100-year-old farm makes plans to stay untouched
DANBURY — A goat barn planned for a centuryold farm in a neighborhood of single-family homes wouldn’t be visible to people passing by the property on South King Street.
And that’s the way the farm-owning family wants to keep it.
“We are trying to keep things nice and gentle and easy-going,” said Dainius
Virbickas, an engineering consultant representing the family, at a recent public hearing before Danbury’s wetlands commission.
“The idea behind the design is to follow the existing paths, and where we are not able to follow, they want the paths to be curvy so you don’t see anything,” the consultant said of the 130acre property, which is south of the Upper Kohanza Reservoir. “They just want it to look as it currently looks.”
That means that as Danbury continues to grow at one of the fastest rates in Connecticut, the property once owned by the Wibling family would remain a terrain of hayfields, forestry and wet meadowlands, just as it has for generations.
“We’re here to present a proposal to be conducted on a piece of farmland that’s been farmed for over a century in the city of Danbury,” Virbickas told Danbury’s Environmental Impact Commission last Wednesday.
“This piece of land is a mixture of open fields and wooded areas and currently has no structures on it whatsoever, but our client wishes to continue a farm on this property,” the consultant said. “What they would like to do at this particular location as a beginning is to build a small structure on the property for farm animals — chickens and goats is what they’re looking to start with.”
The family itself wants to remain as inconspicuous as the farm, the owner said this week.
“This is purely a family project,” said Ben Benoit, president of PCW Management Center in Mystic, which stewards the assets of family foundations, including the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation. “When we purchased it, we said we would keep it a farm. We are really trying to keep this quiet.”
Benoit, who is also executive director of the PCLB Foundation, as the Buck trust is known, said the family farm was being pursued
in the same spirit of conservation as much of the Buck foundation’s philanthropy.
Peter Buck died in November at 90 after living much of his life in Danbury where he became a billionaire through his founding investment in the company that would become Subway.
In addition to building a barn for goats and chickens, the Benoits proposed widening a tractor path on the farm to 14 feet and installing utilities beneath it to light the barn.
To do that, contractors would have to disturb some of the farm’s wetlands — ecologically important land
features that distribute storm water for natural flood control.
“We do have a couple of wetland impacts” Virbickas told the wetlands commission. “Not to minimize it, but if there weren’t ribbons there (to indicate wetlands) it looks just like pasture. There will be a little bit of impact, but it will be minimal.”
“As they start to farm are they going to have any holding ponds for the effluent from the animals — manure piles or whatever they are going to collect?” wetlands commission member Geoffrey Herald said. “That could run into the wetlands and the streams.”
Abigail Adams, a land use consultant representing the family, said there were no immediate plans to have large farm animals.
“So the reference to cows and horses is in the future — that’s not planned now?” Herald said.
“Right now, it is a small family operation,” Virbickas said.
The wetlands commission continued the public hearing until its next meeting in mid-July.
“I’m glad to see the farm is coming back to Danbury,” Herald said. “That’s great.”