which is, it’s putting our art out in front of people,” Colin said.
He added: “I sort of like to start things up and not finish them, right, Mike?”
“No, you finish them,” Molla answered.
