Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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NORTHSHOREMAG.COM 32 JUNE + JULY 2023 F A C E S + P L A C E S Tim Collins and his wife, Emily, intended to downsize. But that's not what happened. "I downsized from a 5,000-square-foot house to a 10,000-square-foot house," he laughs. But they did more than not downsize. They also purchased the 188-acre Meredith Farm in Topsfield and spent several years renovating it. Now, Collins, the founder and CEO of the Ipswich-headquartered EBSCO Information Services, is also a "gentleman farmer," a charmingly old-fashioned term for a person who farms for pleasure, rather than to make a living at it. "I'm not a farmer and have a very low level of talent," he says. "But I enjoy doing it. It's fun." That means on the weekends you' ll find him "getting out in the backhoe" to move rocks for the stone walls that crisscross the property for miles, pulling up stumps, and doing painting and other projects A BRANDNEW HISTORY Tim Collins, founder and CEO of EBSCO Information Services, has breathed new life into the 188-acre Meredith Farm in Topsfield. BY ALEX ANDRA PECCI PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANTHONY TIEULI Meredith Farm was renovated by Howell Custom Building Group and Benjamin Nutter Architects. Preservation Timber Framing dismantled the barn and took it off site to repair and replace rotting beams. Top, Owner of the farm, Tim Collins. around the farm. He even seems to enjoy transferring the manure from the horse barn to the manure pile. Today, he's settled well into the life of a modern-day gentleman farmer, but when they bought the property in 2018, things were very different at Meredith Farm. "Tim had all kinds of buildings on the property, a lot of them in ramshackle shape," says SteveHowell, founder of Howell Custom Building Group, which worked on the renovation and building project alongside Benjamin Nutter Architects. "He certainly wanted to preserve the general feel of the farm, and he was sensitive to the historic structures." Indeed, the history of Meredith Farm is long and significant. Its recorded history post–English settlement began in the 1600s, when the property was part of "common lands." Later, it became tied to the Salem Witch Trials because of a property dispute.