In late 2020, the Stepping Stones Event and Farm Center, owned by Isabella “Boo” Martin, started booking family gatherings, retreats, weddings, and other get-togethers on Webster Highway in Temple. The Select Board has allowed the event center to continue operating even while Martin pursues a required special exception, because the town initially didn’t tell her she needed one.
Martin grew up on the 28-acre property, which served as home to a horse farm, a summer camp, and most recently, therapeutic horseback riding nonprofit Touchstone Farm, which relocated to Lyndeborough in 2020. The land features a homestead built in 1754, a 24-bed lodge built in 1977 when the property was being used as a summer camp, an outdoor and indoor riding arena, and, according to Martin, the largest intact bank barn east of the Mississippi.
“I sort of feel like I know every rock and tree,” Martin said, recalling the morning her parents brought the first group of horses to the farm when she was 11. “That farm needs to be well tended, and well loved, and shared with other people to celebrate all that’s good in life,” she said.
The property’s varied history was one reason why the Planning Board didn’t immediately tell Martin to get a special exception when she presented her idea for an event center in February 2020. At the time, Martin said she planned to pivot to events like class reunions and women’s retreats when the Touchstone Farm nonprofit moved to a new location.
When Martin first introduced the concept, “nobody was really thinking about all the possible issues,” former Planning Board member Allan Pickman said, “because there had always been stuff there before, and she wasn’t talking about building new buildings.”
It didn’t help that it had had been a long time since a significant commercial enterprise was proposed in Temple, he said. “Small towns really don’t have any professional staff on the planning department or ZBA,” he said. “It’s very easy for things to slip through the cracks.”
The Planning Board “wished her good luck and abutters offered her any help they could give” at that first meeting, according to meeting minutes, and Martin said she got to work under that understanding, according to case documents on the town’s website.
“I don’t think anybody thought at the time that the change in venue was a substantial change,” Select Board member Ken Caisse said, but he became concerned as he heard more about Martin’s plans in the following months, and saw the potential for larger changes in use on the property. Even so, Caisse said there was “a huge confusion as to what she had to do,” in order to lawfully change the property’s use as a camp and therapeutic equestrian center to an events center.
“It became clear that the authorization for Touchstone was not going to cover this,” Select Board Chair Bill Ezell, who is also an abutter, said. When asked to recall the Planning Board’s initial conversation, which Ezell was present for as a Select Board liason, he said, “We encouraged Boo to go ahead and do something, but it was not a blanket approval.”
Ultimately, none of the special exceptions granted to the property since the 1970s applied to the scope of the Stepping Stones Event and Farm Center, Zoning Board Chair John Kieley said, so Martin applied for a new special exception in March, and began upgrades so the site would comply with relevant ordinances including fire code, noise and lighting, and parking.
At that point, the Select Board’s legal counsel sent Martin a letter saying the town would allow her to fulfill the large events she’d booked despite lacking formal approval, so long as she followed what she said she’d do in her application. That does not set a precedent for other residents, he said, whose business applications would be taken up on a case-by-case basis. “It was because of the confusion as to what she had to do with changing her status,” Caisse said, and because the Select Board thought it would be better to let her fulfill her existing contracts.
The agreement hasn’t been conflict-free. The Select Board sent a warning letter after receiving noise complaints about the Event Center’s first wedding, hosted on May 20. Martin responded that she had done everything she could to comply with the Select Board’s conditions, and would improve the event center’s noise control policy based on the experience. “We apologize to our neighbors and commit to working harder to prevent this kind of problem for future groups,” she wrote. Martin had to cancel a wedding scheduled for the end of June due to delays in the fire code inspection process, she said, but the property now meets all relevant regulations.
“The vast majority of guests will not be weddings,” Martin said. In addition to weddings, the event center’s website advertises celebrations and reunions, retreats, business training events, and specialty workshops. Martin said she wants to run small business training and relaxation events, and start up retreat-style gatherings for veterans and first responders. The homestead and the lodge buildings are listed on AirBnB and VRBO, and have 14 and 24 beds, respectively.
There are goats, ponies, donkeys, chickens and herb gardens on site for guests to interact with end enjoy, Martin said, and she’s currently looking into reclaiming pastureland for livestock grazing. Six horses will soon return to the site, and Martin said she hopes that in the future, brides can arrive at their wedding ceremony in a horse-drawn carriage, she said. “We’re trying to do a wonderful thing in the community, with the community, for the community,” Martin said.
Gatherings on site are limited to 99 people, and there will be a maximum of 20 weddings annually, all held between May and October, according to the business plan sent to the Zoning Board. Other uses of the property, such as vacation rentals, continue through the winter. Amplified music is only allowed inside the barn and shuts off by 11, and all events require an on-site manager to monitor noise levels, according to the plan.
Planning Board Chair Brian Kullgren did not respond to requests to comment on the story.
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