History: From Forest To Farm To City Center

From Forest To Farm To City Center History of the McCormick Farm and Family

While some of Fairfield Township was open prairie before the arrival of white settlers, when Judge John Cleves Symmes made the famous Symmes Purchase, the area that is now the heart of Fairfield was covered with forest.

The proximity of native earthworks suggests that there may have been small clearings created by the local natives, and General Arthur St. Clair’s army followed an Indian trail through the area.

On August 25, 1796, Judge Symmes granted a deed of a little less than 107 acres to Cornelius Hurley for a little more than 33 cents, but it’s not clear how much time, if any, Hurley actually spent there. A year later, he sold most of the land to Patrick Moore for $65, garnering quite a profit. In 1799, the price was $248 when Moore sold the tract to David Beatty, an early Butler County settler who would by 1805 own 885 acres in Fairfield and Hanover townships, including some adjacent land. The land changed hands several times within the Beatty family until 1836 when John Hart purchased 138 acres that was still then known as “the Old Beatty Farm.” Around that same time, the turnpike came through, roughly along the eastern border of the parcel, close to but not quite where Pleasant Avenue runs through the city now. This allowed for the development of Symmes Corner, carved out of surrounding farmland.

None of the owners up to this point ever lived on the land, but likely rented it out to tenants who cleared the land and began tilling the soil. Neither did the next owner, Samuel Houston, who bought the parcel from Hart for $7,000 in 1838. In 1847, Hueston gave it to his daughter Lucinda Ann and her husband John Pottenger as a $9,000 advance against his estate. The

first recorded house was built there in 1853, but it was still tenanted property until 1865 when the Pottenger’s daughter Elizabeth Jane and her husband John Cleves Hunter lived there.

Upon the death of Lucinda Ann Pottenger, in 1896 the family sold it to Tevillia Rieser for $12,636. In 1898, a traction line followed the turnpike route, making the area even more accessible to Cincinnati and Dayton, yet development in that part of the township was mostly north of the farm, which Ms. Rieser rented to George Vogel in 1900, to John Kehr in 1910.

Then in 1922, William A. McCormick, a World War I veteran and third-generation Fairfield Township farmer, took over operations. He was born on his parent’s farm on River Road. His great-grandfather John P. McCormick came to Fairfield Township from Putnum County, New York, in “1831 or thereabouts,” according to the 1882 history of Butler County.

John McCormick was a paper-maker by trade and worked at Graham’s paper-mill in the township for ten years, then rented a small farm of 20 acres and commenced to raise broom-corn. His grandson Algernon (born 1866), Bill’s father, also raised broom corn and made brooms.

Bill McCormick remained a tenant on the farm through more changes in ownership back to the Pottenger family until he and his wife Rachel took ownership in 1944. When he retired at the age of 91, he had lived on the farm for 65 years. He started with horse-drawn plows and had one of the first tractors in Butler County. He put in his last crop of corn himself, but hired someone to harvest it.

In an interview with Ercel Eaton of the Journal-News upon his retirement, he said that when he moved there his farm was surrounded by seven or eight other large farms with Symmes Corner in the center.

At one time he operated the farm as a dairy with 20 Guernseys, selling his milk to a Cincinnati dairy. He was an avid motorist and had driven his first wife Rachel (died 1958) and second wife Pearl and his Model Ts and

Hudsons to all 48 lower states.

Bill McCormick was also a founding member of the Fairfield Township and City fire departments. He also drove a school bus for 22 years and so was well known to several generations of Fairfield children.

He said that another favorite diversion was fox hunting, where 30 or 40 area farmers would gather nearly every Saturday during the winter. “We’d take our trucks and line men up on four sides making a square. Then we’d move in from all sides, hemming them in. No dogs. Just men and guns.”

He died in 1987 at the age of 93.

Developers bought the remaining farm land in December 1996 for $1.36 million and began residential development of portions of it, and the site blossomed as Fairfield’s city center.

Bill’s brother, Orval Payne McCormick, better known as “O.P.”, was also a prominent Fairfield Township resident. He, too, was born on the farm May 25, 1889. When he was 20 years old, he moved to Crescentville in Hamilton County to work on a farm and fell in love with the farmer’s daughter, Carrie Edythe Runyan. They married August 2, 1909. In 1911, they moved back to Fairfield to work the William Rieser farm and stayed there for 17 years.

Both O.P. and Edythe took an active part in township affairs, and agriculture-related county and state activities. McCormick was a founding member of the Butler County Farm Bureau and served on the search committee to hire the first county agent, Walter D. Hunnicut. As a leader in the 4-H Pig and Dairy Club, he took many county champions to the Ohio State Fair. The Fairfield Township Farm Bureau’s executive committee held its first meeting at their home in January 1924.

In 1928, O.P. won election to the Ohio Legislature and served three years, driving back and forth to Columbus each weekend in his Model T Ford. In 1930, he served as vice president of the Butler County Republican club. He died in 1993.

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