Sweet Hill Farm — Attraction in Ledyard

First off I want to begin with that I’ve seen a bunch of beautiful weddings at this place and I am not discrediting others experience here. However I had an absolutely horrendous experience here with my fiancé and my mother. Seeing how it was a great place for others makes me even more confused on why we were treated such a way, and hours later I’m still speechless on what we did to receive the customer service that we got. Sweethill was our first venue we have looked at so far and all I can say is wow. Completely unprofessional and outrageously rude. As soon as we got out the car an attitude was apparent and followed by dirty looks. I’m not sure what it was, as a gay couple our first instinct was that she was displeased with us or it was simply because I didn’t look apart of what she was expecting. Will never really know what it was, but it was obviously personal. The woman wouldn’t let anyone talk. Rudely cutting us off and wouldn’t let us have our wedding the way we wanted. It was her way or the high way, let me remind that we were just touring the place and nothing was set in stone so we didn’t know if we even wanted it there to begin with. Rude comments about why we are doing our wedding a certain way. Like having it on a weekday and practically saying no one will come to my wedding?? and she prefers if we have it on a Saturday like it was her wedding and not ours. How having pictures done after the ceremony and not being apart of cocktail hour is not how it goes there and how confusing the fact we want to do that is. She then proceeded to be visibly irritated at the fact that we wanted to take pictures after the ceremony in the first place rudely saying “so what? My staff will just stand around for an hour not doing anything” as if we weren’t paying them and as if this wasn’t a traditional thing that a lot of weddings do. There was so much more unprofessional comments and snotty tones directed towards us where I had enough and politely told her that our wedding ideas and what we want didn’t align with the place unfortunately and before I can finish my sentence the lady laughs in my face cutting me off by saying she doesn’t think so either and storms off. While making sarcastic comments about how she’s “so glad I called”. I’m so disgusted and in complete shock that we just experienced what we did. I’m so glad that we seen this during our tour and didn’t go through with it and experienced it on our actual wedding day. I hope no one else ever has to go through this and I really hope Mrs. Charlene tries to sell the place to people a lot better than she did with us. What she did may seem small but it discouraged us into looking into other places because we simply don’t want to deal with someone...

If I could give less than one star I would. The staff was extremely rude and lied about having a temperature controlled room on an extremely hot day. The bride went to the hospital with a heat stroke and I overheard her saying “this is why we don’t do weddings”. When there is literally a wedding tab on their website. The best man had to go to the store to buy water and Gatorade because of how incompetent they were. On top of that the food was horrible and barely chewable. The coordinator didn’t even understand the order the wedding party was supposed to walk it and there wasn’t enough seats for everyone to eat when we submitted the numbers a month and a half in advance. And because of this our table DID NOT get water. We had to go and get our own drinks. Despite what they said in their response. The bride was only 10 mins late and she kept telling the groom that she needed to hurry up. As someone who has worked a lot of weddings, this was the worst and most unorganized place I have ever seen. I could keep going with examples of how rude they all were but that would take forever so just know it was awful. Since she decided to respond so poorly I would also like to add that me and the other bridesmaids were cleaning up the cups and napkins that were left at tables and their waitstaff was all hidden away in the back of the bar shed or on top of the ice cream shop. When we tried to throw the cups away in the shed because we couldn’t find the garbage we were treated with extreme disrespect. I overheard multiples employees complaining while the bride was getting CARRIED in to a car to go to the hospital which is extremely disgusting. When my mother couldn’t chew the meat that they were given they overheard her and they gave her an attitude and brought over metal silverware so she could at least cut through it opposed to the wooden silverware she had to use beforehand, but she still couldn’t chew it either way. There are already people telling me that they’re sick the next morning because of the food. The manicotti was watery and the salad was soggy. The father of the bride had to make his own announcement after the bride was rushed to the hospital. Nothing excuses any of this and their sorry excuses are...

In terms of getting a simple ice cream cone in 2025 under new management it works like this: They employ one person, I believe the owner, and if you are first in line she takes your order and collects your payment for the order – AND then she takes the orders of the next 20 people in line in back of you and collects the 20 payments of the 20 orders in back of you – before she even begins fulfilling your order, which consists of placing 2 scoops of ice cream in cone. Her stated reasoning – “well it is easier for me that way”. Hmmm, maybe, I don’t know but after watching this process for 25 mins long before the time our order had begun to be worked on, I was like “nah, I’m good”…..we really no longer wanted the order we had paid for. Just made for a poor experience. Seemed disrespectful honestly. And the ice cream is lame and way overpriced. But if someone is trying to do the right thing, that makes up for a lot and I will accept or at least deal with poor quality and high prices. But here, that was not the case. Place was great under old management from 2019-2024, but in 2025 it is nothing like that under new management. You can keep the overpriced 3rd rate ice cream and 5th rate service….we’re good. Will not be back and I do not recommend. Stay away. One star, if I could give no...