Lucas Kerr often wonders what his ancestors would think of the bustling cannabis operation that he has built on the family's farm in upstate New York. His forebears founded Torrwood Farm in 1846, when they were recent Scottish immigrants. At its height, the farm covered 500 acres in the town of Lumberland, about two-and-a-half hours northwest of New York City, in a hamlet on the banks of the Delaware River.
Torrwood Farm was full of livestock — horses, cows, goats, chickens, sheep, and more — and varied crops. It had a boardinghouse, largely for guests from New York City, and offered farm-to-table meals, way ahead of the trend.
In the 1960s, Lucas's grandparents discovered an artesian spring on the farm by surveying a spot in the woods where the cows headed during droughts. Soon, companies with 6,000-gallon tanker trucks made daily visits to collect the exceptionally pure liquid that bubbled up on the property. The companies bottled and sold the water, as did the Kerrs beginning in the mid-1960s, theirs in gallon jugs under the name Catskill Mountain Spring Water, Inc.
Lucas's childhood memories of the farm include watching those tankers fill up and getting to operate tractors — "I felt like I was driving a spaceship."
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