SUMNER – Since Mark and Terry Silber moved to Sumner to create Hedgehog Hill Farm in the late 1960s, their farm has been an oasis of color and quiet where visitors could buy anything from dried flowers to herbal vinegars.
But Mark Silber has recently announced, via a newsletter he sends to about 3,500 people, that he will be closing his farm at the end of August. It was a decision he deliberated on for several months.
“I’ve been doing this for 35 years, and this is my land and you don’t abandon the land easily,” he said, sitting in the farmhouse he and Terry rehabilitated together many years ago.
He won’t be moving. Rather, he will shut down the commercial parts of the operation and maintain a smaller garden, no longer selling flowers, vegetables, herbs or products like jams and chutneys.
Since Terry died of cancer in 2003 at 63, Silber said he has taken over all her roles at the farm – design, advertising, financial planning and plant catalogue management – as well as carried on with his jobs. Silber teaches anthropology at University of Southern Maine in Lewiston, has been a Sumner selectmen for 25 years and is working on several photojournalism projects.
“It has been hard, it has been hard every day since Terry died, since she got sick,” he said, adding that the couple used to discuss every detail on the farm together, even matters as small as whether to trim a tree. “No decision came easily,” he said.
The Silbers had one son, Jacob, who is 31 and is working in Washington, D.C., for an alternative energy company.
In the past four years, as Silber kept up all his jobs, plus took on extra ones, he regularly would sleep no more than six hours a night. “I’m always tired,” he said.
Silber, who is almost 60, said he and Terry started coming to the land in the late 1960s as a respite from Boston, moving here permanently in 1978.
“We really wanted to contribute something. The late ’60s, early ’70s, was a time of hope, a time of revolt,” Silber said. “Maine is a very poor state and we thought we could contribute and help with growth.”
He continued, “The way you improve conditions is by being an example. We lived by our ideals, without proselytizing, or giving speeches. We touched a lot of lives.”
He said this aspect of the farm – the way it has been used as a place for teaching – is one of the more difficult parts to give up.
“People loved coming here and learning,” he said. “What we did was less selling and more learning.”
Both Silber and his wife in the early days organized farmers’ markets and offered many workshops “that conveyed our enthusiasm for everything that had to do with gardening and for the relative self-sufficiency we sought,” Silber wrote in his newsletter. The two were involved in the nascent movement called Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. And they wrote books, including one Terry wrote that chronicled their life on the farm that has sold out two printings, “A Small Farm in Maine.”
Silber said Hedgehog Hill Farm over the years has been featured in magazines, newspapers and on television, and as word got out, people turned to the farm as a model.
Although 40 years ago organic farming and back-to-land concepts were more novel, organic foods have become mainstream enough that Hannaford’s in Oxford has recently opened up a natural-foods section.
Part of this is due to farmers like the Silbers.
“This whole place came about because of an ideology,” he said.
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