The Paine House at Greenwood Farm

Located on a peninsula on the Ipswich River Estuary, Greenwood Farm comprises pastures, meadow, woodlands, salt marsh, and three tidal islands: Diamond Stage, Widow's, and Homestead. A trail meanders through an upland field before opening onto a broad vista of the Paine House at the edge of the marsh.

The design, construction, materials, and craftsmanship of this late First Period (1694) house represent the unique style of the era. Recent archaeological investigations revealed a rare survival of an eighteenth-century milk room or dairy inside the house. In the 1640s, Robert Paine Sr. received a land grant from the Town of Ipswich for the Paine Farm. There he began a 250-year-old tradition of raising cattle, harvesting salt hay, and fishing.

Greenwood Farm provides a rich feeding and breeding ground for numerous birds, finfish, shellfish, and mammals. On a typical summer day, you may see swallows, waxwings, and dragonflies swooping over the fields for small insects, or a red-tailed hawk riding high on a thermal. Great blue herons and snowy and American egrets wade through the marsh. Occasionally at dawn or dusk, the air quivers with the soft hooting of a great horned owl or the raspy bark of a red fox. Bobolinks nest in the fields.

The Reservation takes its name from Thomas S. Greenwood, a member of the Paine family, who built the 19th-century white farmhouse. From 1916, Greenwood Farm was a summer retreat for Robert G. Dodge, whose family lived in the farmhouse and transformed the Paine House into a Colonial Revival guest house with late 17th- to mid-19th-century American furniture and decorative arts.