On a quiet back road, with a lovely view of Crotched Mountain, the Carbee family farm has been selling Christmas trees since 1952. On any Saturday or Sunday in December, you’ll see families with excited children racing through the rows of evergreens, looking for that perfect tree to bring home. 

I stopped by the Carbee Tree Farm to find out more about the history of the farm, which has been owned by the Carbee family since 1936. 

“Basically, my grandfather bought it for the timber. The house was just thrown in as a bonus;  it was falling down,” Scott Carbee recalled.

Carbee, who now lives in Francestown, grew up spending summers at the farm on East Road. Carbee’s grandfather, Roland Eugene Carbee,  was a World War I veteran who served in the trenches of France. He purchased the 80 acres of woods and open fields on East Road using his $1,500 life savings,  plus an additional $400 he managed to scrape together.

“My grandfather was visiting Milford for business and he saw an advertisement this farm for sale in Greenfield, New Hampshire. That weekend, he drove back up here from Massachusetts and went to Hopkins Store and asked the locals about it, and the locals said, ‘Mister Carbee, you don’t want that farm!’ It was the Depression. Times were really tough, and that couldn’t imagine anyone paying $2,200 for a falling-down house a bunch of trees,” Scott Carbee said.

Two years later, the Hurricane of 1938 knocked down all the standing trees and blew the house of the roof, but the property became the Carbees’ beloved summer home. The land includes the remains of a 19th-century water-powered sawmill on Rand Brook, which produced the boards for all the older houses on East Road, including Carbee’s, the former Judd Gregg house and the Burnham house at the corner of East Road and Dodge Road.

“The sawmill had a vertical up-and-down saw, and one tooth was off. When you go in the attic of this house, you can see the mark from that saw on the boards, and you can see on the boards in all of the old houses on East Road,” Carbee said. “Every property on this road had a road that led down to the mill.”

The lumber mill later operated as a gristmill, grinding corn with a water-powered wheel. The remains of the historic mill and surrounding woods, which are adjacent to the Greenfield Sportsman’s Club property on Savage Road and the Town Forest, are now in conservancy with the Monadnock Conservancy. Roland Carbee, his son Sheldon Carbee and Sheldon’s brother-in-law, John Blackwood, who had a degree in forestry, established the Christmas tree farm with the goal of providing funds to pay for the education of the next generation of the  Carbee family. Profits from the tree farm went into a savings account for the Carbee grandchildren to use for whatever educational path they chose once they graduated from high school.

Scott Carbee remembers doing his first Boy Scout project on forestry.

“My dad and my uncle John planted the first trees right there, in 1947,” he said, pointing across East Road to a field of mature trees. “It took them five or six years to grow. We started selling trees in 1952 when the first trees got to be about five or six feet, and we’ve been selling ever since.”

Carbee’s late brother, Hunter, was a accomplished forester who won many awards for contributions to the forestry industry over the span of his long career. After Hunter Carbee’s death in 2022, Scott and his wife B.J. took over caring for the tree farm. Carbee said the extreme weather from climate change has been very hard on New Hampshire agriculture.

“New Hampshire lost all its stone fruit this year. It was so warm in January and February the trees started to blossom, and then it was so cold the blossoms were killed. We lost most of the hay because it rained for seven weeks,” Carbee said about the past summer. “On the bright side, I didn’t have to water a single tree.”

Carbee Farm, at 431 East Road in Greenfield, has cut-your-own trees of all sizes, and families can “tag now cut later.”  The farm is open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Thursday, Dec. 22. 

If you like this column and would like to write one for your town, send an email to bfonda@ledgertranscript.com. Have an idea for The Greenfield Beat? Send me an email at jtimmons@ledgertranscript.com.