Officially opened to the public on July 28, 1985, the entire park includes a farm, a large forest and a mansion now called the Patterson House which was first constructed in 1857 by the farm's original owner, George Washington Patterson. Patterson called his estate "Ardenwood", after the forested area in England mentioned in Shakespeare's play, As You Like It. There were two subsequent additions to the house. The largest was in 1889 when Patterson and his wife Clara added the Queen Anne Victorian section to the House. The second addition came in 1915 when Patterson's son Henry and his wife remodeled the old farm house section, and added rooms including the kitchen, a large bedroom above the kitchen, the sun porch, nursery, and a bathroom with indoor plumbing. A feature of the park is the Railroad Museum at Ardenwood which operates a narrow gauge railway, a recreation of a historic local branch of the South Pacific Coast Railroad. The museum has a collection of narrow gauge railroad cars and other artifacts of 19th-century railroading. The museum is run by the Society for the Preservation of Carter Railroad Resources. The park hosts many events, a Celtic festival, an Independence Day celebration, the Washington Township Railroad Fair on Labor Day, a Renaissance Fairein September, The Harvest Festival and pumpkin patch in October, a Zydeco concert, and many Halloween celebrations, complete with a haunted railroad. Among other crops, in the fall the farm harvests a large pumpkin patch.
The Ardenwood Farm today is a working farm producing grain and vegetables. The local area was in agricultural usage beginning sometime in the 1850s. The Ardenwood Farm locale was characterized first for its use as grazing land and dairy production, and gradually became increasingly dedicated to wheat and vegetable production. A review of available aerial photographs by Earth Metrics reveals that the area immediately to the south was used for agricultural purposes from at least 1960 until some time in the late 1970s cultivated with a grain crop. No discrete rows are visible in the aerial photographs of that time. The Alameda family was a prominent occupant in the area for much of the period of agricultural land use. Mel Alameda of The Alameda Company confirmed to Earth Metrics that while cauliflower has been the dominant historic crop for the area, hay and grazing were the primary use later and until the late 1970s. Based on the lack of visible rows on the aerial photos, it is most probable that the area to the south was used for hay production rather than cauliflower.
