Philip H. Jones Jr. watched Monday as a Colorado Blue Spruce tree was hoisted atop the frame of a new barn on his family farm.
“Let’s give them a big hand,” said Jones, 92, leading an applause after two carpenters tied the tree into place.
The tree represents the latest development at Jones Family Farms in Shelton — a 400-acre farm that Philip Jones has helped cultivate over the last 92 years.
It was placed on the new barn at Pumpkinseed Hill as part of a Scandinavian tree topping ceremony, when an evergreen tree is put at the top of a structure after the frame reaches its highest point. The tradition is said to bring good luck and wellbeing to the building.
The new barn will serve as a check-out building at the pumpkin patch, and will be used for other programs as the farm needs it.
Trees
The tree topping ceremony is a typical event when a new building is erected. But this topping was a little more personal for the people involved.
The lumber in the barn below is made from pine trees Jones planted on the farm in 1939 and 1940 — when he was 20 years old.
“Christmas trees were in the back of my head,” Jones said. “And we were told by some of the growers to plant pines, and plant Christmas trees in between them. Well the pines overshadowed the Christmas trees. So we gave that idea up. It wasn’t working.”
Trees were Jones’s contribution to the farm.
His father and grandfather before him had run a dairy farm on the site.
Jones started planting Christmas trees and pine trees on the land in the late 1930s, and transitioned the farm into a Christmas tree farm. Today, half the farm’s 400 acres are filled with Christmas trees.
The tree atop the new barn — the Colorado Blue Spruce — is Jones’s favorite tree. It’s the Christmas tree with the strongest needles, he said, and one that he has grown and sold at the farm for decades.
“It’s amazing, really,” Jones said after the ceremony, reflecting on his family’s growing farm. “I’m very fotruntate. Very lucky that the boys and girls want to keep (the farm) going.”
The farm has been in the family since Philip Jones’s great-grandfather settled there in 1848.
Philip Jones’s son, Terry Jones, added the strawberry, blueberry and pumpkin crops.
And Terry’s son, Jamie Jones, later added the vineyard and winery in 1999. Jamie Jones is the sixth-generation of Jones farmers.
Focus on Local, Sustainable Products
Terry Jones said the barn was special to the family because it is being built by local contractors with the Shelton-grown wood.
G. L. Glover construction in Shelton is the general contractor, and the carpenters are Country Carpenters based in Hebron. The electrical and masonry work was also done by Valley companies.
Christopher Martin, the state’s forester, was at the tree topping and spoke of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection push to get more people to understand sustainable foresting practices.
“The wood here you see is exactly the story we want to tell,” Martin said. “That same ground (where these trees were grown) is going to keep growing things. Something other than concrete.”
