The Quiet Second Life Of The Garden Shop On Beallsville Road

If you've lived out here long enough, you probably have Alden Farms filed away as the place you used to stop for annuals and potting soil. For 25 years, that's what it was: a small garden shop at 19215 Beallsville Road, the kind of stop you made without thinking much about it. Somewhere in the last several years, without a ribbon cutting or a sign change loud enough to notice from the road, that stopped being true.

The garden shop is gone. In its place, owner and sculptor David Therriault has turned the property into a two-acre sculpture garden and gallery, with stone work set among the walks, gardens, and patios where the nursery stock used to sit. It's open to the public any time, no appointment needed, though you'll likely be greeted by two very friendly dogs before you see any art. What's easy to miss, if you're only judging by the driveway, is that this same two acres has quietly become one leg of a nonprofit that's now showing up in state bond filings and reshaping zoning conversations down the road in downtown Poolesville.

From Perennials To Marble

Behind the main house at Alden Farms, Riverworks Art Center runs studio space alongside the sculpture garden Therriault designed: a barn converted into a gallery, a pavilion for outdoor events, and rooms set up for classes and workshops. It functions less like a museum stop and more like a working shop, the kind of place where you can bring your own materials, sit at a shared table, and get feedback on a piece in progress.

The property still shows up on the Countryside Artisans studio tour circuit each April, October, and December, when Therriault opens the grounds specifically for visitors moving between artist stops across the region. Outside those tour weekends, the garden operates on the honor system: come look, no ticket required. That's a different posture than most working studios take, and it's part of why Riverworks describes Alden Farms as the quiet end of its operation, the place built for slowing down rather than performing.

One Nonprofit, Three Addresses

Riverworks Art Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2022 by Sandy Wright and David Therriault. It doesn't operate out of one building. It runs three, and each one does a different job.

Locals Farm Market handles the public-facing gallery rotation and informal music nights. The Methodist church is where Riverworks is placing its biggest bet. Alden Farms, out here in Beallsville, is where the actual making happens. If you've wondered why a converted garden shop on a rural stretch of road matters to what's happening downtown, that's the answer: it's the studio behind the storefront.

Backwards, On Purpose

Most small towns build their arts scenes from downtown outward. A storefront gallery opens first, draws some attention, and eventually needs overflow space, so a satellite studio shows up somewhere cheaper on the edge of town. Riverworks ran that sequence in reverse.

The organization built its working capacity at Alden Farms first, in a converted garden shop with acreage it didn't need to lease or renovate from scratch. Only after that studio proved out, classes filled, exhibitions rotated, a community formed, did the group turn its attention to downtown Poolesville. The Town of Poolesville's zoning ordinance creating a Cultural Arts District is dated February 12, 2026, and it names Riverworks directly as the anchor the district is built around, with boundaries drawn to connect the historic downtown to the group's growing footprint.

Riverworks' own filing with the Maryland General Assembly puts the shift in plain numbers: an operating budget projected to double, from $250,000 to $500,000, and a staff projected to grow from zero paid employees to five.

That filing, the 2026 Bond Initiative Fact Sheet submitted for this year's legislative session, is asking for state money to buy additional property in Poolesville's downtown arts district for more studio and rehearsal space. In other words, the rural garden shop did the unglamorous work of proving the concept, and the state funding request came after, not before.

The 200-Year-Old Church On West Willard Road

The building Riverworks is converting into its performing arts center turns 200 years old this year. Built in 1826, it has cycled through more careers than most people in town: a telegraph office for the Union Army during the Civil War, then at different points a YMCA, a movie theater, a nursery school, a pharmacy, a veterinarian's office, a temporary town hall, and most recently a thrift shop. Riverworks is now converting it into an intimate venue seating roughly 150 people, including a restored church balcony, with a custom sound system, interior finished in locally milled wood, and a stage built to face both an indoor audience and the outdoor stage the site already uses for concerts.

The estimated cost is $2.5 million. The architect is CMW Group of Frederick, Maryland, and the builder is Hamilton Construction of Dickerson, Maryland, both firms already familiar with up-county projects. Riverworks broke ground on the renovation in a ceremony held in September of last year, and the group's own estimate puts the opening sometime in 2026, meaning it's plausible the building could be finished within the next several months of this year.

None of that construction is happening in Beallsville. But none of it would exist without the version of Riverworks that spent its first years building an audience quietly, two acres at a time, on Beallsville Road, and the anniversary lands the same year the group hopes to reopen the building's doors.

What This Means If You're Already Here

You don't need a reason to stop at Alden Farms. The sculpture garden is open whenever you want to walk it, and the only cost of admission is tolerating two enthusiastic dogs who will probably follow you around. If you time a visit to April, October, or December, you'll catch the property during a Countryside Artisans tour weekend, when Therriault's stone work is set up specifically for visitors and a few other regional artists join in.

The community programming side of Riverworks has kept expanding too. The group runs a community choir directed by Christina Carr, a Juilliard-trained opera singer who has been active in the Poolesville community since 2018, alongside Sarah Paksima, a sitting Poolesville Town Commissioner. Sarah serves alongside Jim on that same Town Commission, which he currently chairs as president, a small reminder that in a town this size, the people building the arts scene and the people running the local government are frequently the same handful of neighbors.

None of this changes what Beallsville is: a quiet stretch of county road with more acreage than storefronts. What's changed is what one piece of that acreage is doing. A garden shop that spent 25 years selling perennials is now the working half of a nonprofit with a state bond request, a downtown zoning district named after it, and a 200-year-old church down the road being rebuilt around its next act.

If you're weighing what it means to put down roots somewhere like Beallsville, longer term, or you're already here and curious what your place is worth in a market that keeps surprising people, Jim Brown has spent years watching this corner of the Ag Reserve change from the inside. Get a free home valuation or call Jim to talk through what's happening in your neighborhood.