Farmer reaps fruitful fantasy
The past, the present and the future co-mingle gracefully in the pastoral Howard County setting of Clark’s Elioak Farm.
It’s a place where fairy tale figures and fanciful settings from the pages of children’s books greet visitors on ground once trod by colonial farmers and still tilled by their descendants.
Grandparents and middle-aged tourists enjoy a nostalgic visit, remembering a favorite childhood destination, its original incarnation now gone, while toddlers squeal with excitement as they run through the fields. The occasional bleat of a goat or the cluck of a chicken can be heard on the wind.
Nearby, farmers continue working the land’s gently rolling contours, finding ways to co-exist with encroaching development in one of the region’s fastest growing areas.
There is a gaily painted (and massive) shoe — the kind the fabled Old Lady must live in, as well as the house settled by the Three Bears. And there’s Humpty Dumpty, chilling out atop a wall, unaware he’ll soon be scrambled.
But beyond the Easter Egg-colored structures and storybook figures, giant rolls of hay dot a hillside. At the top of a ridge, a hay-baler methodically makes its way back and forth, rolling up the grasses that will feed a herd of cattle.
This is a working farm, but one that features a popular petting zoo. And it has lately become better known as the new home of some of the original attractions of the Enchanted Forest — a now-defunct, storybook-themed amusement park that was located on U.S. Route 40 at Ellicott City.
Nursery rhymes come to life
Opening in 1955, the year Disneyland debuted in California, the Enchanted Forest quickly became a popular family destination. Based on nursery rhymes and fairy tales, the park allowed kids the chance to see life-sized versions of their favorite characters and their habitats.
They could clamber over the Old Woman’s Shoe or sit in Willie the Whale’s mouth, ride the Mother Goose Train on land or the Little Toot tug boat on a pond where Robinson Crusoe’s island could be visited.
Unlike Disneyland, it was low-tech; the figures were made of wire and wood and a form of plasticized canvas. They did not move or make sounds. There was no roller coaster or other thrill rides. But there was a family-centered ambiance that created a generation of devoted guests.
It thrived for decades, attracting a peak of 400,000 visitors a year to its 20 acres. But by 1988, increasing appetites for more exciting entertainment, and rising land values, resulted in a sale of the valuable land to developers. The gentle theme park was abandoned a year later, and a shopping center rose on the site.
Most of the figures and structures were left in place in a fenced off area. Nature gradually reclaimed the Enchanted Forest, with new growth covering it up, hiding it from view and eroding the artifacts. Pieces of the familiar attractions began ending up in collector’s garages, basements and back yards.
Restoring the magic
Things began to change in 2004, two years after Martha Anne Clark had opened a petting zoo on a 20-acre parcel of her family’s 540-acre farm, located about four miles away from the old Enchanted Forest.
A major attraction at her site was the pumpkin patch. Cinderella’s Pumpkin Coach had long since left the Enchanted Forest and ended up in private hands. Clark acquired it to enhance her site.
Realizing the old orange model was generating a positive response with nostalgic area residents, she asked the shopping center’s owners about the Enchanted Forest site.
Soon she had permission to remove everything she could, and relics of the Enchanted Forest began dotting her farm. After 10 years of recovery, transportation and restoration, everything that could be salvaged is on display again, reminding grandparents of their younger days and delighting a new generation of children.
“I had a woman come in the other day, and she had on her Facebook page a picture of herself sitting in Willie the Whale’s mouth at age 6,” said Clark, 59. “And then she took a picture of herself sitting in Willie the Whale’s mouth here, and put it side-by-side with the old picture on the Facebook page.
“The parents and grandparents are very excited about sharing these memories with their children and grandchildren, because they thought all this was gone.”
Clark, who traces her family ties back to the Clark brothers who began farming the area in 1797, had to learn a new set of skills and assemble an eclectic group of craftspeople. Creating the petting zoo was one thing, but these next steps were something entirely different.
Restoring the artifacts has been laborious, painstaking work. Most of the objects were in bad shape, crumbling to pieces when moved. Fiberglass and concrete have replaced the antiquated materials, and Clark taught herself about the constant work of maintaining the Dish and the Spoon, the Tortoise and the Hare, and all the familiar characters that have once again come alive.
A replica of the Enchanted Forest’s Castle fronts the entrance building. Something of the original spirit of the Enchanted Forest has been regenerated.
