This year, Montgomery Place Orchards enters its 34th season as a family-run farm.

Doug, Talea, Adam and Caroline follow a long line of tenants dating back to the 1700s, upon the same land purchased in 1802 by Janet Livingston Montgomery who created a commercial nursery. Though the historic estate’s proprietors have changed through the decades, the orchards have always been a steadfast feature of the Hudson River property. Today, the land is owned by Bard College.

In the 1930s as the automobile made travel through the countryside more accessible, farmers began pulling wagons up along the road to sell their produce. Montgomery Place’s Violetta Delafield decided to establish her own roadside market, called the “Wayside Stand,” “intended to spread a good example of good taste so badly needed where goods were sold along the highways.” The resulting building was displayed in the 1935 Dutchess County Fair, and still to this day comprises part of our existing market.