29) Farms and Farmers

First Milking Machine  (1930s)

(Gib Blackstone)

My father had a dairy and he purchased the first milking machine in this area.  It was powered by a gasoline engine and there was one big bucket with the compressor, the pulsater, on top and you could milk two cows at the same time.  We milked anywhere from 15-25 cows a day.  And all the farmers thought that Dad would ruin the cows by milking them with the milking machine.  But it didn’t.  We still had the same milking machines when we quit farming, quit the dairy in 1965.

Farmers Worked Together  (1930s)

(Gib Blackstone)

In the 1930’s all the farmers milked cows, raised hogs and sheep and chickens and had gardens and so forth.  At that time there were 12 dairy farms on Burg Street.  Today there’s none.  In fact there’s none in Granville Township.

Two or three of the farms, they had farm tractors and the rest of them had the horses.  All the farmers would work together in filling silos, thrashing wheat and shredding corn.  The farmer who was hosting, where they were doing his work, the women would put on a very big lunch. 

In 1937, my dad and Oscar Lantz purchased the first combine in this area.  A John Deere combine.  It was delivered by train and unloaded where Fairview Avenue is now.  It took them about three days to put that combine together.  The way it worked, the tractor pulled the combine and it was two-man operation.  One man rode the combine to raise and lower the platform.  And the platform had to be removed when you changed one field to another field because gates weren’t wide enough for it to get through.  This was a lot better than shocking wheat, and then hauling it to the thresher all the time.

Farmers and the WPA Rebuild Burg Street  (1930s)

(Gib Blackstone)

The next big thing was rebuilding Burg Street.  The WPA, which was a government program of America, had workers come up here every day.  And they drove Model A Fords and Model T Fords up the road in the morning and down the road in the afternoon.  Anyway, all the farmers, they had horses and they had gravel wagons -- that’s a wagon that’s built with 2 by 4’s on an open flat bed frame.  And as they unloaded, they pulled those 2 by 4’s out one at a time so the gravel fell out on the road.  They got all the gravel out of the Dry Creek at the end of the road up here.  So the farmers helped the WPA in widening Burg Street.  Before that, it was just one path road.  [ 1930s ]

Evolution of the Licking County Fair

(Henry Whitehead)

We’d meet folks at Grange meetings and at the Licking County Fair, which was held in Newark at that time.  For several years it was on the grounds where the mounds are – Moundbuilders.  It was the greatest place for the children to run up and down those mounds and but we had more cut lips, more crying children!  They even had a racetrack inside the mound for horse racing with a Grandstand.  It was eventually torn down, when the historical society took over.  . . .   They didn’t have a county fair for a year or two.  Then they had one at one of the parks there in Newark.  And they tried to have one downtown in Newark, but that didn’t work.  So they finally went over to Croton, and it became the Hartford Fair.

Just Cornfields Between Columbus and Granville  (1959)

(Mary Ann Reeb)

When my family first came to Granville, I remember the ride from the airport along Route 16.  We were just appalled at how far out in the country we were, how rural it was, and that there were cornfields for miles.  This was back in 1959, when there weren’t many businesses along Route 16.  My sisters and I thought we were doomed! 

Township Buys Farmland to Preserve It

(Lyle King)

The township trustees right now are trying to preserve a lot of farmland.  We’ve already bought building rights on quite a few acres of land in the township and we’re going to buy a lot more.  It’s important to me because I was born and raised on a farm.  That’s a way of life with me.  But you go talk to any group in town and that’s all they want to talk about, so they must feel somewhat the same way I do.  We need the farm, the rural atmosphere and I think that’s one thing that’s unique about Granville is holding on to its rural atmosphere.

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