EAST Magazine: Round Swamp Farm's Matriarch

Fifty summers ago, Carolyn Lester Snyder decided to put her family's little farm on Three Mile Harbor Road on the map, quietly vowing one summer to make it a household name.

The year was 1966, and Snyder, then 21, used her grandmother's old kitchen table to sell strawberries beneath one of the five chestnut trees that surround the nearly 300-year-old Lester homestead. She called her stand The Girls.

The next year, her father built her a little red stand on wheels, and her business began to grow, ever so slightly. By 1968, Snyder had expanded the inventory to include squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, brown burlap bags, and little ceramic turtles and frogs.