On the Moraine, Part XXVII

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

The Highland County Fair, 1963: The balance of the summer of 1963 went by in a bucolic manner. The weather was unremarkable for summertime.  

My 4-H pig, Julius Caesar, grew nicely, innocently unaware of this fate. I treated him like a pet and mentally ignored the coming end.

When Fair Week came, Dad had arranged with the Pat Smith family to help us out.  So, on the appropriate Monday, they came by to pick up Julius Caesar and me in their teal blue Studebaker pickup truck. Mother gave me $10 and a couple of changes of clothes, and I went off to the fair for a week.

Barry Smith and I “bunked” in a pen next to our pigs.

With the $10, I ate three great meals at the Grange kitchen for the entire week. I wandered the fair and saw everything. The animal contests, the tractor pulling and on and on.  

I still can’t believe my parents turned me loose at the fair for an entire week as a 13-year-old.  

I talked to all the ride operators, but I never spent any of the $10 on rides. I talked to the “Rock-O-Plane” operator so much that he offered me a free ride, but I declined.  

There were many opportunities to get into trouble, but I have to tell you I did not.

As fall came, I was in the eighth grade at Marshall. Same teachers, same room as there were two grades to a room in those days. One of the things I enjoyed about school that year is that every few weeks, there would be a film from Bell Labs on some forward-looking scientific development. Not having television at home, the very modern, color, full-length films were a treat for me.

On the farm, we were back to gathering firewood for the winter. We also converted the chicken house into a farrowing house for the sows. We built farrowing crates and installed a wood stove. We also installed heat lamps on each side of the crate holding the sows in order to keep the piglets warm.

The other excitement of the fall is we bought a bull. We had been buying beef cows all along and Dad decided we needed a bull. The only problem was the bull was as wild as a deer and could jump fences as well, too. He kept jumping fences, headed back to where he had come from. Mother had to call Dad at work in Troy. Dad came home, tracked him down several farms away and shot him. We had very expensive hamburger that winter.

Rolling stock kept accumulating, too. We bought a 1953 GMC 1 ½ ton truck with a 12-foot bed. This truck ended up serving us for the entire time we were farming. It will come up again in 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.