Long Island's oldest family farm memories: Andrews, Rottkamp, Lewin, Hicks and more
Children pick pumpkins at Lewin Farms in Wading River in November 1978. Credit: Newsday/Joe Dombroski
Once, Long Island was the Idaho of the East, with potato farms stretching as far as the eye could see. Today, those farms are mostly gone. Yet many farms remain, as do their long-familiar roadside farm stands — hawking everything from apples to zucchini.
Yes, everything. Even rutabagas.
“You know what? They've had a little bit of a comeback,” Rose Andrews, 29, co-owner of the Andrews Family Farm in Calverton, said of the obscure root vegetable. “It's all in cycles, so things go out of trend and they do usually come back. You just don't know when.”
Rose Andrews at her family farm, a sixth-generation offshoot of the historic Rottkamp family farms, in Wading River in August 2024. Credit: Randee Daddona
Andrews, her brother Will and their parents own and manage the 43-year-old farm, a sixth-generation offshoot of the historic Rottkamp family farms, which date to 1861 on Long Island. From April through October, their farm stand on Sound Avenue sells “a really large variety of vegetables and fruit and cut flowers.”
Other farm stands much like it similarly keep tradition alive and are even thriving: According to the most recent figures released by the Office of State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapolio in 2024, Long Island was home to 607 farms as of 2022, a 3% increase from 2017 — during which the state overall lost roughly 8% of its farms.
Yet even beyond all the agriculture and floriculture, what Long Island farms and farm stands really grow are memories.
Dean Lewin, of Wading River, checks out apple trees growing on his property, Lewin Farms in Calverton, in October 1972. Credit: Newsday/Bob Luckey
“My father would take us camping and fishing in Wildwood State Park” in the 1970s, remembered Hicksville’s Jaime Cruz, 68, of himself and his younger brother Jeff. “And we'd always stop on the way back and pick a bunch of peaches to bring home” from Lewin Farms in Calverton. “They weren't very tall trees and the farm did have stepladders, but mostly they were on low branches and we could reach them.”
Harvesting the past
To this day, Lewin and many other Long Island farms offer the opportunity to pick your own fruits and vegetables. As a child, Karen Musgrave, 50, of Bethpage, would spend summers with her family in Baiting Hollow. Each Columbus Day weekend, “we would just roam the fields” of a farm whose name she could not recall, “and see how big a pumpkin I could pick up and carry back to the car. If I could carry it, we could get it,” said Musgrave, now the marketing and e-commerce associate of another farm, Hicks Nurseries, in Westbury.
Children visit the animals at Hicks Nurseries in Westbury in November 1982. Credit: Newsday/Bill Senft
Even if you didn’t pick your own produce, farm stands could be a cornucopia of memories-to-be.
“We lived in Lawrence and I remember my family driving out on Long Island to farm stands in Suffolk in the fall to purchase a special type of Italian long pepper used for canning by my Italian mother,” said Chicago journalist Rose Marie Mikolajczak, 77. Those peppers in the 1960s “weren’t readily available in the grocery store” and sometimes not even at farms. “Sometimes it would be a longer drive, checking the different farm stands that dotted Route 25A until we found the special peppers. My parents would buy a few bags full. Those car trips with my mother, dad and baby sister were always fun.”
Becoming destinations
Farm and farm stands indeed often are about the experience as much as the food. Since at least 1997, when White Post Farms of Melville became the first on Long Island to advertise a fall festival with such activities as hayrides, a corn maze, a spooky farmhouse and “Guess the Weight of Big Mack (a very large pumpkin).” Many farms have become destinations for family holiday visits — with one tradition reaching back to 1971.
A Newsday advertisement for Hicks Nurseries featuring Otto the Ghost on Sept. 28, 1975. Credit: Newsday
That would be Otto the Ghost, a character devised by the late Fred Hicks and his staff at Hicks Nurseries, founded in 1853 and today operated by the family's sixth generation. A storybook walk-through about a not-scary spirit and his friends, using music, wind machines and a few simple animatronic figures, the feature has been a local staple for more than half a century.
Children enjoy a Christmas display at Hicks Nurseries in November 1982. Credit: Newsday/Bill Senft
“I remember going on a field trip with Lakeside Elementary” in Merrick in the mid-1970s, recalled Andrew Arnell, 57, originally of Merrick, and now living outside Philadelphia. He saw the first iteration of the story, “Otto, the Little Ghost that Couldn’t Boo,” also starring Squeaky the Scarecrow, Midnight the Cat and Scary Sally. “They put together these amazing dioramas and used black lights and fans and all sorts of things to bring the story to life. The scale of it was amazing to a kid that young. And it was borderline scary, but safe scary.”
The story now changes each year, Musgrave said, but is always “about Otto showing friendship and being of service to others. And to follow through with that, at the end of the story we have a donation box set up for Long Island Cares, collecting nonperishable food items for them.”
As parents do, Arnell and his wife made a return trip with their 8-year-old son in the early 2010s. “Even though he was born into cellphones and iPads and whatever else,” Arnell said, “he could appreciate it for what it was and had fun.” As did Dad. “I bought an Otto T-shirt for myself.”
