By mid-August the corn at Clark Farm is shoulder-high, the trail loops through Great Brook are dry enough to run, and the line at Kimball's spills past the picnic tables around seven. If you have lived in Carlisle for more than a season, you already know the choreography. What you may not have thought about lately is how much of it hangs on four working addresses, all family-run, all on active farmland, and how the missing fifth address at the center of town has changed the shape of a Saturday for everyone else.
This is a guide for people who already live here. Consider it a nudge to revisit the places that make late summer feel like Carlisle, and a status update on the one that a lot of us miss.
The dairy hiding inside the state park
Great Brook Farm State Park is the anchor. It is a day-use public recreation area featuring an active dairy farm in the town of Carlisle, established in 1967 and managed by the Department of Conservation and Recreation, with over 20 miles of trails for hiking, mountain biking, cross-country skiing, dog-walking and equestrian use. That trail number is the one most residents underestimate. Twenty miles inside a single town park means you can walk here every weekend for a year and not repeat the same loop.
The dairy piece is what makes it structurally unusual. Great Brook sits on a state park in the town of Carlisle, and it is the only state park that has an active dairy farm. The Duffy family runs it. Mark and Tamma Duffy, their daughter Marlow, and sons Christopher and Blake, run a state-of-the-art dairy with a "smart" barn housing the first robotic milking system installed in Massachusetts. More than 100,000 visitors come through each year, which is a lot of foot traffic for a town whose entire population would fit inside Fenway with room to spare.
A few things worth knowing if you have not been in a while:
- Free guided tours of the working dairy are offered, and the ice cream stand is a stop after the tour.
- Tours of the dairy farm are available from May to October, and the ice cream stand is open from April to October.
- The Duffys also raise cranberries and sell composted cow manure, which is the sort of detail that turns a park visit into a to-do list.
- Canoeing and fishing are offered on Meadow Pond for anyone who wants a quieter afternoon than the ice cream line delivers.
The stand itself is at 247 North Road, and there is an argument to be made that the milk-to-cone distance is shorter here than at any other ice cream stop within an hour of Boston.
Kimball's at Bates — the other cone
Two miles south, on Bedford Road, the other option runs on a different logic. Kimball Farm sits at 343 Bedford Road on Route 225, on the parcel most longtime residents still call Bates Farm. The Carlisle stand is the smaller sibling of the Westford operation, and residents tend to prefer it for exactly that reason. No mini golf. No bumper boats. Just a lawn, some picnic tables, and a paddock.
Regulars will tell you the appeal is the setting itself. There are goats and geese on the property, fifteen outdoor tables that welcome dogs, and a stretch of grass out back with old-fashioned lawn games. The stand keeps its seasonal calendar, closing over the winter and reopening in spring. If you have out-of-town family visiting this month, this is the stop where the visit slows down and everyone actually talks to each other.
Clark Farm on Concord Street
Clark Farm is the third address, and the one that has changed the most in the last generation. The fields on Concord Street have been in agricultural production since the early 1700s. The Clark family purchased the farm in 1899 and passed it down to their son Guy, a Carlisle town moderator, assessor, and firefighter. Guy ran the dairy alongside his wife Dorothy "Dot" Clark through the mid-1980s. In 2003, Dot joined forces with Grant and Helene Wilson to create a conservation restriction to protect 64 acres of Clark Farm in perpetuity. Upon Dot's passing in 2010, the farm was purchased by Marjie Findlay and Geoff Freeman, who run the operation with farmer Andrew Rodgers.
The result today is a working organic operation that most of us treat as the town's produce section. Clark Farm produces organic vegetables and berries for their CSA community, farm stand, and local farm-to-table restaurants, offering shares that range from spring through winter, plus egg, beef, pork, lamb, goat, mushroom, and tree fruit shares. They offer pick-your-own strawberries, cherry tomatoes, beans, flowers and herbs, and they raise lamb, goats, pastured pork, and laying hens. The herb setup is a small thing worth flagging: instead of committing to a whole bunch of basil that turns black in your fridge on Thursday, you can walk out and cut what you actually need for dinner.
