After much passage of time, extensive research by our dedicated staff and consumption of unknown amounts of adult beverages the heritage and history of Montgomery Farms has become a lot clearer to those of us who have grown up on the land. Several years ago I started giving our hayride patrons a lecture on the history of the land from the time the first European Settlers came into “these hear parts”. These lectures have became so popular that we expanded our research and lectures to include all of the pertinent “facts” about the land that our early forefathers (and mothers) experienced and we have included these lectures in both our daytime and nighttime haunted hayrides.

It has been brought to our attention that some of our nighttime hayride drivers, who by the way their identities will remain unknown for an undetermined amount of time since most have violated their parole requirements, have embellished the factual history that we have so tediously sought to preserve. The following is the true tale of the settlement and hardships that the original founders, of the land that Montgomery Farms now occupies, endured to allow us to share with you the beautiful landscape that you have come to know. We swear, upon the Farmers Almanac, that the following is the truth, the whole truth, so help us General Jessie McCormick. Amen.

Most people know or think they know of the early history of this great land of ours from the time of the Revolutionary War but as with all great conflicts many of the individuals and their families that helped settle this country have gotten lost in the “dust bin” of time. One of those individuals was General Jessie” Never met a jug I didn’t mind tipping”McCormick. He was one of General George Washington’s most reliable commanders and with the completion of the war was awarded 10, 000 acres, part of which Montgomery Farms consist, of prime land from the original Clark’s Land Grant of 1806. After the fledgling nation settled its treaty with England the “General” moved his family from Connecticut and built the two story house that my family and I live in, the barn that all of our operations are staged out of and the old dilapidated wooden hayride bridge; all of which are over 200 years old, as far as we can tell. The General’s family included 13 children, a lovely bride and a mother-in-law……. with an abscessed tooth.

The General and his family made their fortune in logging and cut many miles of logging trails to harvest their timber, the hayride trail that we currently use that goes through the woods including the old “dilapidated” wooden bridge, is part of the logging trail they cut many years ago. One day when the General and his 8 sons were cutting down trees in the woods, we don’t know for sure where it was but believe that it was in the neighborhood of the old wooden bridge, the General cut down a big old Red Oak tree and it landed right on the oldest son’s head……killed him dead…. it did. Needless to say this made the General, a very loving father, quite distraught and over the next few months it drove him to an insane state of mind. Over the next few years everyone in the McCormick died or was killed” under very mysterious circumstances” and the last one to die was the General himself and he committed suicide by hanging himself from a big old Red Oak tree.

Now the Legend goes that the General, in his insanity, decided that if he killed off all of the members of his family that they could join the deceased son in heaven (we assume that he went to heaven although details of the oldest son’s personal character traits is quite sketchy to say the lease, in other words he was a man with much wander lust). But hay that’s just a legend, in today’s modern age we don’t believe in old wife’s tails such as this but when us Montgomery’s bought the farm in the early 1960’s my brother(Gary the Blonde Stallion) and I noticed some very unusual “happenings”. When him and I would travel through the fields and woods we heard things that “were not quite right” and saw things that” were really weird” but us Montgomery’s don’t have the most pristine reputation in the county so we just didn’t say much about it to normal decent folk.

But when we added our first corn maze in 2000 and I sent my haunters into the corn and hayride trails we notice they were joined by “other spirits”, but look we’re just normal business people so if we get some free haunting from these free spirits we think it’s a pretty good deal. The only problem is that these cats truly are “Free Spirits”; we have very little control over them. We suspect that these “Free Spirits” are the ghost of General McCormick’s family that obviously met an untimely demise and are still kind of hanging around but we really don’t know. What we have discovered is that like all spirits, October is their month, they are not suppose to come out until dusk but they tend to go into “heat” when October hits and you just don’t know what or when they are going to do what they do.

The bad thing about these spirits is that they have very strong powers of illusion and can make you see things that are not real; the good news is that they can not hurt you unless you react and hurt yourself or someone around you. So if you’re on a daytime hayride and someone that you’ve known/loved/hated is sitting next to you and they start to look like a Werewolf, a Catfish, Jason or some such critter don’t haul off and hit them, if you wait a couple of minutes that person that you’ve known/loved/hated will come back to their former obnoxious self in good time.

So with knowing these facts……….HAVE A GOOD HAY RIDE!

Our Crazy Neighbor Next Door

The difficulty of having a legacy like General Jessie McCormick is that so many people tend to “distort” the facts of the story. A good example of this is our more than slightly deranged neighbor next door. This neighbor owns some land adjacent to our property and he has been listening to me tell the Legend of Jessie McCormick for so many years that he now thinks he is the general. He has even gone so far as to assume that some of our land is now some of his and started homesteading on us. For those of you who take the hayride through the woods will see when you get to the “old dilapidated bridge” his homesteading has extended to placing cars, hammocks, household items, Barbie Dolls in car seats, body parts smoldering on the grill, you know normal household items that we all have in our homes.

