Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/54815
valley view farm's liz and peter mulholland. previous spread, a valley view goat and the star product. Mulholland remembers a chef at the ho- tel giving him a call after tasting a batch of his cheese and saying, "Get me 80 of those by Friday." Today, cheeses made here at Valley View Farm in Topsfield are quickly bought up within a 10-mile radius of the farm by local stores and restaurants. One pizza maker in particular, the Amesbury Flatbread Co., has been a customer for more than 13 years. Fast forward about 20 years later, and Peter and Liz are seated at their kitchen ta- ble, their dog Sophie nuzzling their hands in want of the occasional pat. Peter, with his iPhone nearby, and Liz, brewing tea, re- call the story of how this all came to be. Liz's parents bought this beautiful hill- top farm in the '70s; three families lived here prior from 1904 on. But then, says Liz, it was more a gentleman's farm. Owners in- cluded the Lynn family of Harry Niles and the Vaughn family of Melrose, and there was much more acreage. By the time Liz's par- ent purchased the farm, it was seven acres of gorgeous rolling hillside and included the main house, the big New England-style barn, a carriage barn, and a chicken coop. Liz and Peter, who were introduced to back in the nineties, in the early days of Peter and Liz Mulholland's cheesemaking, commuting by train to Boston also meant toting a cooler full of cheese. Peter, who then worked at Fidelity in private client services, was bringing Valley View Farm cheese to chefs' kitchens on the jaunt from North Sta- tion to his office. "I'd walk from the train, leave cheese at, say, the Boston Harbor Hotel, and then at the end of the day on the way back to the train, pick up my cooler," he says. 136 each other by a friend just after graduating from college, had no big plans to be cheese makers. Liz graduated from Bowdoin with a major in British colonial history and went on to graduate with a degree in historic preservation. Peter graduated from the University of New Hampshire and quickly landed himself a job in finance. As the story goes, Liz went off to grad school and Peter, craving some physical la- bor, started coming to Valley View Farm to help with some refurbishments, including that chicken coop. "So [Peter] really wooed me fixing up that coop," Liz says. "There was a tree growing out of it, and he'd come by every week to work on the coop." As for the goats, Peter and Liz visited a friend in Ipswich whose goat had just had some kids, and, in one of those life-changing moments, the pair left there with two irre- sistible goat kids riding in the back seat of their car. Soon, they got engaged, and their