Our Story
Left to right: Matt, Alissa and their Twins Gennavive and Charles; Mark and Muriel; Katlyn and Brad
ABOUT
We are pleased to welcome you to our 4th generation family business. Our business started approximately 118 years ago by Edward Rabbie and his wife Lily McQuiod. The business was passed down through the family to his son Franklin, then to his son Mark, his wife Muriel and their children, Matt and Brad, the 4th generation. Mark, Muriel and Matt live and work on site exclusively. Brad has achieved his red seal in carpentry and though he lives off farm with his girlfriend Katlyn now, he takes time out of his busy career to help out with our renovations and lend a hand when needed. Matt and his wife Alissa live on the property in what use to be the restaurant/dining hall with their twins, and Alissa works off farm as a high school teacher during the school year.
The history of the business is as unique as the property has developed throughout the years and building usages have changed. Through the generations the exact dates of changes have become a blur but the story of how we got where we are today is clear.
The story begins from the very early years of ownership. The farm was a general family farm with a little bit of everything simply to sustain the family and maybe make a bit of cash, at the same time they rented out rooms in their house to travellers passing through and looking for a place to stay. At that time the lawn where our cabins sit today was a pasture for cattle during the day and they were taken back to the barn each night. The small village of Northport where the property is located started to grow and experienced a large boom. During the height of the canning factories in Prince Edward County, Northport was a large shipping port, being situated on the Bay of Quinte. There were many large ships that would come to pick up canning products to take to markets. The town was vibrant with shops, houses and farms with canning factories not far away. At this time the farm had 4 working greenhouses to grow enough seedlings for the field to supply the many canning factories and employed many local people as seeding and transplanting was done by hand at that time.
What is currently our office/Matt and Alissa's house started off as a local hangout spot. It was a changing room for the local skating rink's hockey team and it was a restaurant/pool hall/barbershop. As the first version of the cabins we have now were built it became the office and continued as a restaurant as well as feeding three meals a day to the guests in the cabins as they did not have kitchens yet.
Moving towards the '80s we had scaled down our greenhouses significantly as the era of canning had past. The farm then sold field tomatoes to A&P (now Metro) grocery stores up and down the 401 corridor until the 2000s when they went from selling to grocery stores to direct from farm sales. The farm transitioned from having dairy cattle to having a beef herd. During that time the cabins were getting kitchens added but still with the option to have a full meal plan provided. The meal plans were offered for roughly another 20 years before we closed down the kitchen and guests used the kitchens in their own cabins and started offering ice fishing throughout the winter months.
Over the last decade we have renovated the cabins to modernize the decor and layout. We also have started going to market and having permanent booths, expanding the variety of vegetables we grow and added cut flowers to offer more to our customers. We have expanded our animals as well adding sheep and goats to the farm.