The Farm Stand on Powerville Road Waited Twenty-Six Years to Reopen

Drive up Powerville Road toward Split Rock and you pass the same stretch you've passed a hundred times: the old Miller-Decker-Kincaid farmhouse set back from the road, the gravel lot across the street where hikers park before disappearing into the woods, and, for as long as most of us can remember, an empty roadside stand that looked like it was waiting for something.

As of late July, it stopped waiting. The Valley Farm Stand at the Oscar A. Kincaid Home of History reopened after a rehabilitation project, with Jeff and Colleen Dowling running the building their family spent ten years hoping to bring back to life. It is a small piece of news by most measures. But it closes a loop that has sat open on this road for over two decades, and it says something about how long it actually takes a township to bring a piece of its own history back to working order.

What Actually Reopened

The stand sits at 591 Powerville Road, on the same property as the Kincaid house museum, which the Historical Society of Boonton Township has owned and preserved for years. The ribbon-cutting drew a genuine cross-section of local government: Mayor Bill Klingener, Morris County Commissioner Director Stephen Shaw, Township Administrator and County Commissioner Doug Cabana, Historical Society President Bill Rixon, Morris County Sheriff James Gannon, Park Commission President Stu Lasser, Committeeman Brian Honan, and Morris County Planning and Preservation Director Joe Barilla all showed up for it.

Shaw put the stand's place in local memory plainly. "While this is a modest farmstand, it has been part of the life of this community for nearly a century," he said at the ceremony. Cabana, who has pushed for this restoration from inside township government, credited the family directly: "Today would not be possible without Jeff and Colleen's vision and commitment to restoring this farmstand." And Dowling, for his part, described it as a decade in the making. "This has been a dream of ours that started ten years ago," he said. He added that the family is "honored to continue the legacy of this farmstand and become part of its next chapter."

A Century of Root Beer, Milk Routes, and an Honor Box

The building itself has changed jobs more than once. Oscar A. Kincaid Sr. built it in the mid-1920s as a roadside refreshment stand, the kind of spot where neighbors gathered over root beer and local leaders sometimes settled township business on the spot. In 1938, Kincaid expanded it into a milk house to support his Hillside Dairy route. By World War II the family had shifted back to general farming, and the building took on the name most longtime residents still use for it: Valley Farm. From there it sold what a Morris County farm sells: sweet corn, tomatoes, peaches, apples, cider, Christmas trees, firewood. In its later years it carried heirloom apple varieties, including Golden Russet, Fall Pippin, Black Gilliflower, and the New Jersey native Maiden Blush, grown by a Lyonsville pomologist named Harold W. Schroeder.

For much of that run, the stand operated on the honor system: pick what you want, leave your money in an unlocked cash box, no cashier required. It stayed open that way until the final harvest in 2000, not long before Oscar Kincaid Jr., who had carried the farm forward after his father, passed away. Then it sat closed for twenty-six years.

Why Restoration Money Doesn't Automatically Mean Reopening

The building didn't sit forgotten during those twenty-six years. It sat funded. The Morris County Agricultural Development Board preserved the 75-acre Kincaid farm for open space in 2001. The property landed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places in 2005. Since 2003, the Morris County Historic Preservation Trust Fund has put nearly $730,000 toward acquiring, stabilizing, and restoring the Kincaid home and its farmstand, and in 2010 the county recognized the Historical Society's restoration work with its own preservation plaque.

That is the part of this story worth sitting with. Public preservation money is good at keeping a roof from caving in and a building on the historic registry. It is not automatically good at getting someone behind the counter selling apples again. It took a private family with its own decade-long plan, working alongside the township and the Historical Society, to turn a stabilized structure into a working stand. The house had been preserved for twenty years. The stand needed someone to actually reopen it.

The Man Who Made the Rest of the Township Look Like This

Understanding why Oscar Kincaid Jr. mattered here means looking past the apples. He served on the Boonton Township Committee for thirty years, including a stretch as mayor in the mid-1970s, and he was a founding member of the Morris County Agricultural Development Board, where he sat for seventeen years and chaired it for six. His push for farmland preservation across the county eventually helped protect 41 farms covering 3,100 acres in multiple municipalities. If Boonton Township still reads as open fields and tree lines rather than one subdivision after another, some of that traces back to a farmer who ran a stand on Powerville Road and spent his committee years arguing that the land around it was worth keeping open.

There is one more detail from inside the house that has nothing to do with farming and everything to do with the kind of place this is: a folk-art face painted on a front-hall wall by an unknown hand, old enough that conservationist Anton "Tony" Rajer was brought in to restore it. Nobody knows who painted it or why. It has just always been there, the way the stand across the parking lot was always there, closed.

The Trailhead That Never Stopped Being Used

Here is what makes the timing of this reopening land differently than a simple ribbon-cutting story. The gravel lot across Powerville Road from the stand is Kincaid Woods, one of the access points into the Pyramid Mountain Natural Historic Area, nearly 1,500 acres of Highlands terrain that has been open to the public since 1989. Kincaid Woods has always been the quiet entrance. Compared to the main Boonton Avenue side of the park, where a staffed visitor center and a bigger parking lot draw most of the weekend traffic, Kincaid Woods trails wind past old mine test pits with a fraction of the foot traffic, before eventually connecting to the park's better-known formations, Bear Rock and Tripod Rock.

That means for the entire twenty-six years the stand sat empty, people were still parking across the street from it to hike. The trailhead never needed the stand to function. But a hiker pulling in and out of that lot had nowhere to stop, nothing to look at, no reason to linger on that stretch of road beyond the trail itself. A few practical notes for anyone making that drive now:

• The farmstand and Kincaid house sit at 591 Powerville Road, with the Kincaid Woods trail access directly across the street at 2 Kincaid Rd.
• Kincaid Woods trails connect deeper into Pyramid Mountain toward Bear Rock and Tripod Rock, so it works either as a short loop or as the quiet start of a longer hike.
• The Historical Society of Boonton Township still owns and maintains the house itself as a museum, separate from the Dowling family's operation of the stand.

None of that changes what the trail offers. What changes is what's waiting at the bottom of it.

What This Actually Says About the Township

A farm stand reopening is not, on its own, a headline that changes much about daily life here. But it is worth noticing what it took to get here: two decades of public preservation money keeping a 1785 farmhouse standing, a family willing to spend ten years turning that stabilized building back into something people actually use, and a road that had all the pieces of a destination except the one that makes people stop instead of drive past. Powerville Road finally has both halves working again, the trail and the stand, the same way they worked when Oscar Kincaid was still selling apples out of a cash box nobody watched.

Sueanne Sylvester keeps a close eye on small changes like this one across every Morris County community she serves, the kind of local detail that never shows up on a portal listing but shapes what it actually feels like to live somewhere. If you're the kind of neighbor who wants dispatches like this before they're common knowledge, or you're simply curious what a property with this much history behind it is worth today, Sueanne Sylvester is easy to reach, and a Request a Home Valuation is always just one message away.