Tompkins Farm · Town of ColdSpring NY · Cattaraugus County
ColdSpring Pearl
There is a white ear on Lebanon Road that was not named for a catalog.
2806 Lebanon Rd · Randolph, NY 14772 · Town of ColdSpring NY
The river comes through these hills the way it always has.
This is the Allegany. Not a creek. The river itself.
The Seneca — Onöndowa’ga:’, the People of the Great Hill — kept this western door. Their fields and trails followed this water through what is now Cattaraugus County.
The mother creates the people. Clan comes through her. She is the center. The father protects what she has made.
Corn was not a new idea when the first framed houses went up. It was already the crop that made a village possible. Beans climbed it. Squash covered the ground beneath it. That was how people ate here. That is still how a table gets filled.
Stand in the bottoms and you can feel why. The river feeds the land. The land answers in green.
The name of that white ear begins in this water.
A man named for what he planted.
The world wrote him down as Chief Cornplanter. His people knew him as Gaiänt’wakê — by what one plants. He was born to a Seneca mother of the Wolf Clan. The clan was his because of her. Planting was the work that named him. It is still the work that names this field.
The Allegany Territory remains along this water. These bottoms have always been good ground for an ear that can feed a table. That is why corn still stands here in the dew, close enough to the woods to feel the shade.
The farm at 2806 Lebanon Road borders what is now Seneca Nation reservation land. The older story and the newer one share a fence line. That is not poetry. That is the survey.
Two families from these hills later met on this side of the country as Tompkins. The names stayed. The planting stayed. What grows here now is grown to be eaten — picked in the morning, cooled the same day, and set on a plate while the husk is still sweet.
Then the creek. Then the trail.
Cold Spring Creek comes down to meet the Allegheny. That cold, clear water named the Town of Coldspring. The Seneca name is still on the land: Jo:negano:h.
The 1879 town history is plain. The Old Indian Trail left the Allegheny at the mouth of Cold Spring Creek and followed the stream north toward Napoli. From these hills, older roads ran on toward Lake Erie.
Along the river, and about three miles up that creek, lie some of the reservation’s finest bottoms. Anyone who has walked that water in June knows why a people would plant there — and why a family still would.
The creek holds half the name. The other half is the ear: white as a pearl, and sweet enough to keep.
The valley kept the names of the people who stayed.
If you walk Lebanon Road you are walking the old valley the history simply called Lebanon. That is the road under the Tompkins mailbox. Sluga, Bowley, Barlow, Stacey, and Troxell have kept those houses a lifetime. Dakota Skinner keeps the town books from this road. Kirk Hayes keeps the highway from a barn down it.
Those last names do not tell the whole story. Mothers took a married name. History and the public record kept the new one. The women who set the tables are often written under someone else’s name.
Blood Road still answers to Blood. Barber is in the 1875 census and still lives on Blood Road and Lebanon Road, with Riddell, VanSickle, and Carr. Toward Randolph the first settlement still holds Fuller, Harvey, Helms, and McCapes. North in Napoli the old trail climbs past Champlin, Boardman, Bushnell, and Booth.
Out toward Conewango and the Randolph hills the Amish still farm this country the old way. Buggies on the same roads. Hands in the same soil. Neighbors.
Price Corners. Bunker Hill, where Horton and Conklin still live. Hotchkiss Hollow. Arrance Road in Steamburg. On Route 394 the Hide-A-Way is the only restaurant close to the farm — where Coldspring sits down after church, after a ball game, after a Friday sale. Marsh, Finch, Walters, Mighells.
Abbey Hayes is town supervisor. Robert Stewart and Jason Steger sit as town justices. Kathleen Foster keeps the town history. Randall Brooks keeps the code. Eric Butler is Sheriff of Cattaraugus County.
Those are not credits at the end of a film. They are the people this ear is grown for.
The oak at the corner of the woods.
It is not a steep knoll. It is the high point of the field, with a slow slope falling away. The woods make a corner there. The oak stands a little into that line, at the outside of the turn, a little larger than the trees beside it.
On a foggy morning the corn comes to within about ten feet of the trunk. Stand in those first rows and the tree is right there. No book names who sat under it. One can only imagine a traveler coming up from the river, following the creek trail toward the lake country, looking for shade before the walk went on toward Lake Erie.
Knees in the grass. A rest. Then on again — toward a white ear waiting in the dew.
What grows under it now.
Tompkins is not a name that arrived from somewhere else. Mark was raised in Napoli, of the Ruth family. Tammy was raised in Randolph, of the Luce family. Two lines from these hills. One table.
The river, the reservation, Napoli, Randolph, and this farm are not four stories. They are one.
In 1989 they went to Texas. Years later they came home — not to a new place, but to the ground they were from, and to the people who made them who they are.
The house on Lebanon Road went up in 2014. In 2021 they took the thirty-two acres and began again. No-till. Living clover. Food they would put on their own table. Daughters and grandchildren never far from the rows. The farm is managed day to day by Aaron Espersen, from Westfield.
They did not invent corn on this ground. They answered it.
So what is it, really?
When people ask, I could bore you. Multi generations of in-and-out breeding of selected super-sweet corn. Hand pollination. Then the final crossing of two last strains. Non-GMO. Pure white.
Trust me when I say it is the sweetest pure white sweet corn there is.
Bite it raw in the row and the kernel gives like cream. No toughness. No aftertaste. Just juice and sugar and a cob that was still wet an hour ago.
But it is not just the seed. It is how it is grown, and where.
No-till into living white sweet clover. No pesticides. Picked in the early morning dew. Washed in pure water. Cooled so the sweetness and tenderness hold.
That is the growing. The name is older than the seed.
If it is good enough for their grandchildren, it is good enough for yours. Come Friday at noon. That is when the husks are still wet.
The name the catalog never had.
From the Allegheny to Cold Spring Creek. From a mother who carried a clan, to last names that hid the women who kept the houses. From the Ruth table in Napoli and the Luce table in Randolph. From Texas and home again.
The mother makes the people. The father protects what she has made.
Mother Nature and Father Time make ColdSpring Pearl. She gives the clover and the ear. He stretches the summer days, and stretches the rain, until the sweetness can finish.
We protect the corn. The corn feeds us.
That is the table. That is this farm.
Not a catalog name. A creek name. A table name.
That is ColdSpring Pearl.
Grown for our family and yours.
Tompkins Farm · 2806 Lebanon Rd · Randolph, NY 14772 · Town of ColdSpring NY
Fridays · Noon–6 PM · until gone
Drive down to the barn. Need corn before then? Message the farm.