Cates Family Farm sits in the Wyoming Valley a few miles from Taliesin, tucked into the kind of Driftless hill country that makes you slow the car down before you even reach the driveway. It’s a real working farm, not a property that got converted into a venue. A small grass-fed beef operation, in the Cates family since 1967, when Dick Cates Sr. bought the land as a place for his kids to learn how to work it. Four generations later, the family still runs it that way, with Eric and Kiley Cates now stewarding the land their family has worked for decades.
We’d actually crossed paths with the farm before Amanda and Cody booked us. Ray had already photographed Eric and Kiley themselves on this farm, so walking back onto the property felt less like arriving somewhere new and more like visiting people we already knew. The Cates family is well known among the other working farms and family land around Spring Green and the wider Driftless region, which tracks. Good land tends to be known by the people who work good land.
Amanda and Cody live in Vermont these days, but the Driftless region pulls at both of them — Cody’s family is from Viola and La Farge, not far from where we’re based — and that pull is part of why they came back here to get married instead of somewhere closer to home.
Amanda and Cody married right in front of the barn under a simple trellis, with the whole valley opening up behind them, about as classic a Driftless setting as exists. Guests gathered on a big cement pad outside for cocktail hour, then moved upstairs into the barn itself for the reception. It’s an 1890s building, and it wears its age well. Worn wood, good bones, the kind of character you can’t fake.
Amanda got ready in the farm’s shed, which might be our favorite corner of the whole property. Work hats on the wall, an old GE fridge still humming along, decades of actual use built into everything in the room. Nobody staged it for the day. It was just what was already there, and it made for one of the best getting-ready spaces we’ve shot in a while.
The whole crowd matched the energy of the place. Friends shot the day on classic camera formats right alongside us, the best man’s toast turned into real storytelling, and Amanda and Cody spent the entire day looking like people who liked being exactly where they were. It shows in almost every photo from the day.
Then there’s the dress. Amanda wore a bright red gown, which you don’t see often at a wedding, and she wore it perfectly. Later in the day, a family member drove an old GMC truck onto the property and parked it out in a field just for photos. That red dress against a farm truck in open country is the kind of pairing you can’t plan for in advance. It just landed.
Cody designed both of their rings himself and worked with a local jeweler to bring them to life. Amanda and Cody letterpressed their own programs too, by hand. Amanda made some of the pottery for the day as well, including the cake stands and a handful of vases, thrown and glazed by her. It fit the rest of the day: two people who make things themselves rather than buying them off a shelf.
Dinner came from Underground Food Collective in Madison, where Amanda used to work before the wedding, so the choice was personal as much as practical. It was served on a farm that raises its own beef down the hill from where everyone sat down to eat. For golden hour, we walked Amanda and Cody out past the barn, through the fields, and across a small wood bridge over the creek that most guests probably never saw. It’s a quiet stretch of the property, and it gave us some of the best light of the day.
A few practical notes if you’re considering Cates Family Farm for your own wedding. It’s an active, working farm in Wyoming Township, about three miles from Taliesin and a short drive from Spring Green and American Players Theatre, which makes it easy for out-of-town guests to build a weekend around. The reception happens upstairs in the 1890s barn, cocktail hour on the cement pad just outside it, and the ceremony out front facing the valley. It isn’t set up as a full-scale event venue with a booking calendar and a coordinator on staff, so reach out to the Cates family directly if you’re interested. That’s part of what keeps it feeling like a family farm instead of a wedding business.
