Meghan Mason, Dick and Sharon Blood's daughter, rings up a few items for locals at the Blood Farm retail store. He recalls proposing to his wife that they retire. So he and his children expanded the farm’s slaughtering capacity, processing and retail - where they make the most money. But after the fire, Barney Blood faced a big decision that would affect the whole family. But that never happened, he says, because the family needed him on the farm.Įventually Barney Blood became fascinated with the meat side of the business - specifically how much meat you could yield after butchering a whole animal. What he really wanted to do was go to college. As a teen, Barney Blood hated milking the cows. Early on, the current patriarch says dairy was the main product, but his grandfather maintained a small slaughterhouse. “And you generally don’t find that strong a presence that has that staying power.”īarney Blood’s great-great-grandfather was the Groton town clerk in the late 1600s. “If you go back into the historical documents of the town you find the Blood name laced through the history of this community for over 300 years,” Collins said. He’s one of two Groton town diarists charged with documenting the Blood Farm fire for posterity and says this tale is destined for the vault in the town clerk’s office. But the family name can be traced back even further than that, according to Bob Collins. He told me he was born in the same room as his father. Like his son Dick, Barney Blood grew up here. The people of Groton flocked to the farm to witness the four-alarm fire - which was ultimately declared accidental - and to support the family and the farm's 15 employees. “It seemed like a long time they were coming, when actually it wasn't,” he said looking back out the window. Then Blood said time slowed down while they waited for the firefighters to arrive. The elder Blood told the officer to call the fire department. And then I looked down and the flames were coming out of the door of the smokehouse.” Barney Blood, who currently owns Blood Farm, is 91 years old and still integral to overseeing operations. “I was sitting in this chair, somebody knocked on the window, and I looked and it was a policeman. “Worst thing I ever saw,” the family patriarch recalled from his perch by the window on the first floor.
Now 55 years old, he's been working here since he was "old enough to hold a knife.”įrom the family's house on the property, Dick Blood's father, 91-year-old Barney Blood, had a bird’s eye view of the blaze as it consumed his sweat, toil and livelihood. (Courtesy Blood Farm)ĭick Blood grew up in those rooms. Blood Farm following the December 2013 fire. The smokehouse, butchering area and retail shop were destroyed. “You couldn’t make out what it was,” he added.įirefighters weren’t able to cut open the slaughterhouse's scorching hot metal roof, so the building heated up like an oven, incinerating thousands of dollars worth of meat processing equipment. The remains of the table were contorted, charred and molten. “There was an aluminum table right near the fire, where it started in the smokehouse, it was just like a glob of aluminum,“ he said as he flipped through photographs of the aftermath. Remembering the December 2013 fire that took his business, Dick Blood used the word “catastrophic." Dick Blood, the sixth generation of Bloods to work on the farm, points out the USDA stamp placed on all of the products they processes. That’s one reason why the community of Groton joined with the local meat industry to save a type of operation that makes a lot of people squirm: a slaughterhouse. Flames engulfed a major portion of the business that the Bloods (yes, that's their real name) have run for seven generations, forcing them to shut down.īut the larger agricultural ecosystem in Massachusetts also took a hit that day, because Blood Farm is one of only two USDA-certified slaughterhouses in the state. Just over a year ago, an early morning fire broke out at the Blood Farm slaughterhouse and meat processing plant in Groton. After the fire, the community of Groton joined with the local meat industry to urge the family to rebuild.
A fire in December 2013 destroyed the business that has been staffed by seven generations of Bloods. Facebook Email Tom Peyton, Blood Farm's plant manager, walks in front of the newly built processing facility in Groton.
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