Late August is peak pick-your-own for cherry tomatoes and beans, and it is the last real window for the cutting-flower rows before the light shifts.
A quick reference for the calendar
| Address | Season | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Great Brook Farm, 247 North Rd | Ice cream April–Oct; tours May–Oct weekends | 1,000-acre park, 20+ miles of trails |
| Kimball Farm, 343 Bedford Rd | Spring through fall | Bates Farm setting, dogs welcome outside |
| Clark Farm, 185 Concord St | Market season through Thanksgiving | Organic CSA, PYO strawberries/tomatoes/beans/flowers/herbs |
| Ferns, 8 Lowell Rd | Closed May 2025 | Community-led reopening in planning |
The Ferns question
Here is the thread that ties the four addresses together. Every town like ours has a general store at the center, or used to. For over a century, a general store has been the heart of Carlisle's town center. Whether you knew it as Daisy's or Ferns, it has always been a staple, a daily touchpoint. When Ferns closed its doors this past May, our whole community felt the loss.
That closure is the reason your Saturday probably looks different than it did two summers ago. No more coffee-and-sandwich stop before the trailhead. No more porch rocker after a bike ride out from the center. Fern's Country Store had been around since the late 1800s, and it was the only store in this small town.
The reopening plan is real, and it is being run by neighbors. Ben and Amy Pirri, along with their close friends Mark and Jill Kushinsky, are coming together to bring Ferns back for everyone to enjoy again. The scale of the project is worth understanding before you assume the doors will swing open next month. The work ahead is significant. On top of the purchase price, renovations and remediation are expected to exceed $1.4 million. This is far beyond what a small-town general store could ever generate through sales alone. Septic, plumbing, electrical, and HVAC systems all need replacement, and the kitchen must be relocated and rebuilt with proper ventilation and workflow.
The team the Pirris and Kushinskys are working with tells you something about how seriously they are taking it. They are in conversations with Sam and Kinnari Patel of Turnpike Market in Billerica, who revitalized their own century-old store into a thriving hub of fresh food and community connection, and they have engaged Sousa Design Architects, a design firm known for their extensive experience in hospitality and community spaces. More than 500 neighbors have shared ideas, memories, and hopes through the community survey.
The version they describe is not a nostalgia rebuild. The plan is a modern kitchen bringing coffee, breakfast, smoothies, acai bowls, sandwiches, pizzas and family-friendly meals, alongside a true general store stocked with essentials like milk, butter, eggs, and bread. If you want to weigh in or track progress, fernscarlisle.com is where the project is publishing updates.
A Saturday loop that actually works in August
If you have hosted anyone this summer and defaulted to the same three restaurants in Concord, try this instead:
- Start at Clark Farm on Concord Street. Get coffee and a pastry from the market, then walk the trail on the conservation acreage before the field heats up.
- Cut over to Great Brook and pick a loop. The Pine Point loop for a shorter walk, the outer perimeter if the dog needs a real outing.
- Ice cream at the Great Brook stand if you are already there, or drive south to Kimball's at Bates for the goats-and-lawn version.
- Finish at home with whatever you picked at Clark. The last of the corn, tomatoes that have not seen a refrigerator, a bunch of zinnias from the cutting field.
You will not spend more than twenty minutes in the car all day, and every dollar you drop stays inside the town line.
What this rhythm tells you about Carlisle
The thing worth naming is this. A lot of towns market themselves on their farms and trails. Carlisle actually runs on them. Four family-operated properties, on land that has been farmed for three centuries in one case, quietly carry most of the weekend traffic. When the town's general store closed, the town did not wait for a corporate operator to swoop in. Four neighbors put their names on the reopening.
That is not a small detail if you are thinking about the character of a place you already own a home in. It is the reason a Saturday here feels the way it does, and it is worth revisiting the actual addresses that make it work while the light is still long.
If you have been thinking about how the character of your particular corner of Carlisle translates into what your home is worth today, or how a move within town might look when the market shifts this fall, Ann Shaw Homes is happy to sit down for a personal market consultation. Twenty-seven years of listening to this town, and we still learn something new every August.
