Plenty of struggling farm owners imagine going on vacation and returning to a brand new barn. But Renee Sherrard-Luther lived that dream when the bus from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition showed up at her farm on October 14 ready to rebuild her home, barn and arena.
Each episode of the Emmy award-winning ABC show features a race against time as participants hurry to rebuild a deserving family’s home in one week, when that project would ordinarily take at least four months to complete.
Over the next two years the show will tackle building projects in all 50 states, and the show’s producers decided to work on a therapeutic riding stable in Maryland to pay homage to the state’s equestrian heritage.
“The producers told me that they had narrowed down the Maryland contestants to five finalists, and they told me the day the bus would come if it was us,” recalled Luther. “I was so naïve I didn’t really know if it would happen. So that Sunday we were sitting around the breakfast table talking about horses and soccer and all of a sudden we hear ‘Good morning Luther family!’ I turned into a wild woman.”
Luther founded Freedom Hills, a therapeutic riding program at her Rolling Hills Ranch in Port Deposit, Md., 25 years ago. She teaches up to 50 lessons a week to mentally-, physically- and emotionally-challenged students, and organizes the fundraising efforts necessary to keep an operation like Freedom Hills running. She also runs a lesson program for able-bodied students and manages the daily care for the 22 horses at the farm.
During construction Luther and her children, Alex and Ellie, were whisked away to Italy on a week-long vacation, and some of the horses went to temporary homes during filming while contractors rebuilt her house and barn from the bottom up.
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The producers recruited Beezie Madden to act as a consultant on the stable and arena.
“We didn’t actually get to meet her because we were in Italy,” said Luther. “But she invited us to come to Syracuse and be her guests during the [Syracuse Sporthorse] Invitational [N.Y.], but it was the same time as Ellie’s Pony Club ‘B’ rating, so we couldn’t go. But she said we could come next year.”
The episode airs Sunday January 20 at 8/7 Central on ABC.
The new barn at Rolling Hills Farm in Port Luther, Md. (Paul Risk Associates Photo)
