The Story
In May 2004 Jenny Brown and Doug Abel bought a house and twenty-three acres on Van Wagner Road, in the Woodstock hamlet of Willow, and began putting up barns for animals nobody else would take. The address spent the next eleven years as the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary, at its fullest a home for more than two hundred rescued cows, pigs, goats, sheep and chickens. One of them was Albie, a three-legged goat found loose in a New York City park, whose rescue reached the New York Times and then opened The Lucky Ones, the memoir Brown published in 2012 and wrote here. In 2015 the organization moved to a hundred and fifty acres at High Falls, dropped Animal from its name, and left these fields behind.
The main residence dates to 1985 and was framed with reclaimed barn beams: 2,975 square feet under two-story cathedral ceilings, an exposed bluestone fireplace laid up the full height of the great room wall, and an imperial staircase to the second floor, where a bridge crosses above the room to two bedrooms and a shared bath. The kitchen holds walnut cabinetry, quartz counters, a butcher block island and a black cast-iron AGA. The dining room sits two steps down with windows on two sides. A bookcase-lined hallway off the kitchen reaches a bedroom with its own bath and the office that looks out at the outbuildings, the pool and the fields.
Of the 22.32 acres, roughly nine are wooded and the rest is pasture, the split the owners themselves recorded when they first offered the farm in 2015. The Little Beaver Kill runs part of the boundary. Two guest houses add four more bedrooms, a party barn and a two-story working barn stand between them, the saline pool is heated and recent, and the vegetable garden by the kitchen door is fenced. The Overlook Mountain trailhead and Woodstock village are a short drive east, Phoenicia west. The barns went up for animals that had to winter outdoors in the Catskills, and they were built for it.
