The Preservation Habit Behind Hollis's Farm Stand Season
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Drive west on Broad Street from the Nashua line and the change happens fast. Subdivisions give way to stone walls, then to open fields, then to a farm stand with a hand-lettered sign and a line of cars pulled onto the shoulder. That stand is likely Brookdale Fruit Farm, at 41 Broad St, open seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and this week it means corn, peaches, and the first hints of the apple crop still a few weeks out.
None of that is an accident of geography. It is the outcome of a fight the town had over its own farmland, and a newer version of that fight is playing out right now over a building instead of an orchard. Understanding both tells you more about how Hollis actually works than any list of "things to do" ever could.
The farm stand circuit that Hollis residents run this time of year has real stops, not generic categories:
That last one matters more than it sounds. Lavoie's Woodmont stand sits on land the town spent years fighting to keep as farmland rather than let it become another subdivision. The peaches you buy there this week exist because of a decision made well before this season started.
More than a decade ago, Hollis bought roughly 180 acres of the historic Woodmont Orchards property for $3.25 million, protecting it from development while keeping it in active agricultural use, according to NH Business Review's reporting. A follow-up attempt to buy another 90 acres of the same orchard later fell apart when the seller needed cash flow to cover that fall's harvest instead of waiting on a federal conservation grant. The orchard's old Ice House, a genuine local landmark, was eventually demolished and replaced with a reproduction rather than left to fail entirely.
Longtime hay farmer Carroll Spaulding, who sold his own family's dairy operation decades earlier, put the tension plainly: "I hate to see housing being built, but what else can you do?"
The town's answer, at least partly, was zoning. Hollis set minimum lot sizes of two and four acres in its residential and agricultural zones early on, according to Hollis Historical Society historian Sharon Howe, reserving only small pockets for business and industrial use. That single planning decision is a big part of why a town this close to Nashua still supports a working farm stand circuit instead of a strip mall corridor. At the time of that Woodmont land fight, about a fifth of the town's total land was already set aside for conservation, an unusually high share for a town this size.
Hollis is having a quieter version of this same debate right now, just aimed at a building instead of a field. The town's Select Board spent part of this summer weighing renewed interest in preserving the Farley Building, with its future use still unresolved as of late July 2026. Around the same time, a proposed development at 30 Northern Blvd. drew environmental concerns from residents on both sides of the Amherst-Hollis line, according to the same local coverage.
Neither story made regional headlines. Both are exactly the kind of decision that determines whether Hollis in ten years still looks and functions like Hollis today. The town has a documented pattern of treating what it already owns, whether farmland or a municipal building, as something worth arguing over in public rather than quietly disposing of.
Once the last stand closes, the trail network takes over. The Beaver Brook Association manages 2,200 acres and more than 40 miles of trails in and around town, part of what New Hampshire Magazine called Hollis's leaning into its farming roots rather than drifting from them, as so many neighboring towns have.
If you're headed to Silver Lake State Park instead, the schedule is worth checking before you go. For the 2026 season, the park is staffed and open only on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with day-use fees of $4 for adults and $2 for kids age six to eleven. After September 8, the park goes unstaffed for the rest of the season. Across the street, the Spaulding Town Forest offers hiking trails that don't run on the same weekends-only clock, so it's the better bet on a random Tuesday afternoon.
As one longtime resident, Louann Swaney, put it when asked why she settled here: "It was the landscape in Hollis that drew us."
Hollis already had its National Night Out cookout and touch-a-truck event at Nichols Field on August 4, hosted jointly by the police department, fire department, and DPW. The next civic gathering on the books is the Friday Night Block Party at Nichols Field on September 19, running 5 to 9 p.m. with food vendors and a DJ, according to the town's own event listings.
In between, Hollis Artspace has been running creative workshops for adults and teens, part of the small-scale cultural programming that keeps the historic district active outside of harvest season. Co-owner Anna Birch and her family, including Historical Society curator Sue Birch, are part of the same civic fabric that shows up in Select Board meetings about the Farley Building and in weekend crowds at the farm stands. The Hollis Historic District itself, anchored by Monument Square and buildings like the Ruth Hills Wheeler House on Main Street, is the physical version of the same instinct: keep what's already here, and decide carefully what comes next.
That's the thread running under every item on this list. A fruit stand and a municipal building don't have much in common on paper. In Hollis, they get the same treatment: nothing gets paved over or torn down without a fight first. That's not sentimentality. It's a pattern with a paper trail, and it's why the town still feels the way it does every August.
If you're watching Hollis from the outside and wondering what it would take to become part of that pattern yourself, Pat Clancey Realty has spent decades working these exact streets, from Broad Street to Silver Lake Road. Reach out for a local market consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
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