Freestyle Farm was created by a most remarkable woman, Ariel Taylor [16 December 1953 - 20 May 2021]. Ariel is well-described by her obituary, written by her sister, Marcy.
Ariel had been boarding her first horse as an adult, Bemis, in 1995 at Gretchen Anderson's Apple Hill Farm in Weare, NH, when she first got the idea of building a farm for Bemis. She had had several horses as a child when she lived in Illinois where she was an avid foxhunter from a very young age. But Bemis was special, as he got her into eventing (called "Combined Training" at the time). She and Bemis had some good success, competing very successfully in recognized horse trials through Training level.
In 1996, she bought the 200-acre property on Mack Hill Rd in Amherst, having seen it while hiking behind her house in Mont Vernon. At that time, the cleared land was a corn field, having previously been an apple orchard. She was struck by its beauty. It had already been subdivided for a development, with a sign posted saying that 35 new homes would be built there. She was walking her dog, Trouper, down Remington road, when she met Marie Chase, who lives in the house next to the farm on Mack Hill, and they got talking about the planned development, and how it would be a shame to spoil the beautiful field. The two of them hatched a plan for Ariel's husband, who was a stock broker, to pose as a developer himself, and buy the property before the intended developer began site work - you see it was Marie's father who actually owned it, and they had had a serious falling out; he decided to sell it to a developer as a sort of punishment for Marie. But the deception worked, and Ariel's husband managed to buy the property.
Ariel began construction of the barn and indoor ring shortly after. The L-shaped main barn was designed by her partner, John Gorman, and it was completed in a year. The barn opened for boarders on April 1, 1997. There were initially just 5 horses: Ariel's Bemis and a 4-year-old OTTB named Teddy that she had bought the previous year, plus Rich Peterson's horse named Brew, Sandy Sowden's Roscoe, and Lauren Foster's Hutty. Over the course of the year, word got around what a great boarding barn it was, and the place filled up.
While Ariel was thrilled with her new farm, and all the new horses brought in by boarders, two tragedies struck all too soon.
First, in 1998, Bemis, for whom she built the farm, got kicked in the elbow during group turnout. She rushed him to Myhre Equine in Rochester, where Grant Myhre took X-rays that revealed the bone was fractured. He performed surgery to screw a metal plate into the bones to stabilize the fracture. But during recovery from the anaesthesia, Bemis thrashed about and re-broke it, and needed to be euthanized at the age of 16.
And then, in 1999, Ariel was long-lining her surviving horse, Teddy, in the indoor ring, when a noise outside spooked him and he lunged forward and bucked, kicking her in the head. She was not wearing a helmet. She suffered a fractured skull with traumatic brain injury that put her in the hospital for weeks. When she was released, she had lost the ability to speak. John spent countless hours over the next several months helping her regain her speech. Although she did regain her speech and could speak clearly, even years later she often found the effort it took to speak to be exhausting.
Over all the years since the barn first opened, there has never been a problem keeping the stalls filled, without any advertising beyond the single page website with contact information, as word got around about the facility. Soon after the barn opened, Ariel set about making many improvements, including an apartment for a live-in caretaker above the tack room, an outdoor ring, getting a company to come in with a rock crusher to make footing material to spread on the trails, having her neighbor Ray Perrault build a rock road through the swampy North end of the pond to make it possible to go all the way around it, getting Chris Milanese to come and build a number of portable cross country jumps that were placed out on the trails, and building a water jump and a round pen. The footing in the indoor ring has been replaced several times, and the outdoor ring was expanded to hold a full-size dressage ring. Most recently, she had Bruce Heck come and build a set of cross-country steps designed by her jumping trainer, Stephie Baer, in the big turnout field.
Ariel died on May 14, 2021, after a year-long battle with CLL leukemia. She passed at home in the new house she had built in 2015 a quarter mile South on the other side of Mack Hill Rd, where she lived with her partner, John. She wanted to make sure that after her passing the farm never fell into the hands of developers again, and she left it to a trust managed by her brother Brad in Oregon, with a stipulation that he could only sell it with easements attached such that it could never be subdivided for development, but had to remain a horse property, with strictly limited building sites for use by the new owners.
Below are the photos that were on the front page of the original website. From top to bottom and left to right:
