Some Local History and Our Farm

Huntoon Road from 1900 to Today

When settlers moved into Geauga County in the early 1800s they relied on waterways for transportation and power for industries. The early part of the 1800s was the era of the canal and water wheel. A creek, like Big Creek, or even a modest stream like Jordan Creek could power a small enterprise's saws and power hammers, or turn a grist mill, or a wool mill.

The GIF at the top of the page shows the end result of a shift away from waterways being important. The part of Huntoon Road, which used to descend to the forge in "Howe's Hollow" (aka Liberty Hollow), is abandoned, then cut by I90 (and the railroad disappearing into the Green Way). In the early settlement days, the topographic features and water features defined how people related to the land. In our time, waterways and topography are barely noticed out the window of a car as we drive to a job in the city.

The people back then used renewable energy, but they were as far from being "green" or environmentally conscious as is possible. They made no effort to adapt their methods to their new home. They were human locusts.

By 1900 they'd cut down every single tree of commercial value and converted it into money and converted almost all the forested land into farmland or pasture. They literally killed every animal they could trap or put a bullet in. White tail deer, which we're so used to seeing all the time, were hunted to extirpation in a few decades. It boggles the mind that elk, bears, and bobcats once lived here in abundance. When you read their journals and histories written at the time (or shortly thereafter) it's apparent that they not only wiped out species that were competitors to their agricultural endeavors, or that had commercial value, they killed animals out of total wanton desire to kill. They put a bounty on squirrel pelts! Nature was their enemy.

It's pretty hard to imagine what was lost. Ten thousand years of primeval forest floor must have produced an incredibly rich and productive soil. The settlers turned that soil into food, pasture land, and of course money until it was washed away year after year. The lumber was milled for wood for local use (or to be shipped to other markets), but most of it was just burned. A tiny portion of that ash was used for fertilizer or to make household chemicals, but most went into the fields.

1906 Topographic Map

By 1900 newspaper accounts showed regrets at what was lost and communities started to change course. Also the patterns of land use started shifting toward our modern use. The property that Red Squirrel Farm occupies is on a tributary of Big Creek on what used to be a farm. (likely area of the old farm shown above. It was subsequently subdivided numerous times.) There are trees on our property that are almost certainly predate 1906, but most of the land was probably clear cut and used for agricultural fields or pasture land for dairy cows.

We've been here a year and we're in the very early stages of deciding on a direction or even trying to figure out what it means to "manage" woods and land like this. We've investigated the tree-farm scheme that the State of Ohio supports, but we're not interested in doing commercial timber harvesting or production. If you spend a lot of time in the woods and try to understand it in its own terms rather than look at the trees as a crop, the conclusions about what to do (if anything at all) are completely different than the commercial foresters approach.