No Place Like Home

One day in 2015, as Kendall Rood was daydreaming, she started sketching a long, winding driveway leading up to a stone farmhouse with a garden and animals. She thought, When I’m about 80 and I’ve saved up enough money, I would like to be an innkeeper, running a bed-and-breakfast and doing all the things I love. She named the property Boxwood Country Farm Bed and Breakfast, dated the drawing, then tucked it away.

One day three years later, her aunt Donna Jamison Cave awoke from a dream in which she purchased her childhood home in Lahaska, renovated it, and turned it into a bed-and-breakfast and event venue. The property in Cave’s dreams was Fox Briar Farm. Her parents, Earl and Sheila Jamison, who founded Peddler’s Village in 1962, had bought the circa-1740 stone farmhouse on fifty acres behind the iconic outdoor shopping center three years later. There, against the bucolic backdrop of rolling fields, woods, and tranquil views of three ponds, they raised their five children: Sherri, Kim, Donna, Kelly, and Brad.

With both parents now deceased, the property was jointly owned by the children and rented to tenants. When Cave reached out to her sister Kelly Rood for her thoughts on the future of Fox Briar Farm, Kelly told her that Kendall’s dream was to manage a bed-and-breakfast. “When we learned that Kendall wanted to be an innkeeper, we thought, Whew, now we can do this, because you need a family member on the property to be a B&B,” says Cave, who is also CEO of Peddler’s Village.

“My dream was placed in my lap,” Kendall says.

After Cave and her husband, Jeff, purchased the property from her siblings in 2021, they and Rood set to work turning the historic family homestead into an overnight destination. “Kendall’s got a great eye,” Cave says. “We made a perfect three-man team.”

Rood and the Caves did most of the grunt work of refinishing the inside and beautifying the landscape while Rood’s contractor uncles, Glenn and Gavin Roedel, managed the larger aspects of the restoration. “The renovation was a lot of physical work,” Rood says. “Inside, we used heat guns and blades, stripping wallpaper, scraping paint, and exposing the original brass hardware on all these gorgeous windows and the original wood paneling that had been covered over through the years.”

On the grounds, they cleared thicket and took down diseased trees, filling truck beds with branches. “It was just the three of us, getting scrubby—a lot of dirty hands and sweat,” Rood says. “It was slow, loving work to restore this beautiful foundation of our home and to honor the family history.”

In May 2023, the Inn at Fox Briar Farm opened with Rood as Innkeeper, cheerfully greeting guests who had come from as far away as California to the property her family holds dear.

Although she was born in Bucks County, Rood spent her childhood in Decatur, Illinois, returning to the River Towns each summer for visits with family. “My grandparents named the property Fox Briar Farm because you see foxes trotting around here all the time,” she says. “Since they rented the house, my only memories of the property were when my grandfather would put us grandkids in his boat in the main pond and we’d rip back and forth.”

When Rood was a teenager, her family returned to Pennsylvania, eventually settling in Doylestown, where she attended Central Bucks High School East. She later graduated with a degree in marketing and management from Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. She was working as an artist, painting house portraits, when she learned of Cave’s dream about Fox Briar Farm.

For Rood, who turns 36 in August, serving as an Innkeeper of this historic property is the nexus of all she loves. “I do graphic design—I created our logo—and Donna and I did the Inn’s interior design,” she says. “It was great to work side-by-side, selecting colors and buying beautiful antiques and rugs at auction.”

She also loves hospitality. Each morning, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., she cooks and serves guests a full breakfast that includes entree specials, eggs, baked goods, fresh fruit, yogurt, granola, and specialty coffee, tea, and juices. “It’s a great opportunity to connect with people and really get to know them,” she says.

After breakfast, Rood attends to the myriad tasks involved in the Inn’s daily maintenance. She might hop on the mower to cut the grass or fire up the weedwhacker or water the indoor plants or feed the resident geese and swans or otherwise tidy the landscape as required by the season. She’s also responsible for business tasks—marketing the Inn, supervising the housekeeper, and helping Cave manage the nearly weekly weddings on the property.

When she is not at work, Rood resides a few steps across the driveway in a building that, at different times over the decades, was used to store farm equipment and house Peddler’s Village employees. “It’s a manageable commute,” she says, waving her hand from her home to the Inn’s front door.

Family memories accompany Rood as she bustles about her day. “Much of the artwork and pieces of furniture are original and are in the exact place that they were back in the ’60s,” she explains as she enters a sitting room with a large stone fireplace. She points to an equestrian painting across the room and adds with a laugh, “My Uncle Brad decided this room was a good place to play hockey. Look to the right of the horse’s nose. The black mark in the sky? That’s where the puck hit.”

Each of the eight guest rooms has a brass plaque on the door bearing the name of the family member who once occupied it: Nanny, Rood’s great-grandmother; great-aunt Dee Dee; grandparents Earl and Sheila; and the five siblings. The rooms serve as an homage to their previous occupants. In Sherri’s Room, a shelf showcases horse statues, competition ribbons, and framed photos of Sherri Jamison, a lifelong equestrian, as a toddler on horseback and another, at 71, when she was still competing with her horse. In Kelly’s Room, there are frogs. “When I was growing up, my mom would tell stories about the magical views from her room,” Rood says. “Since there was no air conditioning back then, she would open her windows at night and hear the bullfrogs.”

For Rood, preserving such memories is all part of a day’s work. “I do not take this for granted,” she says. “I firmly believe that I live in the most beautiful place in the world—and I’m so thankful that I get to share it.”

River Towns Departments Editor Patti Zielinski has written about other historic family properties now open to the public, including Duke Farms (Spring 2025) in Hillsborough, New Jersey, and Morven Museum & Garden (Summer 2024) in Princeton.