Last weekend, Tim, his family, and I went down to southeast Ohio to see his cousin get married. Tim and his brother-in-law were excited to show me “The Old Farm” that his grandpa Hogue owned. We didn’t get to it until the last day, and I couldn’t figure out what would be so thrilling about going to see an ordinary farm.
It turns out that not only is it an old farm, it’s an abandoned farm. The farmhouse has been uninhabited for over 30 years. It was built in 1905, and the house that was there before it was the original house, built in the 1700s when the Hogue family was granted a piece of land (Tim’s uncle has the original sheepskin deed) by president John Adams.
Both Tim’s dad and grandfather grew up on this farm, so I imagine they both have stories to tell, but we had not the time for any.
I took pictures because of the unusual setting of the farm. We took the 1/2 mile driveway back into the fields and trees, past several plots of land that were sold off years ago, reducing the farm from the original 250 acres to 75 acres. There are rolling hills everywhere in southeast Ohio, it was pretty magnificent.
The driveway stopped at the entrance to a large field, which bordered a forest. The rest of the driveway led into the forest, and wasn’t passable, so we walked alongside it in the field until we finally saw buildings a ways into the woods. We had to hike down a steep ravine to get down to the farmhouse.
Here are pictures of The Old Farm, now in the middle of the forest.
