Generations of Wismar familygather to celebrate farm’s 100th year

FALLS VILLAGE — On Saturday, July 5 some sixty Wismar family members and friends celebrated the family’s 100th year at the Music Mountain Road farm.

Just over a hundred years ago the Rev. Dr. Adolph and Christiana Wismar purchased the home and property on what was then Barrack Road.The property at that time consisted of a tenant’s farmhouse with adjacent barn and an additional two timber frame barns and outbuildings a quarter mile up the road — all situated on about sixty acres.

The main house, formerly the home of the late Frederick Dean and his wife, had burned to the ground a few years before.In the 1930’s, the Wismars erected a modest home on the foundation of the former Dean home.

That house became home to a succession of tenant families and, later, as the retirement residence of the late Bishop Cyril and Sylvia Wismar and, later, CB Wismar and the recently deceased Kathy Wismar. The upper house and property were recently purchased by Jonathan and Emily Lally.

In the 1920s, Adolph Wismar was pastor of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan, the oldest Lutheran Church in America, having been chartered by the British in 1664.

It was a time before air conditioning, and summers in New York City were brutally hot, and the Wismars were among the New Yorkers seeking relief in northwest Connecticut.

Since those days successive generations of Wismars have enjoyed “the farm” as a place for summer activities and recreation.