Weston's Last Friday: Inside the Market Keeping Lachat Farm Alive

By 5:30 on the last Friday of the month, the gravel lot at 106 Godfrey Road West is already tight with cars, and the smell of Baked in Weston's sourdough is drifting past the old dairy barn before you've even parked. This is the Lachat Town Farm Farmers Market, and if you live in Weston, you already know the rhythm: last Friday, June through October, 4 to 8pm, rain or shine. What most people who show up for the bread and the goat photos don't realize is that their purchase is doing more than feeding them dinner. It's paying the electric bill.

Lachat Town Farm looks like a town department. It sits on town land, inside a town-run facility, overseen by a town commission. But Lachat Town Farm is not funded through Weston's municipal budget. The nonprofit Friends of Lachat runs the classes, the markets, and the community events specifically because that programming is what keeps the farm operating. There is no tax line for the goats. There is no line item for the sourdough vendor's table fee. The last-Friday market, the Tai Chi sessions, the knitting circle, the pancake breakfasts, all of it exists because enough people keep showing up and buying things. That's not a metaphor about community spirit. It's the actual funding model for 42 acres of Weston's last unbroken farmland.

Old Weston Split Two Ways

The story of how that land stayed farmland at all starts in 1997, when Leon Lachat deeded the family's 42-acre working farm on Godfrey Road West to the town of Weston and the Nature Conservancy jointly. A 2011 lease agreement split the property in a way that still shapes how it feels to visit today: the Conservancy manages roughly 22.5 wooded acres that connect directly to Devil's Den Preserve, while the town holds the front meadow, about 19 acres, along with the historic buildings. That's why the farm reads less like a park and more like a working homestead that happens to border the Nature Conservancy's own preserve. You're standing in a meadow, but the tree line at its edge is Devil's Den.

The farmhouse anchoring that meadow predates the country it sits in. It's a pre-Revolutionary structure, restored with contributions from Weston residents alongside funding from the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation and the 1772 Foundation, and it now holds a spot on the Connecticut State Register of Historic Places. The building that once housed a family dairy operation now hosts the CSA pickup and community classes.

That dairy operation has its own local legend. Leon Lachat ran a milk route through Weston in the 1940s, and according to Margaret Lachat's account to Patch, "Leon delivered to Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller," both Weston residents at the time. It's a small detail, but it reframes the meadow. This wasn't always a quiet civic amenity. It was a working farm serving a town that, even then, had a habit of attracting people who didn't need the attention.

Who's Actually at the Tables

The last-Friday market isn't a produce stand with a few extras bolted on. It's become a rotating roster of small, specific businesses, and knowing who's there changes how you plan the evening.

• Baked in Weston sells sourdough in flavors that range from plain white and whole wheat to oat porridge, rye, and walnut cranberry, all made with a natural leaven rather than commercial yeast.
• Cami Boehme, a Weston-based ceramic artist who picked up clay in the summer of 2025 after decades in a corporate career, brings handmade, one-of-a-kind, signed pieces made in small batches.
• Momu, which makes its ice cream and sorbet at a shop in Westport, brings scoops built around whatever's in season at the market that week.
• Palmer Pages, a Weston business, sells "blind date" books: pre-loved titles wrapped in paper with a teaser instead of a cover, so you don't know what you're getting until you unwrap it.
• RastaRant, founded by Chef GiGi Lawrence, who learned to cook at age eight in Kingston, Jamaica, serves vegan Caribbean plates.
• Agape Premium pours single-origin Greek extra virgin olive oil from family groves in Messinia, run by a certified olive oil sommelier who will talk you through what real EVOO is supposed to taste like.

None of these are farm-adjacent hobby vendors passing through once. They're the same names, market after market, which is part of why the event functions less like a pop-up and more like a recurring town gathering with a rotating menu.

The Cast That Doesn't Sell Anything

Not everyone at Lachat is there to sell you something. Three Nigerian Dwarf goats named Bob, Clover, and Vindaloo, all wethers born in the spring of 2020 at Guardians Farm in Southbury, live on the property and have become something close to local celebrities. Behind the historic barn, in what used to be the milking room, sits the newly built Bunny Manor House, home to six resident rabbits.

The farm also runs a Giving Garden, built by volunteers at the start of the pandemic with grants from Sustainable CT, Whole Foods, the New England Grassroots Environment Fund, and the Weston Progress Fund. In its first year, it donated thousands of pounds of produce and eggs to families facing food insecurity over an 18-week stretch, and it's still supplying the Weston Food Pantry today. Alongside it sit 50 rental garden beds that make up the farm's Community Garden, using the property's naturally sandy loam soil.

What's Actually on the Calendar

If August 28's market is the one most people already have circled, it isn't the only reason to keep an eye on Lachat this fall. The Longest Table, a communal outdoor dinner, is set for Sunday, September 13. Tai Chi meets on the second and fourth Saturday of every month. The Lachat Knitting Circle gathers on the third Wednesday. Yoga and meditation run most Saturday mornings. None of this requires a special occasion. It's just what the calendar looks like when a piece of land is treated as a shared resource instead of a museum piece.

That's the part worth sitting with. Weston has no commercial downtown, no Main Street strip of shops pulling foot traffic on a Friday night. What it has instead is a 1770s farmhouse, three goats, and a nonprofit that stays solvent because residents keep buying sourdough and blind-date books once a month. The market isn't a nostalgia act staged for people who miss a simpler version of the town. It's the actual mechanism by which that version of the town gets to keep existing.

If you're already circling August 28 on the calendar, that instinct is the whole point. Show up, buy the bread, say hello to Vindaloo. You're not just enjoying old Weston. You're one of the reasons it's still here.

For those exploring what makes Weston's neighborhoods and properties distinct beyond the market itself, Jaclyn Picarillo and the team at Unique and Luxury Properties bring the same close attention to this town's character to every conversation about calling it home.