To celebrate the second season of Hill-Stead Museum’s Farmers Market, locally grown food, and the museum’s agricultural history, Hill-Stead is pleased to present its second annual Dinner on the Hill benefit event on September 19, 2010. Locally celebrated chefs Russell Pryzbek of Russell’s Creative Global Cuisine, West Hartford, and Kevin Cottle of The Country Club of Farmington (also a runner-up in the 2009 season of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen) will prepare a savory multi-course dinner showcasing fresh, seasonal, local foods provided by Hill-Stead’s Farmers Market vendors and other Connecticut farms, paired with specialty wines.
Dinner will be served al fresco at long farm tables overlooking Hill-Stead’s spectacular estate, once home to dairy cows and acres of orchards and farmland. The “funky cool grooves” of the band Gigglejuice will enhance the festivities. Tickets are $150 per person (a portion of which is tax-deductible) and support the Farmers Market, as well as education and community programs at Hill-Stead. Seating is limited. For information and to purchase tickets, contact Paul Stigliano at 860.677.4787 ext 132, or visit www.hillstead.org/activities/benefit_harvestdinner.html.
In 2009, Hill-Stead Museum was awarded a Strategic Initiative Grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism to support a new Farmers Market on the museum’s historic property. Hosting the Farmers Market on the estate, which was designed and run as a fully operational dairy farm and orchard from 1901-1946, is in keeping with the museum’s goal of preserving and interpreting the farm complex and contributing to the preservation of Connecticut’s agricultural past in a visible and interactive way. The Market, which runs every Sunday 11 am – 2 pm July through October, has been a great success, attracting 800- 1,000 patrons each market day and bringing the farmers some of their best single-day sales ever. One visitor declared that with so much of the community gathering on the property every week, Hill-Stead has become the de facto town common.
Last year’s Dinner on the Hill was a sold-out event. Guests were welcomed to the museum’s West Lawn in the early evening, where two 64-foot tables were festively decorated with an assortment of fresh breads arranged among harvest bouquets of roses, cattails, goldenrod and maple. Camaraderie flowed while guests enjoyed the food, wine and the estate’s breathtaking views of meadows, pond, former dairy farm and distant mountaintop foliage. “This was one of the BEST events we have attended – anywhere,” exclaimed one diner. “The food, the wines, the ambiance – you have a winner!”
A National Historic Landmark and an official project of Save America’s Treasures, Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, CT, is a stop on the Connecticut Art Trail and a member of Connecticut’s Historic Gardens. The period rooms are open for tours Tuesday through Sunday, 10 am – 4 pm. The last tour of the day begins at 3 pm. Grounds are open and free to the public daily 7:30 am-5:30 pm.
Noted for its 1901, 33,000-square-foot house filled with art and antiques, Hill-Stead is one of the nation’s few remaining representations of early-20th-century Country Place Estates. Pioneering female architect Theodate Pope Riddle designed the Colonial Revival-style house, set on 152 hilltop acres, to showcase the Impressionist masterpieces amassed by her father, Cleveland iron industrialist Alfred A. Pope. Collections include original furnishings, paintings by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, James M. Whistler and Mary Cassatt, as well as numerous works on paper and Japanese woodblock prints.
Stately trees, seasonal gardens and over three miles of stone walls and blazed woodland trails accent the grounds. The centerpiece of the property is the c. 1920 Sunken Garden designed by landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, today the site of the acclaimed Sunken Garden Poetry and Music Festival. For more information browse www.hillstead.org or call 860.677.4787.
