Our Story
The
Farm.
South Road Farm didn't start as a wedding venue. It started with an arch, and a brother-in-law — a lifelong carpenter — with a truck full of tools. This is that story.
2022
A wedding that
started everything.
Nick got married at a barn venue in the fall of 2022. Something about it stayed with him — not just the day, but the setting itself. The way a farm holds a celebration differently. The light through old timber. The feeling that the land was already doing something no amount of decor could replicate.
When South Road Farm came up a short time later — sixty acres, two barns, a farmhouse, and a lot that needed attention — he recognized something in it. Not what it was, but what it had been. And what it could become again.
Nick's brother-in-law Dave had built the wooden arch for that first wedding himself — not commissioned, just made, as a gift. It went up before the barns were finished, before most of what you see now existed. The arch Dave built for one wedding now stands at the entrance to another. It wasn't planned that way. It just turned out to be the first thing this place needed.
The Restoration
Years of work.
Most of it Dave.
Most people who buy a property like this hire someone to restore it. Dave is the someone. He's also a co-owner — which changes the quality of the work in ways you can feel but not quite explain.
In the years since, Dave has put this property back together piece by piece. Both barns. The farmhouse. Every deck, every threshold, every beam that needed attention. Largely himself, by hand — the kind of work that takes years and can't be faked when it's done.
Midway through, a once-in-a-generation windstorm took the entire roof off one of the barns. Not the shingles — the roof. All of the timber framing, the beams. You could see the sky from inside the barn. It was sad, and oddly beautiful. They figured out what needed to happen, and rebuilt.
Nobody contracted this out. When it's your own property, your own name on it, you don't cut corners on the joist you'll never see again. When the people doing the work are the same people who will stand in it at a wedding, the work comes out differently.
The Community
Nobody
asked them to.
The work brought people. Dick Bragg, who lives on the adjacent land, has shown up season after season with his tractor — moving material, clearing land, putting in more pro bono hours than any person should.
"Being a good neighbor means helping out when you can and are able."
— Dick Bragg
Bob Black grew up on this property decades before Nick and Dave arrived. He appeared at the door one evening when the basement flooded — generator and pump in his truck, nobody called him.
Josh Heck, a jack-of-all-trades from the next town over, has been working alongside Dave several days a week throughout the long, final stretch of work. He keeps going even when Dave isn't there. He's taken this project up nearly as his own.
Dyanna Lincoln's aunt and uncle, Tom and Sylvia Andrews, farmed this land through its final years as a working farm. Dyanna got married here, started a small-batch pesto business on the property growing herbs from the farm, and eventually moved back to the area — drawn home in part by the place itself. She's also the reason the timeline below exists — she dug up most of it.
"When I returned home, I longed for the night sounds of the farm — the steady chorus of crickets, the throaty calls of tree frogs, the sudden screech of an owl. The moonrise over the barn and stable transported me to a time when its pale light stretched a farmer's day. Morning coffee on the deck, overlooking the hills to Androscoggin Lake in Wayne, carried me further back, to when my ancestors first settled there in the late 18th century. After the wedding, I kept returning to the farm, drawn back again and again. Through South Road Farm, the whispers of my ancestors brought me home."
— Dyanna Lincoln
Nobody was asked to care about this place. They just did. That's not something you build — it's something a place earns over a long time. This one has been earning it since 1793.
The Land
1793.
Still farming.
Joseph Watson settled this hundred acres on July 4, 1793. The post-and-beam framing that still stands in the barn went up in the early 1800s. The granite foundation was hauled by oxen from quarries in Jay, Maine. The farm ran continuously from the late 1700s until 2018 — longer than Maine has been a state.
Ready to Talk?
Your weekend
starts here.
South Road Farm is available May through October. We keep bookings limited to keep every weekend personal. Reach out and we'll send availability, pricing, and next steps.