Kelsey and Scott got married on July 10th at the Barn at Harvest Moon Pond in Poynette — Kelsey grew up in Madison, Scott’s family is from outside Chicago, and the two of them met at a small liberal arts college in Saint Paul, MN, then spent the better part of a decade as each other’s best friends while their lives pointed toward opposite ends of graduate school: Kelsey in molecular biology at the University of Pennsylvania, Scott finishing veterinary school. By the wedding, they were living in the Philadelphia area, describing themselves, in their own words, as “socially functioning introverts” who spend about as much time with their dog and two cats as they do with other people.
What they wanted most from the day was simple: their people, actually together, in one place. Their closest friends from college had scattered across the country in the years since, which made an occasion like this one rarer and more worth savoring. Kelsey told us the thing she was most looking forward to was seeing everyone who’d mattered in their lives standing in the same room — including her grandfather, a veterinarian himself, who was especially proud to watch Scott follow the same path.
The ceremony went out by Harvest Moon Pond’s willow trees, which is where most couples get married here now — the property has two of them, both enormous, and on this particular afternoon the wind kept moving through the branches the whole time, giving the whole thing a kind of motion behind the vows. Guests carried around little face cutouts glued to paint sticks, a detail that had no business being as funny as it was, and that’s the kind of tone this wedding had throughout: laid-back, sincere, genuinely fun — exactly how Kelsey and Scott described it themselves before the day even happened.
This was also the first time we’d shot here since the barn grew a proper patio out back — a shaded, character-filled spot that gives cocktail hour somewhere to gather besides open lawn, especially useful on a day when the sun stayed high and hot well into the evening. It’s a different property than the one we shot years earlier, when Andy and Lacey got married here on a cold November day and held their ceremony upstairs in the loft instead. Two weddings, two completely different ways to use the same 1865 barn — one an intimate, cold-weather affair confined to the upper room, the other a wedding that used every inch of the property, willows to patio. If you want to see what this same barn looks like in a different season, that one’s worth a look.
A little more about the two of them: Scott is a newly minted veterinarian and an avid soccer fan who told us his favorite thing about Kelsey is her patience with him — “I am a crazy person,” he said, which, fair. Kelsey is a molecular biology researcher with a soft spot for old BBC murder mysteries, gluten intolerant in a way that turned cooking into one of the things she and Scott do best together, and by her own admission, a little camera-shy — which is exactly why she wanted us there: not to pose them, but to actually catch what was happening. They found us through the blog, and their coordinator at DT’s Details vouched for us too, but what Kelsey told us stuck with us most: she didn’t want the awkward, posed version of a wedding album. She wanted the real one.
Congratulations, Kelsey and Scott. Thank you for a day as laid-back and sincere as you promised it would be.
More about this venue: read our full guide to getting married at the Barn at Harvest Moon Pond.
