Dennis Farm Charitable Land Trust

In 2017, the symposium had three components: a program and luncheon, open to the public at nearby keystone college; guided tours of the Farm.

Educational initiatives: the dfclt's educational program has three components. First, dfclt reaches out to specific departments at colleges and universities to determine whether or not they would like to develop curriculum course(s) on Dennis farm-related themes. Second, representatives from the college/university, a professor or department head makes a field trip to the Farm where dfclt gives them a tour. Following this, the professor or department head contacts dfclt and proposes an academic course based on the Dennis Farm. Dfclt reviews the plan and if it meets our goals and standards, we accept their proposal. Third, the professor or department head offers the course to students and, after preparatory course work on campus, they make field trips to the Farm for on-site research and proceed with their work. In some cases, as it was with penn state's dept. Of landscape architecture, denise Dennis, a dfclt board member, the author of dfclt's national register application, and an architect who is working on the restoration of the Farm house, were invited to state college for a charrette with the students mid-semester, and again at the end of the semester, for a formal presentation of their final projects. One of the students chose to do her final project, the spring semester, on the Dennis Farm. She gave a copy of her project, in book form, to dfclt. In the case of drexel university, ms. Dennis and board member, wade catts, met with the department head and students at drexel university prior to field trip and during their field trip to the Farm. Each school gives dfclt an opportunity to review the students' work and, where appropriate, to use it to help meet our goals. For example, in our national register nomination, we used information from the doctoral dissertation of the director of binghamton university's archaeological field school at Dennis Farm. The director of the field school wrote his dissertation about his work at the Farm. We were listed on the national register of historic places as a site of national significance. In 2016, students from the university of Delaware's center for historic architecture and design studied the 175 year-old farmhouse on the Dennis Farm. Their work contributed to the Trust's historic structures report.

Tours: in order for a site to be designated officially "historical" under national register standards, it must have certain features. All of these features are pointed out to visitors who take the tour of the 153-acre Farm. The historical features on the Dennis Farm include: 1) a series of stone walls, a mile-long, running up and down the hillsides constructed during the nineteenth century; 2) the archaeological site which consists of the stone foundation of the original house or cabin built on the property and the nearby springhouse remains; 3) the family cemetery with a stonewall around it and closed by an iron gate, built in the early nineteenth century and used until the early twentieth century, and where veterans of the revolutionary war and the civil war are buried; 4) the ruins of the barn complex and 5) the farmhouse, built in the early nineteenth century and restored in 1939. Nearby keystone college provides students docents to give the tours each year, for which they receive a stipend. Dfclt provides keystone with a script for the students to follow and literature about the Farm, its history, and the family from their arrival in the region in 1793 to the founding of dfclt. The docents describe current projects underway at the Farm and future plans. They also point out where, in the years when it was the working Farm, the fields for planting crops were located. In 2016, the dfclt caretaker planted clover in one of the fields and that plowed field became a part of the tour. The grounds are beautiful and the beauty of the landscape is a highlight of the tour. The Farm's hillsides are covered in green and in the spring, summer and fall months, varieties of wildflowers are sprinkled along the hillsides.