American Idyll

Fast-forward 32 years. Today's Blackberry Farm houses up to 120 people in 65 rooms, some in the main house and others in clusters of cottages that spread through the property. A proper on-site restaurant prepares what staff chef John Fleer calls Foothills Cuisine, a combination of high and low that shows up in dishes such as pork cheeks with collard-green kimchi or in locally foraged ramps and morels. Baby Sam, now 31, is Blackberry's proprietor. "He's my clone," Kreis says. Sam's passions have added an exhaustive wine list and three and a half acres of organic vegetable gardens. At times, its harvest provides 100 percent of the produce used in the kitchen.