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Christmas,
Easter and Halloween displays come and go. Once you have visited them they
are forgotten in a heartbeat. Once they are gone forever, they come back
in the mind and people say, “Remember this or that or remember Tice
Farms?” If you lived in the tri-state area, Tice Farms was just one of
those things you remember simply because your parents had taken you there
when you were a child or, if you had lived in the immediate |
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area,
shopping there for fresh produce was just a good experience.
Tice Farms was
a huge produce enterprise selling its own product as well as many other
imported from all over the country. The farm had many acres with a number
of buildings dedicated to a variety of goodies from produce, fruits, baker
goods and specialty items depending on the season like fresh made cider
from the Tice Farms cider mill. Tice Farms was located in Woodcliff Lake
Township in |
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Northern New Jersey somewhat west of the Garden State Parkway. Tice
Farms goes way back, all the way to 1808 when the Tice family purchased
acres in Woodcliff Lake for fruit and produce farming. The family build
their own house on the property from fieldstones obtained from clearing
the land for cultivation. This stone house still stands on the original spot it
was build many years ago. The Farm did well and prospered buying more
acreage as time went on until total owned acres exceeded over 250. The
land was well managed. |
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Madam Pumpkin |
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was
well managed. It was divided into product lots of certain acre size
which were cultivated with certain fruit trees like apples, peaches or
pears and the like and others for produce and pumpkins. On Holidays the
place would take on its own festive character usually done in a grand
way such as the Halloween pumpkin-selling season, drawing
thousands of visitors from all of the area and neighboring States.
The place was so popular that on
most weekends, local police hired extra extra manpower to regulate the
traffic. We as a family got
to know Tice Farms in the early sixties and visited the place on
a regular bases until the late seventies
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even after we moved to Connecticut.
The barn type
buildings were located on both sides of Chestnut Ridge Road. The largest
one, on the West side, was build first and was used to sell produce
year-round and housed a bakery as well as the cider mill. On the East side
or across from the main barn were a variety of buildings used for seasonal
selling and
display. It was on this property
that most of the spectacular Holyday displays were put together. Halloween
being the most extravagant.
On a weekend ride into country located west of the upper Garden
State Parkway in NJ and looking for something to photograph with
my newly purchased camera, we ran into Woodcliff Lake and Tice
Farms. |
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very well done display of painted pumpkins, old farm tools, equipment and
a cider mill. My wife noticed the bakery and suggested to park the car,
which was, a request, I did not need with all this colorful stuff on
display. This place was, to say the least, a photographer’s paradise! On
the back seat I had the new Nikon F2 with a 35/85 mm Vivitar 2.8 lens
loaded with slide film and was composing the shots before I parked the
car. While my wife was buying bread and pastry and our
kids roaming from display to display, I shot a roll of film getting the
pictures posted in this web site today! At the time most of us took Tice
Farm for granted because we assumed that it would be there for our grand
children however, in the years following, Tice Farms scaled back
considerably and began selling imported vegetables from Mexico. In the
late eighties, most of the surrounding acreage has been transformed into
housing and commercial buildings and the traffic became a serious
problem. In November 2001, Tice's Corner Marketplace complete with |
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the old Apple (Tice)
logo opened its main door and those of the twenty or so retail
outlets inside. It is located in the same place where the large
produce barn used to be located. The Tice fieldstone home for
eight or ten generations, survived the wrecking ball probably a |
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gesture of respect
for a family who worked the fields there for 190 plus years. As
with everything, there is a beginning and there is an end but
somehow, I as many of us, regret the end of this outstanding
enterprise! Today (2007),
Tice Farm's exist as a
memory only. This 250-acre Farm was sold piece by piece in 20
acre lots, starting |
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Tice Farms exists as a
sometime back in the seventies to land developers for housing and
commercial use who enhanced the area with modern office buildings
surrounded by (ironically) Tice apple trees. Fresh produce is now imported
from Mexico. |
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Devil |
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| Halloween at other Locations |
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| H-1269
Halloween, Grayson, Ga |
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H-617 |
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H-626 Cider
Road Stand |
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H-50D_0697 |
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H-50D-0696 Niese's Maple Farm, Putnam valley NY |
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