In 1926, Content Farm in Cambridge, New York, went into commercial egg production with a large flock of hens. This giant abandoned chicken barn is part of what that operation left behind. Armistead Peter III had actually been born at Content Farm in 1896, and thirty years later he inherited the farm from his mother and began running it himself.

The chicken business was a new chapter, but Content Farm had already been a working farm for decades. The family had been using the property since at least the 1890s, and by 1915 it had a Guernsey herd that remained part of the farm into the 1920s. Around the same time, Peter’s mother spent several years renovating the property.

Peter didn’t leave the farm the way he inherited it. He raised sheep, developed a poultry breeding operation, and by the 1930s Content Farm was even putting out its own advertising brochures. The barn stretched through several connected sections, rose multiple stories, and had row after row of windows to bring in the light and ventilation all those chickens needed.

Today, this giant chicken barn sits abandoned in Cambridge, and those long rows of windows now open into empty floors instead of a working poultry house. The chickens and all the activity that once filled the building are gone. A century after Peter inherited Content Farm, this huge piece of its farming history is still standing.