Farmers Station The Booming Days

By Jan Griffith, Sr

This book is 5 years of research of homes that are and have been built in and around Farmers Station, Ohio. I have researched the properties back to 1876 and some of these names are the early settlers into Clark Township region. I found ownerships I never knew existed and was very surprised at some of my findings while researching these homes and houses. I hope this book will he of great usage to researchers 100 years from now 2018. It is accurate to best of my abilities of research and is intended for future research only.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jan Griffith, Sr
• Release date: Sep 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463237939

Jan Griffith, Sr

I am 69 years of age and I started putting my life history in print maybe 20 years ago on an 8088 computer and then i got away from it for a long time and about a year ago I learned of Smashwords.com from my granddaughters pen pal and it rekindled my need to finish my books and then I found a few more areas to write the history of and that brought me to publish my first book.I am married with two children and 9 grand children and am a retired Parts person and trying to enjoy life without having to be at a place of work everyday. My wife and I have been raising a large garden and selling some of our crops in our front yard.I have in the neighborhood of dozen books yet to be finished and published to Smashwords specs, I know I will enjoy finishing those books too! jansr..

Book preview

Chapter One; history;

Research shows that Farmers Station was founded in and around 1811, so it is a relative young village comparing it to Wilmington and the other bigger towns in and around the county. Farmers Station is a don’t blink you will miss it village which in the old days they called it a widening in the road on a state route which is because the state usually made the highway wider while going thru villages.

Farmers Station is located on State Route 28 half way between New Vienna and Martinsville, Ohio in southern Ohio. Clinton County Road number 7, Farmers Road intersects the village from the south near the west side of the village and from the north near the east side of the village.

I also found information that St. Rte. 28 was widened and paved sometime between 1915 and 1918.

When the village was young there were a General store, Livestock weigh station, Kestler’s Buggy & Blacksmith shop, Preston’s Poultry and General Store and a grain and feed mill which was located on the southwest side of the railroad tracks. They also had their own Post Office as well as a train depot which was beside the Post Office. It was known to be a booming town in its hayday. Donald Haines a neighbor who lived north of the station near State Route 350 once told me a story about when he was young living at the north west corner of the Clinton County near the village of New Burlington, Ohio. He was a member of the Future Farmers of America while he was in high school; they took a field trip to Farmers Station to see the grain and live stock operations there. He said that our village was way out in the boonies, but he did say it was a booming village, the grain terminal was busy all day; he said you would wait for hours to get a load a horse drawn wagon of grain unloaded; the grain terminal would ship the grain to Cincinnati, Ohio via the railroad. He never really said much about the livestock yard, but I can only imagine it had to be very busy also since it was known to ship 35,000 head of hogs out in a years’ time. Donald told me that when he was on that field trip if someone would have said that some day he was going to live near Farmers Station, he would have said you’re crazier than hell if you think I’m living down there in the boonies.

Donald was forced off his family farm by the building of Cease’s Creek Lake. His dad Luther had purchased land close to Farmers Station years before. Donald also purchased land north of Farmers Station after he lost the family farm. He lived a mile north of the village at the time of his passing a few years ago and his dad past away living less than a quarter mile from the Farmers Station sign on the east side of the village.

Larry Quigley stopped in after lunch on April 4, 2014 to tell some history of Farmers Station. He told of a man that lived on the south side of Farmers Station; he designed and made the first train car coupler out of wood. This coupler is the invention is the grandfather of the modern day train car couplers. His name we do not know and it is told his friends advised him to get a patent on his invention before he showed it to anyone. He instead hand delivered it to the Union Terminal in Cincinnati and showed it to the railroad people there. The railroad people took the coupler back in there shop and looked at it for over an hour then brought it back to him. They told him that it wouldn’t work and sent him home. The man never put a patent on his coupler. It is believed that this man worked for the grain elevator in Farmers Station where they loaded grain on railroad cars. Nine months after he made his trip to Cincinnati he saw train cars coming into the grain elevator with his coupler design on them and working perfectly.

I done some research on this coupler and I found several different inventors that described making their invention the same way as the man from Farmers Station only they retained patents on their inventions. I didn’t find any of them from Farmers Station, Ohio.

Chapter Two; My Home Place;

The address here is 6846 Farmers Road, owned by Linda Ross of Tennessee soon to become the property of my son Jan Jr. This transfer of ownership should take place the week of October first per Linda and Jan Jr.

The following will be a description of all the homes and who lived there at one time and present. There are some past and present residents I never knew or don’t know. We’ll be starting on the north side of the village on Farmers Rd. with my home place which now is deeded in Linda Ross’s name. That house being the house that my Dad purchased in 1947, the house structure was originally built on a foundation a half mile north of here on the east side of the road in the early 1900s on what was known as the George Gano Farm which Luther Haines purchased in 1951 from Mr. Kinser.

I believe that Mr. Kinser; Betty Gano’s Grandpa built dad’s house. It is known that Mr. Kinser did build the house that stands where Dad’s house once stood up the road. When Dad’s house was built I can only guess it was built in the early 1900s, but it was moved from the original location, south down the road to a location back a lane we knew it as back at the hog barn and from there it was moved to where it sets now at 6846 Farmers Rd. prior to 1944. Betty Gano informed me that there was a five room house back the lane on that empty foundation.

Harry Ertel says he can remember children getting on the school bus in the 40s at that house.

Harry also told me two names that lived in Dad and Mom’s house before my parents purchased the property. One was Carl Moffett and he had one son. The other is Dean Fisher who was a school teacher somewhere. Dean had a son Fred Fisher that is still living today. Both families must have been renters of the home before it was sold to my parents.

I now believe that the house was not wired with electric at the time my father purchased the house because my son and I did some remodeling work on the house a couple years ago which we found wiring that does not date back to the early 1900s; wiring dating back that far would have been tube and knob wiring which we found none of that type or any signs of that type of wiring in the house anywhere.

I really can’t find any information on either one of the houses at the tax maps office at the Clinton County Court House. The property is shown being inside the corporation line on the north side of Farmers Station which the maps don’t show much on properties inside of village boundary lines.

I was raised in this house by my Mom and Dad, Harold and Lilly Billie Griffith. My mother passed away in April 1973 of a heart attack in her sleep. When dad passed away in 1991 he left the property to my niece Linda Bailey who at the time of this writing still owns the property but is in the process of transferring it to my son’s name; she had put some people in to take care of the place for their rent but that didnt work out very well; by the time we got in the house to remodel it was in rather bad condition inside which we did a lot of work to get it into shape to live in. It has taken nearly a year to get the house improved to livable condition.

JJ