CORNISH — Growing up on Long Island, Ken DiPaola often had the sense that the space around him was shrinking.
He spent his days wandering the land surrounding his family’s quarter-acre property in the suburbs. Slowly but steadily, contractors sliced up the land for housing developments and strip malls.
“I grew up losing my playground,” he said.
He dreamt of owning his own land one day, viewing it as “necessary to complete myself as an adult … as a man,” he said.
That dream was realized later in life when DiPaola, now 53, purchased a roughly 115-acre farm in 2021 on Cornish Stage Road that belonged to longtime farmer Charles Stone.
Initially, DiPaola, a sculptor and craftsman, bought the land to use as a site for a personal art studio, but soon his vision grew to include a farm of his own and a residency program for other artists.
He has since scooped up four additional properties in the area: The late Tammie Marie Bean’s property on Cornish Stage Road in 2021; Steven and Stephanie Cummings’ 2-acre property at 18 East Road and the late Dieter Seier’s property at 204 Route-120, both in 2024; and Claremont resident Mark Burgess’ property at 210 Route-120 late last year.
He plans to build housing for farm workers and residents on the Cummings’ former property, and as well as the properties formerly owned by Seier and Burgess.
At the moment, he doesn’t have a fixed budget for the project.
Construction is currently underway on the farmland and properties in the Flat, with tentative plans to have the residency and farm running by 2027 at the earliest.
The hope is that the space will serve as a hub for community members to gather and a refuge for artists to hone their work.
“With artists, space and time are the biggest and most difficult commodities to come by,” DiPaola said.
He’s struggled to secure either one at different points in his life.
After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University with bachelor’s degree in art with a focus in sculpture, DiPaola went into the building trades, seeing the work as a natural extension of making sculpture.
He worked as a groundskeeper in Washington, D.C. before moving to New York City where he found work building houses and skyscrapers as well as furniture for private clientele, architects and designers.
He met his wife, multidisciplinary artist Andrea Stern, in 2002 while installing some art in her home on Long Island.
They realized they had a couple of contacts in common, and a shared passion for art.
“Otherwise I just don’t think it would have happened because we were just in two totally separate kinds of worlds,” DiPaola said.
Stern’s father, Leonard N. Stern, is the billionaire CEO and chairman of Hartz Mountain Industries, a real estate firm with offices in New York and New Jersey.
New York University’s Stern School of Business is named after the alum, who donated $30 million to the school in 1988.
Stern and DiPaola’s relationship introduced him to a world completely unlike his own upbringing or life as a builder.
“It’s impossible to describe, and I’ve tried and failed a thousand times with my friends and family,” DiPaola said. “You’ve got to live it to know it.”
Around 2019, DiPaola and Stern, long married by then, opened a gallery called dieFirma in Cooper Square, a bustling junction in Lower Manhattan.
The couple use the space to host “museum-quality shows for gallery sales,” DiPaola said. They typically hold about three shows a year, and represent about three artists.
By the time dieFirma opened, DiPaola had already begun looking for a place to have a studio to work on his own art outside of the city.
He’d watched artists in the city be replaced by bankers, and often struggled to keep a studio of his own before being forced out by investors looking to tear down the building and erect a condominium.
He and Stern owned a home in Meriden, which they purchased while their son was a student at Kimball Union Academy, so he was familiar with the area.
After connecting with the niece of Charles Stone, he contacted the farmer, then in his late 70s, about purchasing his livestock farm.
DiPaola and Stern were aware of the property from their drives through Cornish during their years in Meriden.
“It kind of already had a place in our minds without ever even knowing we would enjoy having a farm,” DiPaola said.
The farm was divided into the three tax allotments between Stage Road, Route 120 and Dodge Hollow Road, all of which DiPaola bought in 2021 for roughly $1.25 million.
Stone, who lives about a 15-minute drive from the farm, declined to comment on the sale.
The same year, DiPaola purchased a property formerly belonging to Tammie Marie Bean, who died in 2020, for $175,000.
Even though DiPaola hadn’t initially intended to use the land for farming, he didn’t want it to lie fallow, and he’s always had fantasies of running a farm.
As a boy, he and his dad, a school teacher, would work on the family’s garden in Long Island.
“That was the only joy I got as a child with my father was gardening,” he said.
He began to imagine how he could use the land for his own farm and create a residency that offered artists free room and board in exchange for a few hours of labor.
After attending some conferences on running a farm, he realized that to make the project viable, he would need to build housing for workers and artists to live.
In 2024, he purchased the property at 204 Route 120 that had belonged to Dieter Seier, who was fatally shot by a friend’s son in Woodstock in 2022. DiPaola purchased the .18-acre property, which included a residential home, from Seier’s estate for $200,000.
The same year, he purchased Steven and Stephanie Cummings’ 2-acre property at 18 East Road, which also included a residential home, a three-minute drive from the farm.
DiPaola’s 7,000-square-foot studio, which sits on the far-end of the farm, on Route 120 near the Cornish Recycling Center, was completed about a year ago.