“We pride ourselves on not having a lot of bells and whistles. We want a place where the kids can run and play and take their shoes off and walk in the grass and have a kind of low-key experience. Maybe have a pony ride, but also to be introduced to the Enchanted Forest characters and structures their parents enjoyed and go down Memory lane with,” said Clark.
It seems to be working. On this day, the farm is active. Clark says they can manage up to 12 birthday parties a day, and visitors come from all over the region, from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., Montgomery and Anne Arundel counties, Pennsylvania and more.
The real pumpkin patch remains the biggest draw overall, enticing 20,000 visitors each October, and school groups take educational trips to the farm and petting zoo.
A resurgence in farming
Clark is determined to keep the farm going, to follow in the footsteps of the generations that preceded her, and to pass it on to her descendents.
When her husband, Douglas Crist, died in 2002, she faced difficult choices. Until then, they had farmed their own parcel of land. But after his passing, she decided to join her father, the late State Senator James Clark, Jr., in running the ancestral farm.
Her daughter Nora Crist, a graduate of University of Delaware College of Agriculture & Natural Resources, has now taken up farm management.
“Our roots are awfully deep, and I just love this area,” Clark said. “It’s a great area to farm. The weather’s good, the land’s good.
“But the challenge is, it’s also a great place to live, halfway along the Baltimore-Washington corridor, so the pressure on the land for development is really, really, high.”
Salvation may have arrived in the burgeoning “locavore” movement, which has devotees preferring to buy and eat locally grown food.
The Clark’s 150 cows are grass-fed. They sell the meat from the cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens, as well as eggs and seasonal vegetables, at a produce stand and in the farm’s public entrance building.
“We can’t produce enough meat or enough vegetables for our local market here,” Clark said. “We sell retail, and can’t even begin to scratch the surface of restaurants and hospitals and schools and that type of thing.
“The neatest thing I’ve seen in the last 10 years is young people like my daughter coming back to the farm and realizing they can make a living here, because they didn’t think they were going to be able to do that.
“There’s at least 10 young people in Howard County who have come back to their farms, and are producing vegetables and going to farmer’s markets, and working with restaurants to make a living selling food,” Clark said.
The demands of the locavore movement require a mix of old and new farming techniques.
“Nora processes her pork without any nitrates, and she goes all the way up to Pennsylvania to buy non-GMO [genetically-modified organisms] grain,” Clark explained, “because she wants to provide her customers what she would like to eat herself.”
Preserving a legacy
The desire to hold onto the land runs deep. James Clark, Jr., who served as president of the Maryland State Senate, helped create the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation.
Established by the Maryland General Assembly in 1977, the Foundation purchases agricultural preservation easements that forever restrict development on prime farmland and woodland. Maryland has now preserved in perpetuity more agricultural land than any other state.
Being a good steward of the land is important to Clark, who has a number of Ellicotts and even Hopkins in her deeply-rooted family tree. She says proper land management is essential, and the family keeps up with the latest advances in agricultural science as they also work to handle increasingly complicated environmental regulations.
As farming has turned into “agri-business,” Clark has taken on a diversified set of responsibilities. She finds herself a member of the Farm Bureau, the Tourism Council, and the Howard County Historical Society. And she is a leader in the new field of “agri-tourism.”
She has also written two books. “My business goes from April to November, so I’ve got to find something to do in the winter time,” she explained about her writing.
One book is for children, called Trusty the Tractor, and is about the hay ride tractor at the farm. Her second book, released last year, is a collaboration with local writer Janet Kusterer called The Enchanted Forest: Memories of Maryland’s Storybook Park.
The name Clark is embedded here. Clarksville. The Clarksville Pike. And now the Clark Elioak Farm is attracting a new generation of visitors to the area.
But Martha Anne Clark has a tangible reminder of her family legacy. By the family home, situated behind a stand thick trees on the farm, is a large memorial stone.
It has the names of her parents, and their birth and death dates carved into it. And below the names, as a stark reminder from her father, is this mandate: Never Sell The Land.
Clark’s Elioak Farm is located at 10500 Clarksville Pike (State Route 108) in Ellicott City. It is open to the public from April 1 to November 2. Hours of operation: Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (last admission at 4 p.m.); Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (last admission at 4 p.m.). The farm is also open Labor Day and every Monday in October.
Admission is $5 per person, no fee for children under 12 months. Tickets for the hayride, cow train and pony rides are $2 each. Tickets for gem mining are $7. There are season passes available, and special pricing for birthday parties and educational tours.
For information, visit www.clarklandfarm.com or call (410) 730-4049.