Field at Placidmere farm on Averyville Road (Provided photo)

LAKE PLACID — A woman who used to live in the Janet and Tim Smith house on Averyville Road would look out the window while washing dishes in her kitchen sink.

“And there was not a tree to be seen,” said Nancy Beattie, whose family has owned a farm on Averyville since the early 1950s. “So from there, all the way down past (the Wenzlers’) house, way over to the top of the big hill, that used to be all wide open.”

It was all cleared farmland, she said.

“There were a few trees, but not many,” said Nancy’s husband Chris. The couple talked about the family farm on March 4 at their Marcy Road home in Lake Placid. “Maybe like the big pine tree at the schoolhouse was there. But other than that, there were very, very few trees in Averyville.”

Today’s Averyville landscape is much different, with plenty of trees and fairly new homes.

It’s like a scene New Jersey folk singer John Gorka described in his 1991 song, “Houses in the Fields,” lamenting the sale of family farms that were replaced by housing developments.

“The spaces won’t be spaces anymore,” he sang.

Yet one of those agricultural spaces on Averyville still remains active today near the end of the road, a farm called Placidmere.

Placidmere is one of the most preserved farms around Lake Placid today. Nancy’s father, Dr. George Hart, bought the property in 1951. Placidmere still encompasses 169 acres of the original 189-acre purchase.

“I was sad when so many houses started going up,” Nancy said. “When pieces of land were sold off and it wasn’t just open fields and farmland.”

Nancy Beattie shows Rose Wenzler photos of Placidmere farm on Averyville Road in Lake Placid during an interview in 2022. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

Nancy did not live on the farm, but she remembers visiting it while growing up in town. She called her father a “gentleman farmer.”

“He only went out there Thursday afternoons from 2 to 4 because he worked 24/7,” she said. “So Thursday was his day off, which meant he had two hours, and he would go out and he’d walk the fields and he’d be in with the cattle. But that was all the time he had for that.”

Those two hours were the highlight of Dr. Hart’s week.

“He loved it,” Nancy said. “If he’d had his choice, and wasn’t doing what he did, he’d have been there a whole lot more.”

Dr. Hart got rid of the Aberdeen Angus cattle in the early 1970s. Then, as his career started winding down, he had more time to spend at the farm.

Chris Beattie looks at photos of Placidmere farm on Averyville Road in Lake Placid. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

“When I look back through his records of stuff, so many of the farm owners were doctors — all up and down the East Coast. He used to go to cattle shows,” Nancy said. “The Aberdeen Angus owners were doctors.”

Nancy said most of her old pictures of the cows were taken of their behinds, as they were usually judged by their rear ends.

The top Averyville farm crop was potatoes.

“Potatoes and rocks,” Nancy said. “One of the farmers went away to college and grew up and had a big, big potato crop out there.”

Now that many of the farms are gone, life is different on Averyville Road.

Dr. George Hart (man in the shadow) takes a photo of cattle at his Placidmere farm on Averyville Road in Lake Placid, which he purchased in 1951. (Photo provided)

“People worked all the time,” Nancy said. “There wasn’t a lot of socializing the way there is in Averyville today. Did neighbors help neighbors? No, because there were only older people who lived out there. Justin did. You know Justin Wescott’s farm at the end of the road? The two big barns at the end. … That was a very active farm. Dairy cattle and lots of haying and potatoes. Potatoes were his big thing.”

Hay is still a big crop in Averyville and is grown today at Placidmere.

“The hay that’s growing now in the big field where you see Dr. (Craig) Dumond do his haying, his animals like the best of all the hay they get from anywhere.”

Dr. Hart’s biggest challenge in running Placidmere was finding people to do the haying. He only had one person who worked for him, and to hay you need a lot more, about five or six people with manual labor.

“And he found school kids like my husband,” Nancy said. “My mother frequently says she hated summers, parts of summer, because she’d have to go to the beach and she’d round up our friends from the beach, when they were having a lovely summer afternoon, and bring them out to the farm to go do the haying.”

Nancy recalls farm life stories from when she was growing up. As a child, she was put in charge of picking the peas from the vegetable garden.

“I don’t know if I had to pick the peas or I just chose to pick the peas, because I love to eat them,” she said.

Farm life came with struggles, too.

“One morning the farmer called my father and said there’s some cattle dead here, and I don’t know what the problem is,” she said. “There was a puddle in front of the barn, and the electric wires had come down and electrocuted some of the cattle. And only because the farmer had his rubber boots on was he not electrocuted.”

Placidmere was Dr. Hart’s “heart and soul,” Nancy said. The Beatties’ favorite part of the farm is the peace and quiet that’s out there on Averyville. It continues to be a gathering place for family and friends, as it has been for over 70 years.

(Lake Placid News Editor Andy Flynn contributed to this story.)