The property known as the “Webb Farm” on the Jaffrey-Troy Road in Marlborough has a long and storied history. The current owners, Russell Brandwein and Anita Oliveira, have more than 30 years of family memories at the home, including weathering a tornado and at least one ghost.
“It was just an amazing place to raise our kids,” Brandwein said. “We loved every minute of it.”
The Webb Farm, built in 1794, was also called “Grand View Farm” for vistas of Monadnock and surrounding hills. The home has been run as a summer estate, an inn, a livestock farm, and most recently, a home for a busy family of five.
Before moving to Marlborough, Brandwein and Oliveira, both artists and designers, were living in New York City. When they were expecting their first child, they decided to move to the New England countryside.
“We drew a circle around Enfield, Connecticut, where Anita’s parents live, to see what fell within an hour and half drive,” Brandwein said. “That brought us to Brattleboro, and then eventually we found this area, and that was it.”
Brandwein and Oliveira bought the Webb Farm in 1992, and moved their design business to New Hampshire.
“Here we were, alone in a house with 13 bathrooms,” Brandwein said. “My mother said, ‘You’re going to clean 13 bathrooms?’ “
Over the years, Brandwein and Oliveira ended up combining several of the tiny, postwar bathrooms, converting one into a laundry room, and eliminating others.
“It was originally all a ton of little rooms, as old houses are,” Brandwein said.
The property was owned for several generations by the Webb family. George B. Webb founded the Webb Granite Construction Company, amassing a fortune shipping granite all over the country. According to records, the Webb quarries produced three million granite paving blocks every year for a period of time.
The company railroad used to run right through the property, transporting Webb granite to cities across the country.
In the late 1800s, Webb built a luxurious Victorian mansion on the property to use as his summer home, and used the original farmhouse to house his staff. According to records, in September 1903, after the family had gone back to the city at the end of the summer, a caretaker smelled smoke. The mansion burned down, but the original farmhouse survived.
“Apparently the Throgs Neck Bridge was built with granite from the Webb quarry,” Brandwein said of the span over the East River in New York City. “A few years ago, when they were reconstructing the bridge, someone found that out, and they tracked us down, and they asked me if I wanted to buy back any of the original stones that came from here. So I have a bunch of those stones.”
Brandwein said his family has met several members of the Webb family who came back to visit the homestead over the years, as well as other people who grew up on the property.
“People really have a bond with this house. They all come back,” Brandwein said.
In 2023, a tornado touched down on the property and damaged some outbuildings, but the house was unscathed.
“It went right through here heading for Dublin,” Brandwein said.
The 45 by 90 foot barn behind the house, which was built by the Webbs in 1894, may be the largest ever built in New Hampshire. The structure, which is six stories including the ground level and cupola, is about 20,000 square feet. Historic records state that the foundation is built of blocks of granite from the Webb quarry and that the wood came from “spruce cut from Grand Monadnock.” The property also used to have 50 horse stalls.
“My kids had a ball exploring the barn. They found all kinds of crazy stuff,” Brandwein said. “When we first moved in, we found this huge scale which had been hidden behind a bunch of stuff. It’s a giant, metal-springed pad. We couldn’t figure out what it was for, and then we saw all around the edges there were the weights of pigs and cows and horses, and it went up to 10,000 pounds.”
Brandwein found at least 50 examples of George Webb’s signature carved into the barn.
Brandwein and Oliveira ran their design firm out of the barn for many years. One corner of the barn is Brandwein’s art studio.
According to historic records, the third generation of the Webb family sold the house to the “Spinster Gage sisters” in the 1940s. When Brandwein and Oliveira bought the house in 1992, members of the Gage family were running the farm as a bed and breakfast. According to Brandwein, Chevy Chase stayed at the inn while “Funny Farm” was being filmed in Vermont.
Brandwein and Oliveira discovered quirky evidence of the way the inn was run, including a master electrical panel in the front office.
“The owner of the inn controlled all the electricity in the building with one switch. Guests had to ask him to turn their lights on and off,” Brandwein said. “I’ve had multiple electricians look at the panel and they say they have never seen anything like it. I think the innkeeper must have been a very extreme Yankee.”
The former innkeeper also plumbed the house so that every fixture had the option of using filtered or unfiltered water, which is naturally brown in color due to the high concentration of iron in the aquifer.
“Every sink, every toilet, had the option of dirty water or clean water,” Brandwein said. “The first time I had the plumber in here he was speechless. I had never seen so many pipes in my life.”
In the family’s early years on the property, the house also had a resident ghost.
Brandwein said Oliveira first encountered the ghost when she was stocking the pantry in the hallway next to the kitchen.
“She felt something tug at her back, and she turned around, but there was no one there. It kept happening, and finally she turned around and saw a scruffy looking man standing in the doorway. She shouted at him, ‘What are you doing here?’ and he just vanished,” Brandwein said.
In the following months, the entire family saw and heard evidence of the ghost, who interfered with electronics, lights, and the doorbell, ringing it at all hours.
“No electrician could ever find anything wrong,” Brandwein said. “It was making us all nuts; no one could figure out why any of this was happening. We knew it was the ghost.”
The family dog started to refuse to sleep in the kitchen and got so hysterical he broke out through a window.
Then, one day, Oliveira’s mother called, saying she had a message from a close friend who was a psychic medium.
“Anita’s mother said the medium had asked her to tell us, ‘The man at the back door was turned away when he asked for food.’ She said, ‘Tell Russell and Anita they just need to give the man some food and he’ll stop bothering them,'” Brandwein said. “And we thought, we’ll try anything.”
Brandwein immediately toasted a bagel, spread it with cream cheese, and left it at the back door on a plate.
“He never bothered us again,” he said.
After 33 happy years, the Brandwein-Oliveria family is looking to downsize, and the Webb Farm will be on the market soon.