Now some of you patrons have asked why I haven’t had this old coot and false General McCormick evicted from our property but you know I’m a nice guy and a fairly soft touch and since he wasn’t causing any problems and did add a little “color” to the hayride I just didn’t have the heart to kick the old fart off the premises. But that was before the “incident” that he caused one Saturday near the end of last season. The incident, as it has become known among the Montgomery Farms staff, happened on one of the nighttime hayrides while it was stopped at the “old dilapidated bridge”. While the hayride driver was telling the story of the McCormick family my “slightly deranged neighbor”, who was suspected of keeping company with Mr. Jim Beam started shooting at the hay wagon with his shot gun. Now don’t get all worried, nobody got killed or anything like that but a couple of our patrons did weight a little more when they got off the wagon than when they started the hayride but we took care of them in fine fashion by plucking the buckshot out of them with needle nose pliers and sent them on their way.

But here's what you future hayride patrons need to know, our drivers are paid to take you into the woods but not to bring you out so when you get in the vicinity of the bridge and the nutcase neighbor/false General McCormick starts yelling” get out of my woods” or a shotgun blast goes off hang on for dear life because your hayride driver is going to put his tractor in high gear and get the heck out of there.

So, once again, with knowing these facts……….HAVE A GOOD HAY RIDE!

The Tale of Sara “McCormick” Ferguson

For those of you that have visited our” not your normal family farm” you have probably seen our Cow Train Rides for the younger folk and for those “missing out on the fun things of life” that have not been to our place yet you can get an idea about what the cow trains look like by viewing them on our website. The reason I mention this is that the cow trains you are looking at are actually the second generation of the cow trains that we made, and the tragedy of what happen to the first generation of cow trains is what this enlightenment is about.

We at Montgomery Farms are very proud of our safety record of keeping our patrons safe while they’re having a good time, since our inception in 1997; we have reduced serious injury and an occasional patron’s demise to around five to six people a season. But we had a slight mishap that occurred last year that kind of …sort of….. impinged upon our stellar safety record. You see I’m responsible for training all of our employees that will be operating equipment (now doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fussy inside) either for land use or transporting any of our patrons across our property. One of our new employees last year, namely Sara Ferguson, was adamant about wanting to use the Scag mower to drive the young folks around the farm on the cow trains so I ran Shari through our training program and she passed with flying colors. The final instructions that I gave Sara were that under no circumstances was she to drive anyone in the cow trains into the woods after dark. She said that was fine but asked why, I told her that when people travel through our woods at night on the wagons they are high enough off the ground that the spirits can’t reach up from the ground and snatch them off of the wagons but the cow trains travel at ground level and the spirits can./could/may grab them right out of the cow train. She seemed to understand this and said it would be no problem.

As things would have it Sara did fine in September but for those who have been to our place in October things can get rather hectic, when you get a couple of thousand people running around anything can happen…………….and it did. While I was tied up with whomever, probably scaring the daylights out of someone, ten slightly intoxicated adults approached Sara and said they had traveled all the way from Transylvania to ride the cow trains after dark. Well Sara, like me being a soft touch, relinquished and gave them a cow train ride they insisted and she complied and took them into the woods. As they were coming down a steep grade going too fast the cow train jackknifed and spit the gas tank on the Scag which instantly exploded and sent a huge fireball into the air and burnt everyone to a crisp. As you can well suspect when you get one little bitty accident like this the Feds want to investigate so they sent out all of the usually investigative teams like the CDC, FEMA, FFA, PTA, DNA,RNA and a host of others to check things out. We had so many people with MS’s, PhD’s, and titles by their names we couldn’t keep them straight, and actually we felt they were”full of it“but we put up with it since we had no choice.

I have to admit that they did come up with one fact that lead us at Montgomery Farms to figure out what happen. In analyzing Sara’s DNA they determined that Sara was the great, great granddaughter of “General Jessie McCormick” which confirmed to us that he sent the Transyvanites to Montgomery Farms to “do her in” so she could go to heaven, or wherever the rest of the McCormick clan is at. Of course this conclusion didn’t satisfy the feds so they have recently released their official findings which can be viewed at the State Capital in Indianapolis. So when you make it out to Montgomery Farms, AND YOU WILL MAKE IT OUT TO MONTGOMERY FARMS THIS YEAR, you will be excited to know that the site of this cow train wreck that you are standing on has been declared, by our highly regarded federal government, as the first official case in the State of Indiana of Mad Cow Disease.

Lastly, with knowing these facts, you will have a great time. Trust me, so help me General Jessie McCormick!