Historic Hiram farm to become community center

A historic Hiram farmstead is in the process of being revitalized to create a community-oriented volunteer education center. The center will feature instruction on eco-friendly living and will include hands-on programs on topics like growing heirloom apples, nut trees and other fruit crops, as well as making apple cider.

Clean up on what is now known as the Greendale-Couch Organic Farm began in 2023.

Perry Green, the then Ohio director of agriculture, established the Greendale Farm in the early 20th century, after which it became the most productive dairy farm in the state of Ohio in the 1920s. Green went bankrupt when the farm stopped being productive and sold the 127-acre farm at 11485 Garfield Rd. to Alfred Welling Couch in the 1950s.

Couch was an organic farming pioneer who used his estate to teach about the principles of healthy eating and holistic living long before it was popular and, as a result, captured a national audience.

Prior to his death in 2001, Couch appointed his daughter-in-law, Dorothy Couch, as the executor of his estate. After his death, she set up a group of trustees to take over the estate and signed off on the family’s affiliation with the property. The farm is now a 501c3 nonprofit organization and is part of a larger nonprofit organization, Global Development Solutions. The farm had largely gone unused until committee members began the recent renovation.

Secretary Dennis Taylor said the committee is aiming to turn the estate into a community education center with a focus on organic growing, sustainability and eco-friendly living.

“We’re really interested in helping people understand the relationship of humans to the land on which they live, and how, if we really are organic and want to be sustainable, we have to look at more than just food. We have to look at everything in our lives and how it relates to the land,” Taylor said. “So, we’re extremely interested in the heritage of the land back before people came from Lebanon, Connecticut, in 1800 and began the original farms that were there, and we’re interested in where we go in the future.”

Early this year, the committee, along with volunteers, began to rehabilitate the property and restore the main house.

“There was an old 1830s residence for the farm workers when it was the Greendale farm. They had 24 hired hands just to milk the cows and take care of the horse teams and their families, so there was another structure that was for housing, and then the barn and the milking structure was in addition to that,” Taylor said. “The residence was left, but it was in such bad shape since the roof had blown off, we just had it demolished by the Moore Brothers.”

The exterior restoration of the main house is currently underway; the soffits have been repaired, rotten wood was replaced, a new roof was installed along with gutters and downspouts, and a portion of the exterior has been painted.

This summer, the committee sourced a historic barn frame.

“The really exciting news is that we found a barn frame, which is 30 feet by 40 feet, 12×12 beams as well as the purlins, which are 30 feet across. They’re solid timbers, every single one of them, from about 1850, or thereabouts, of local Hiram trees,” Taylor said. “We hope to, some time in the fall, disassemble the barn and get it over there, and if we can raise the funds in the spring, we’ll put it up and have it become a community center that will allow for all sorts of activities to take place.”

Once the restoration of the main house is complete and the barn is constructed, the committee plans on creating projects to include the community, such as planting flowers and making apple cider.

As a horticulturalist-botanist, committee President Lucy Chamberlain was interested in the history of apple orchards in the Hiram area, so she did some research and found a map from the 1800s that shows that nearly everyone had their own little orchard back then. She wants to make a fondness for orchards trendy again.

The apple orchard contains 32 trees, 17 of which the committee had recently planted. The others go back to when the farm was established in the early 1800s and to those that Couch planted in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Those have been neglected throughout the years and require preventative care to bring them back into production.

“We’re growing cider apples and they’re heirloom apples, many of them go back hundreds of years in age, so they’re historically connected with the farm back to the 1800s, 1830s, when the farm and the farm house was built,” Chamberlain said. “Hard cider was something people drank back then, because you couldn’t drink a lot of other things, because the water might not have been clean. This was something that was considered safe. We’re working on the process of restoring them and that, in itself, is a whole process of bringing them back and getting them into production. We’re going to be developing that, and it’s not going to happen tomorrow.”

The plans for the farm’s future have roots that go back to its very beginning in the 1800s, but the committee largely sees the project as an extension of the work that Couch did in educating the community about organic principles, farming and food preparation.

Mayor Anne Haynam said the farm is a step toward the revitalization of Hiram and is also a way of honoring the village’s history.

“One of the things coming in as mayor that concerned me is that there is a loss of institutional memory for our village, so the Couch farm fits into that category, much like we’ve forgotten that James A. Garfield went to school here, became a leader here, got his political footing while he lived here and was a part of our community,” Haynam said. “We’re working collectively to reconnect to some of the remarkable things about our village and our history, so what Denny and Lucy and others on the Couch Farm board are doing, it’s really part of that.”

Up until this point, the project has largely been funded by the committee; however, they have put together a development committee to write grants and seek funding for the remainder of the restoration of the house and for the construction of the post-and-beam pole barn.

A harvest festival fundraiser has been scheduled for Oct. 11, from noon to 4 p.m. Tickets will be available online at https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/greendale-couch-organic-farm-harvest-festival?zlinkid=bd1896f6-b14f-41e8-bf3c-a2c04efb1338