Construction is still ongoing at the other properties. The house at 204 Route 120 is intended to have two bedrooms, while the house being built at 18 East Road could have two or three.
While Stone used the farm to raise livestock such as Angus cattle, DiPaola plans to grow vegetables and flowers, and potentially raise sheep, alpacas and goats.
He acknowledges that he doesn’t have a lot of prior farming experience. He hoped Stone would be a mentor to him, but “he was not interested,” DiPaola said.
Two years ago he approached Meriden resident and longtime friend Vicki Ramos-Glew about coming on as the farm’s operations manager.
Like DiPaola, Ramos-Glew has a fascination with cultivating the land that goes back to childhood. At 11, she took a summer job detasseling corn on a farm near her family’s home in Illinois.
She taught environmental science for a few years starting in 2007, before spending about a decade working at Green Hope Farm, a mail order flower farm in Meriden.
More recently, she’s volunteered at farms through Willing Hands, the Norwich nonprofit that harvests, collects and donates food to area pantries. She’s also spent the past year volunteering at Sweet Beet Farm in Bradford, N.H., where she learned about small-scale gardening.
Last year, DiPaola and Ramos-Glew decided to test what they could sow. Keeping it “super simple,” they dug a 30-by-30-foot plot of land where they planted cucumber and snow pea plants, Ramos-Glew said.
“We literally just threw seeds down in a row,” DiPaola said. “I just want(ed) to see what’s the least amount of work and what does it get us.”
The experiment yielded about 400 pounds of produce, which DiPaola and Ramos-Glew sold to a nearby Asian restaurant.
Come spring, the pair hope to expand to a 50-by-100-foot plot of land where they plan to grow flowers, Napa cabbage and other produce in addition to last year’s veggies.
DiPaola also has a penchant for pawpaw trees, a small deciduous tree native to North America that yields large fruit similar to a papaya. He currently has 50 trees on the Cornish property, and he plans to expand to as many as 200.
In terms of growing practices, DiPaola wants to be “beyond organic,” he said. “I want to use sun, dirt and water, and that’s it.”
He and Ramos-Glew are still deciding whether they want to take on the lengthy process of becoming certified organic through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but Ramos-Glew plans to keep up with the requisite recordkeeping just in case.
It’s still early days, but they can envision running a small farmstand eventually, or donating a portion of the produce to the area schools or Willing Hands.
As for the residency, DiPaola plans to host around five artists at first, beginning tentatively in 2027.
Residents would work on the farm a few hours a week in exchange for free room and board.
At the residency, “You don’t have to worry about producing meals, you can just focus as many minutes of the day on what your creative drive is,” DiPaola said.
The program would be open to artists across disciplines and would culminate with a public gallery show on the farm.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Lauren Hurlburt, who worked with Stone on his farm for about 20 years, said of the residency.
“Cornish had an artist colony a hundred years ago … so it’s interesting that it could return,” said Hurlburt, who lives in Cornish.
A painter and textile artist herself, she was referring to the colony of about 100 artists that grew up around sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who started spending summers in Cornish in 1885 and worked there full time starting in 1900. His property, Aspet, has since become a national historic park.
About 60 years later, author J.D. Salinger moved to Cornish, where he lived a secluded life. In 2016, cartoonist Harry Bliss purchased Salinger’s former home to launch an artist residency, now in its 10th year, in partnership with the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction.
“We’re constantly impressed by how much talent is in here. … Quilters, wallers, woodworkers, post-and-beam people. It’s kind of remarkable that this place is its own industrial complex,” DiPaola said.
Cornish timber framer John McSwain is currently leading the construction of a timber frame barn on the foundation where Stone had formerly built a barn for horses.
The new barn will serve as a meeting place for artists and community members to share a meal, ideally with produce grown on the farm.
DiPaola also hired Dave Fielder, a stonemason based in the Upper Valley, to build stone walls throughout several parts of the property.
Stone’s former property is next to GMC Farm, a dairy farm that Marcia and Greg Clark have owned for over three decades.
Marcia Clark, a relative of Stone, and she and her husband milked cows for Stone, before starting their own farm.
These days, they have about 60 Milking Shorthorn, Brown Swiss and Holstein cows, which they look after with their daughter, Brooke Clark.
“It’s great to have new people” enter the agricultural industry, Marcia Clark said in an interview at the farm on Tuesday morning. But her bigger concern is how existing farms are going to survive amid rising production costs.
“Farming is important and a vital part of our community,” she said.
Marcia Clark also runs New England Custom Gun Service, a gunsmith and restoration company based in Claremont.
On Tuesday morning, she and her daughter had just finished milking the cows and were busy disinfecting the equipment before she headed to work at the gun shop.
“Farming is part of our kids’ heritage,” Marcia Clark said. “It’s about family.”
Even though Stone is no longer farming next door, his legacy lives on through the Clarks, and through DiPaola’s agricultural ventures.
“This has always been a working farm,” Marcia Clark said. “That doesn’t come to an end. We’re still farming.”