Drive south on Route 2 through Exeter and you will pass a blackened shell of a building that has sat there since before most local kids in middle school were born. It looks abandoned. It is not. Behind it, a steel skeleton the size of several football fields has been rising, stalling, and rising again for five years, and what finally gets built there will determine more about Exeter's identity than any zoning meeting most residents will ever attend.

The building is what remains of the original Schartner Farms retail stand, the one with the Christmas tree lot and the cider and the Pumpkin Express that a generation of Exeter families grew up riding. A fire heavily damaged it in 2015. The farm stand operation formally closed in 2018. For a long stretch after that, the story most people told themselves was simple: a beloved local business had an accident and never recovered. That story is out of date, and the real one says something sharper about how this town is changing.

The Fire Wasn't the End of the Story

What actually happened after 2018 is that Tim Schartner, whose family has farmed this stretch of Exeter and North Kingstown since the late 1920s, decided not to rebuild the stand at all. Instead he started building something almost nobody driving Route 2 could have predicted: a 25-acre, climate-controlled greenhouse designed to grow beefsteak tomatoes hydroponically, year-round, at a scale no farm in the Northeast currently operates. The company behind it, Rhode Island Grows, broke ground in 2021 on a facility the state's Department of Environmental Management then priced at $57 million.

The project has followed a lengthy and complicated path. In August 2022, a Superior Court judge ruled that even agricultural buildings still have to meet a town's dimensional zoning requirements, which stopped construction cold. Rhode Island Grows and the Schartners had assumed a greenhouse this size counted as an exempt agricultural structure. Exeter's building official disagreed, called it an industrial operation, and the dispute went to court before the town eventually rewrote its own greenhouse rules to accommodate a structure nobody had anticipated when the original ordinance was written.

By September 2024, when Exeter's Planning Board gave unanimous approval to move forward, the project's price tag had climbed to roughly $80 million, up from that original $57 million estimate three years earlier. The increase is substantial. During the same period, the project went through legal proceedings, lighting redesign, and engineering work on neighbors' safety concerns.

Here is the timeline in full:

The projected output has shifted along with the budget. The 2021 groundbreaking announcement cited 14 million pounds of tomatoes a year. By 2023 and 2024, company representatives were citing figures between 19 million and 26 million pounds annually, and a daily haul of up to 42,000 pounds. None of these numbers are wrong exactly. They are estimates from different stages of a project that kept redesigning itself under pressure, which tells you something the final number never will: this greenhouse has been reengineered as many times as it has been rescheduled.

What hasn't stopped is the farming itself. While the greenhouse fight played out in court and in town hall, the Schartner family kept growing produce for local restaurants on its working farmland, and younger family members have kept planting Swiss chard, cherry tomatoes, and kale at the family's nearby Slocum farm. The greenhouse itself is going up off Ten Rod Road in Exeter, on a different section of a family farm whose broader footprint also reaches into neighboring North Kingstown, not on the burned stand's exact footprint on Route 2. The charred building stays where it is for now, a placeholder for a retail comeback Schartner has said will happen once the greenhouse question is settled for good.

Exeter's Fall Tradition Already Moved On

During the project's legal proceedings, Exeter's fall festival continued at Yawgoo Valley.

Yawgoo Valley Ski Area and Water Park, at 160 Yawgoo Valley Road, is Rhode Island's only ski area, and on festival day it becomes something else entirely. The Friends of the Exeter Public Library run a fall festival there that has quietly become the town's replacement for the old farm-stand tradition. Craft vendors set up alongside food trucks. There's a bake sale, raffles, a table for local authors, carnival games, live music, and a K-9 demonstration. Inside, Yawgoo runs its annual used ski and snowboard equipment sale, timed for families gearing up for the winter season that follows a few months later. It's a genuinely useful pairing: browse local crafts outside, then walk in and buy last year's boots for a kid who's outgrown them.

The festival lands on a Saturday in late September most years, close to the date on this year's calendar. It won't have a corn maze or a hayride, and it isn't trying to be Schartner's Pumpkin Express. But it fills the same calendar slot the old farm stand used to own, and it does it in a building that has nothing to do with farming at all, which says something about how flexible a small town has to be when its signature institution spends a decade rebuilding itself.

Where the Rest of the Weekend Happens

The festival is one Saturday. The other six days of an Exeter fall week still run through a short list of local spots:

• Cornerstone Pub, where the salt and vinegar wings get called out by name in local reviews
• Celestial Café, a quieter mid-day stop between the lunch and dinner rush
• Purslane Eatery, the kind of place regulars mention by name rather than by cuisine
• Homestead Restaurant and Pub, open late most nights on South County Trail
• Alaina's Ale House, which has built a following around private coursed dinners
• Little Country Pizza, home to the Italian Stallion sandwich that regulars specifically call out in reviews

None of these are new. That's the point. These smaller businesses keep doing what they do, filling an Exeter weekend.

What This Actually Tells You About Exeter

The lesson in the Schartner story isn't really about tomatoes. It's about how long it takes a small Rhode Island town to absorb a genuinely large change, and how much of that absorption happens quietly, in court filings and planning board votes most residents never see, while daily life reroutes itself around the gap. The burned stand on Route 2 isn't a symbol of decline. It's collateral in one of the largest agricultural bets attempted in this state, a bet that has already survived a lawsuit, a three-year construction freeze, and a budget that grew by tens of millions of dollars before a single tomato shipped. Whatever finally opens there, and whenever it opens, it will be a very different kind of neighbor than the one Exeter lost in 2015.

That is the sort of texture that doesn't show up on a listing sheet or a town website, and it's exactly the kind of detail worth knowing if Exeter is a place you're watching closely, whether you already live here or you're weighing whether this stretch of Washington County fits the way you want to live. If you'd like a conversation grounded in that kind of on-the-ground knowledge rather than a generic market summary, Amy I. Doorley-Lucas is glad to talk through what's actually happening in Exeter and the surrounding coastal towns, well beyond what any spec sheet will tell you.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.