Preston — When a local family farm closes and sells a large chunk of land that had been in the family for more than 100 years, no one expects those farmers to be able to turn back the clock, buy the property back and start working the land again.

The Mattern family in Preston has done just that, to even their own surprise.

In 2006, family members had reached an impasse on what to do with the 127 acres of farmland on Route 2. Some wanted to keep farming it. Others wanted to sell the valuable piece for development. In the end, they took the big money — $2.8 million — and sold the land to the Mashantucket Pequot tribe on June 14, 2006.

The decision was a heart-wrenching one for some family members who had hoped to keep their small dairy operation on nearby Mattern Road going. But without cropland to grow corn and hay to feed the herd, that plan was untenable.

But the improbable has happened, thanks to dogged Yankee determination, a turn in the economy and strong helping hands from farmers and craftsmen.

“It’s hard to believe that we got it back,” Ed Mattern said last week. “Losing something like that tears at your heartstrings.”

The Mashantuckets never developed the Route 2 parcel purchased at a time when the tribe was planning for development expansion. By summer of 2014, the tribe was weathering the recession and facing financial constraints and put the Preston parcel, along with several other large parcels in Waterford, Ledyard, North Stonington and Hopkinton, R.I., on the market.

Ed Mattern, his brother George and uncle Jim Mattern learned their family parcel was up for sale and bought the land back for $625,000 on Nov. 14, 2014. Family members own the property under the name Mattern Farm LLC and are working with the state Department of Agriculture to sell the development rights to keep it as farmland in perpetuity, Ed Mattern said. 

With that purchase, Ed Mattern’s dream of honoring his great-grandfather’s legacy and reopening Mattern Farm at nearby 51 Mattern Road started to take shape. He and partner Carol Wojtkun, who worked at the Oakwood Farm in Preston, launched Sweet Grass Creamery at Mattern Farm, a retail milk, cheese and yogurt operation they plan to open this fall.

“Just a little refrigeration work to do, and then we start making cheese,” Ed Mattern said.

As with many start-up businesses, the plans took longer than expected — and cost more.

Aging cheese in cave

Ed Mattern had milked Holstein cows at his father’s 50-acre farm at 51 Mattern Road from 1989 until 2000, when the family dispute led to the decision to sell the Route 2 land. Without the cropland, he sold the cows and closed the farm until 2014.

By then, he had slapped vinyl siding on the barns and let the grass and weeds become overgrown. Wojtkun shook her head recalling the condition of the farm that had been dormant for 14 years.

Mattern and Wojtkun purchased one adjacent parcel for grazing and a second 15-acre piece of land across Mattern Road for additional grazing land. He bought 10 Jersey cows in Maine as “seed stock" and has been breeding them to increase the herd to the current 70 cows. He keeps the female heifers and sells the males.

The couple updated the old milking parlor to handle eight cows at a time, turned a 1950s-era barn into the heart of Sweet Grass Creamery, with the retail store in the center, a 1,000-gallon milk tank in a room to the right and a room to the left with pasteurizing equipment, a yogurt incubator and related equipment.

A framed billboard tells the family story: “Mattern Farm, Where our Story Begins” with old photographs, hand-written property deeds and the story of how Frederick Mattern immigrated to Preston from Germany in 1898 and bought 142 acres of farmland for $1,850.

The showpiece of Sweet Grass Creamery, however, is a short walk from the creamery: the cheese cave, a carefully engineered and custom-constructed 20-by-40-foot partially underground cavern where the cheese will age for 60 days.

Mattern and Wojtkun hired Ledyard stone mason Jeff Burton to design and build a fieldstone face and stone wall-lined entranceway to the cave. "He let me help," Mattern said. They poured the concrete foundation and side walls.

For the roof, they needed an arched slope to allow the moisture to run down to the side walls rather than drip from the ceiling. So they filled the entire cavern with sand and formed an arch at the top of the pile. They covered it with plastic and built the rebar base before pouring the concrete. When the roof had dried, they had to shovel out the sand, placing it 4 feet deep on top the roof to serve as insulation. The unexpected result was a smooth, shiny, stone-like ceiling finish.

"It looks like a real cave," Mattern said.

The earthen mound on top now is covered with weeds, but Wojtkun plans to plant wildflowers as a finishing touch.

70 Jersey cows

Mattern thanked Preston farmer Clark Woodmansee and the Geer family in Ledyard for “a huge amount of help” in getting the recovered Route 2 field prepared and the crops planted.

“They continue to help us,” Mattern said of his farming community neighbors.

Wojtkun said growing their own crops and having ample grazing land is an important selling point for Sweet Grass Creamery. The cows are rotated every two days onto different grazing paddocks. The cows leap with anticipation onto the new patch. They graze throughout growing season and eat the farm-grown corn and hay in winter, with commercial grain as a supplement, Mattern said.

Mattern is milking 23 cows of his total herd of 70. He and Wojtkun sell the raw milk to Dairy Farmers of America to be distributed through regional milk brands until Sweet Grass Creamery is ready to make cheese.

The couple chose Jersey cows because they are small, gentle and produce milk rich in protein and butterfat, ideal for making cheese, Mattern said. Every cow has a name and Mattern and Wojtkun can identify them even at a distance.

Their attractiveness — light brown fur, black eyes and white-rimmed snouts — adds to the idyllic New England farm appearance Wojtkun was striving for. She insisted the vinyl siding be ripped off the barn. They painted the barns and support buildings a picturesque red with white trim.

Wojtkun created an open lawn area lined with crabapple trees and landscaped flower plantings for visitors to sit and enjoy the scenery. Once the operation is stable, she plans to host farm tours and have school groups come to see how the operation works.

“We want to create a destination, someplace pleasant for people to come to,” she said.

c.bessette@theday.com