Halloween Page

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

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

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. 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 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. They had a 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 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 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 Farms exists as a memory only. This 250-acre Farm was sold piece by piece in 20 acre lots starting 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.

H-604 Going on a trip

H-617 Hi

H-605 The Devil


H-606 Farwell	H-618 The Produce Barn	H-624 Spooky Dolls

The above images are 72 DPI only. However, when ordered, they are custom printed @ 1440 DPI using Epson UltraChrome art inks guaranteeing an eighty year lightfast product on Epson luster photo stock.

To order any of the above images, see our product and Order page