WALPOLE, N.H. — If you were to spend a hot summer day in 18th-century New England toiling at haymaking, chances are your reward at day’s end would be a long pull of switchel. Once known as “haymaker’s punch,” switchel consists of boiled cider (or “apple molasses”), ginger, water, and a bit of cider vinegar. Thirst-quenching and rich in potassium, it might just as well have been called “haymaker’s Gatorade.”
Those thirsty farmers photographed in 1910 on the farm’s West Field, working land owned by the Cabot family since Colonial times, are on the label of Boggy Meadow Farm’s “Switchel” Cider Vodka. The dairy-based farm, close to the eastern banks of the Connecticut River (which seasonally floods the fields), has enjoyed 2½ centuries of alluvial fertility, and generations of cows and Cabots.
Today the farm is owned by two Cabot siblings and their spouses, Stephanie Cabot, 50, and her husband, Marcus Lovell Smith, 51, and Christopher Cabot, 48, and his wife, Alison, 47. After the death of Powell and Bernadette Cabot, Stephanie Cabot and Lovell Smith moved to the sprawling property in 2004. In doing so, they joined a long line of family members who added the responsibility of the farm — and its 400 rolling acres, 400 dairy cows, and scattered clusters of white-painted outbuildings (folly, creamery, carriage house, too many barns to count) — to already hectic careers.
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