On the Moraine, Part XVIII

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

As time went on, my parents realized that 164 acres, the McNary Farm, was not going to be large enough to support general farming. They conducted an almost continual search for new acreage.  

Around 1960 or so, they almost bought what we called the Lytle Farm on Brier Hill Road. This road extends from Barrett Mill Road to Ohio 41 north of Cynthiana, near where JR’s Store is today.

The nice thing about this farm was that it had a back corner that touched the McNary Farm. A small easement across the corner of Dr. Benner’s dairy farm would connect them and give access. I torpedoed this. It would have meant moving from Troy; and I did not want to do that, at least not at this time.

Little did we know that in just a couple of years, an event would occur which would set off a serious search for more land.  

The weekly trips to the McNary Farm settled in to being routine, and by the time I was in the fifth or sixth grade, they could be called boring. We had spent Dad’s vacation every summer on the farm and at last I started lobbying for a vacation somewhere else. 

So, in the summer of 1962, we took a modest vacation to Spring Mill Park in southern Indiana. I had been there as a tiny guy and somewhat remembered it. Spring Mill Park is a restored early settlement with a grist mill, village and so forth. It kept with my parents’ theme of enjoying the old things. But, hey, it was something different. You might like it, too.

We came back from this little vacation expecting things to be pretty much the same. I was starting into the seventh grade, where in Troy they consolidated the six elementary schools into one school for the seventh and eighth grades. Each grade was about 250-300 students. I was somewhat looking forward to this, but a bit nervous.

We got back into the routine of going to the farm. One Friday night, we got there and found a surprise. We had been robbed!  

The thieves had come in through a window, and they took anything of value. Dad, particularly, was in a panic. He immediately went to the attic looking for the chainsaw. The attic had a big pile of old newspapers and magazines, and Dad always hid the chainsaw there, underneath those. It was still there; they had not found it.

As you can imagine, that was a weekend of turmoil, perhaps more so for my parents than for us children. Dad went to the sheriff’s office in Hillsboro on Saturday morning and reported the theft.  

Perhaps one of these days, we will get a report on that. How about it, HCSO? Talk about a cold case!

Of course, looking back on it, it is a wonder we were not robbed before this. Our comings and goings were predictable, and the house sat back a long lane, down a hill and was not visible from the road.

The coming weeks were a time of reflection and assessment of what we have been doing and our plans for the future.

Note: Geologically, Ohio is roughly two states divided by a line that runs from Cincinnati to Cleveland. Sometimes, this line is thought to roughly follow the old “3C” highway or I-71. It veers quite widely from this line, particularly in Highland County. North and west of this line, the state is fairly flat and smooth, the result of the last glacier of the Ice Age. South and east of this line are the Appalachian foothills, undisturbed by glaciers. In most textbooks, this line is called the Terminal Moraine. Starting in the 1950s, my family acquired two farms. The first one, known as the McNary Farm, is located at the junction of Highland, Ross and Pike counties. The McNary Farm is clearly on the southeast side of the Terminal Moraine. The other farm, known as the Beaver Farm, is located on the north side of state Route 506 at the intersection of that highway and Franklin Branch, a creek which is clearly marked on the Highland County engineer’s map of today. The Beaver Farm is definitely on the northwest side of the Terminal Moraine.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.