Keeping a family business going takes hard work, dedication and a can-do attitude, year after year.
When those years start adding up to decades, then a century, it deserves some recognition. At least the Ohio Department of Agriculture thinks so.
Each year, the agency recognizes farms that have been owned and operated by the same family for at least 100, 150 or 200 consecutive years through its Ohio Historic Family Farms program.
In 2017, 125 such farms were designated either centennial, sesquicentennial or bicentennial farms by the department, including a nearly 103-year-old farm in Huntsburg Township known today as the Haueter Farm.
“I was actually born in this house. Not a lot of people can say that these days,” said 81-year-old Janet Haueter, who owns the place once known as the Ratzenberger Farm after her grandparents, John and Susie Ratzenberger purchased the 110 acres on which it sits on Feb. 17, 1915, according to the application she filed with the state agriculture department.
The old farm house looks quite different than it did when the Ratzenbergers (whom Haueter said may or may not be kin to the John Ratzenberger who played America’s favorite, know-it-all mail carrier Clifford Clavin in the 1980s sitcom Cheers) bought the land and the farm house Haueter calls home these days.
“The house was originally built by Emiziah Townsley and I know of two families that lived in it before John and Susie Ratzenberger came to own it,” she said. “Originally, it was probably more of a cabin-like affair. You can tell that it’s been added onto and, if you’d go look in the basement, you’d see it’s made up of old stones.”
According to the application she filled out to earn the century-farm designation, Townsley built the original structure in 1847, after which came the bank barn that remains on the property and where Haueter keeps her hay to this day.
Now 103 acres, the original plot her grandfather bought was 110, the application shows, and her grandparents ran it as a dairy farm.
“My grandparents were great farmers,” her application states. “Neighbors remember how clean the barn windows were...”
She said during a Jan. 30 interview inside her home that she has Amish neighbors alive today who remember her grandparents and how well they kept the place.
“Oh, they say that they always remember how clean they kept the windows in the barn,” she said. “The one lady told me my grandmother used to sweep the road! I mean, it made sense back then because the road wasn’t used nearly as much as it is today.”
Haueter said she did most of her growing up in Middlefield Township, about a house away from the Middlefield Village border, and would come work at the farm where she was born frequently during the summer months, cleaning eggs, making hay and even driving a team of horses pulling a hay-laiden cart from the fields to the bank barn across the road from the house.
“I say I drove them, but they were probably more like driving themselves,” she said. “But I held the reigns and sat on the cart with the hay.”
She described an ingenious method her grandfather devised for off-loading the hay into the barn, whereby they would attach ropes which went through a series of pulleys to the horse-drawn cart. The ropes were attached to a big fork that hung in the rafters inside the barn. The fork would be lowered to the ground and the horses led across the road with the ropes, causing the fork and its payload to lift up. Then, they could maneuver the load of hay to wherever they needed in the barn.
She said it’s that kind of ingenuity, along with their iron-clad work ethic, that made her grandparents such great farmers.
“They had 16 milking cows and, at that time, trucks would come pick up the milk in those big, steel cans,” she said. “My grandfather had a bad back, so my grandmother would have to pick up those big milk cans herself and load them onto the trucks. I remember it well. They both worked very hard. And that’s what they did for years, until they retired.”
Haueter said she remained involved with working on the farm from about five through her early teens, “when I got interested in other things.”
“I came up in the summer, probably until I was about 13,” she said. “I didn’t want to as much then because I was more interested in boys, which was probably a mistake.”
As the years went on, through marriage, rasing her three children, getting divorced and working a few different occupations, Haueter always felt a strong connection to the farm and managed to acquire ownership, share by share, from siblings and other relatives, mainly by trading her own interests in other pieces of family property. She said it was in 2000 when she took full ownership of the farm.
For her, it’s always been about protecting the place. Not that she said her family was pawing at the ground to turn its acres into subdivisions and shopping places, but she said she knew that, as long as she’s responsible for it, it will always remain farmland.
So, one thing she did was join the Western Reserve Land Conservancy to help ensure that, even after she’s gone, the place will remain natural.
“My children could sell it. But the new owners would have to abide by whatever rules I set up (through the WRLC),” she said. “And that’s very important to me, to preserve the land... So I’m going to keep it going until I die. Then they can worry about how to divide it up.”
As far as keeping it going goes, Haueter and her son, Ted, do most of the work there, where about two dozen alpacas live in one of the two newer barns built there in the mid-1980s. She also boards a handful of horses, raises chickens and makes hay.
She even has an old tractor with which her grandfather once worked the same fields.
“I still use it,” she said. “It’s a Ford, you know, and they can go on and on.”
And, although she’s scaled down the operation compared to what it once was, she said it’s important to her to keep working the land she calls home.
“I’m still farming,” she said. “I mean, I’m 81, so I’m not going to get into any other kinds of farming. And I’m an animal lover. I love animals. I mean, I don’t even kill my own chickens.”
Mainly, though, she said her life’s goal has been to keep the Haueter Farm alive and its acres preserved.
“I didn’t do it because I wanted to make money on it,” she said. “I did it because I wanted to save it. I don’t want houses all over it
The Ohio Department of Agriculture reports that, since its inception in 1993, almost 1,500 have been registered in the Ohio Historic Family Farms program. Through it, each family receives a certificate signed by the governor and agriculture department director to keep with the historical records they maintain.
Agency director David T. Daniels said the fact that Ohio is home to so many functioning historical farms is a point of pride for the Buckeye State.
“Our historic family farms are an important link to Ohio’s great agricultural history and promising future,” Daniels is quoted as saying in a January news release about the 2017 additions to the program. It’s an honor every time we are able to recognize Ohioans who take such great pride in their own agricultural heritage.”
Ashley McDonald, the agency’s public information officer, concurred.
“The program offers us a way to recognize those families who’ve been in agriculture for at least 100, 150 or 200 years — an impressive milestone for any business,” McDonald writes in a Jan. 29 e-mail exchange. “Our Historic Family Farm families take great pride in their history and the state recognizes the impact they’ve had in laying the foundation for Ohio’s agriculture industry.”
The department states that “anyone who can verify that a currently owned farm has remained in their family for at least 100 years may register” for the program. For more information, visit agri.ohio.gov/divs/cent_farms, call Erin Dillon at 614-752-9817 or e-mail centuryfarms@agri.ohio.gov.
An up-to-date list of all Ohio’s historic family farms, by county, is available on the agriculture department’s website.
As far as Northeast Ohio goes, there are five century farms in Ashtabula County, two in Cuyahoga County, 15 in Geauga County and three in Lake County.
For her part, Haueter said she put quite a bit of effort into establishing her farm’s prerequisites for the recognition, confirming that it took her about a year to do all the legwork.
She said she enjoyed it, however, that it’s been well worth the effort and she’s glad she put the time into it.
“Oh, it means everything to me,” she said. “As I think more about it, this place has been a very large part of my life. So it was very important to me to get it into the Western Reserve Land Conservancy and also to have the 100-year plaque because there aren’t very many people that have that anymore.”
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