The Farm at Dover might be our favorite wedding barn in Wisconsin, and that’s saying something in a state with no shortage of them. This wedding happened during the farm’s first full season open, and it was our first time shooting there too. We’ve been back for several weddings since, but this is the one that started it.
Julie grew up in Colorado, where family vacations meant two weeks in a tent with her parents, two brothers, and the family dog. She and Ryan got engaged while camping and hiking in Banff National Park, which feels like that childhood coming full circle. She’d moved to Chicago eight years earlier and spent seven of them at a package design firm, independent enough that she says she doesn’t need Ryan to take care of her, she just chooses to let him.
Julie found us by accident, Googling barn weddings at a completely different venue, and kept coming back to our galleries because the people in them weren’t posing. She wanted real people and real places, made beautiful without being styled. She and Ryan planned for fifty guests and ended up closer to a hundred once the list met reality, still small enough, she said, to spend real time with everyone instead of feeling rushed through her own wedding.
Julie smiled the entire day. She wore her bright red hair down under a floral crown, and it suited her exactly as well as you’d expect. The tables held vintage glassware next to simple, colorful floral sprigs, with table numbers built around national parks the two of them had visited together: Banff, where they’d gotten engaged, and Crater Lake among them.
The best line of the day belongs to one of Julie’s bridesmaids. Asked if the group had a wedding hashtag, she said, “A hashtag? No, we’re too old for that.” (They were not.) We also spotted a vintage Vernon County Fair sign, from the fair that runs in our hometown, tucked inside the grainery, and Ray had to be talked out of taking it home.
And if you want proof this is real farmland: a trailer stacked with round hay bales rolled right behind the ceremony seconds before it started.
Here’s the day, in photos:
We’ve shot several weddings at The Farm at Dover since, including Rebecca and Matt’s late-summer wedding there, but Julie and Ryan’s is the one that started it for us.
Julie and Ryan were the first wedding we photographed at this venue. Our Farm at Dover venue guide collects what we’ve learned there since.
Vendors from the day:
- Venue – The Farm at Dover
- Florals – Wood Violet Floral and Design
- Planning – Andrea, Events to a T
- Band – The Zachary Wade Project
