The Most Famous Farm In America Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall And The Spirit Of Being “Teched” By Dr. Lorin Swinehart
“It is the duty of every citizen, for his own welfare, if for no other patriotic reason, to support and fight for and possibly initiate measures having to do with conservation of soil, water and forests.” Louis Bromfield A Primer of Conservation
F
rom the 1,310-foot summit of Mount Jeez, the view of rich farmland and forested hilltops is certainly one of the most beautiful in the Midwest.
Many years ago, this hill was known as Poverty Knob, its soil so exhausted by poor farming methods and subsequent erosion that no one could make a living on it. That changed in the
1930s when the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield returned to the Ohio countryside of his youth, purchasing 600 acres consisting of four depleted farms, and restoring the topsoil through methods regarded as newfangled and controversial at the time until the land became famously productive again. Bromfield blamed what he called whorish agriculture for the exhausted soil and eroded ground, much as he blamed the Dust Bowl of the 1930s on short-sighted agricultural practices. His methods of topsoil restoration included so-called “trash farming,” precursor to no-till agriculture, as well as strip farming, contour plowing and sheet composting. It has been said that he is responsible for the beginning of the organic food movement. Were he alive today, he would be scandalized by the horrors of factory farming and the world-gobbling practices of agri-business. Bromfield insisted that the first word to come to mind when anyone looked out over the valley from the summit was “Jeez!” Hence, the name Mount Jeez. From the summit, one can view parts of three Ohio counties, nearby Pleasant Hill Reservoir and Mohican-Memorial State Forest. He named his lands Malabar Farm, after the Malabar Coast of India, where he had spent time while writing his bestselling novel The Rains Came. For his home, he constructed a 19-room Greek Revival-style house, known ever since as the Big House. Bromfield became an outspoken advocate for sustainable agriculture, an enthusiastic horticulturist and larger than life promotor of ecology and wildlife management. Many of his works of fiction, most of which were made into movies, have been sadly forgotten over the years, but his nonfiction works continue to inspire generations of farmers and naturalists. Louis Bromfield was famous during that period from the 1920s through the 1950s. His novel Early Autumn won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927. Numerous of his other novels were turned into movies, like The Rains Came, featuring such luminaries of the silver screen of yesteryear as Tyrone Power, Myrna Loy, George Brent and Nigel Bruce. The movie premiered in his hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, in 1939. While much of his fiction has been neglected by more recent critics and readers, some, like The Farm, The Man Who Had Everything, The Wild Country and A Good Woman would seem to deserve more attention today. He also composed the script for Walt Disney’s nature classic The Vanishing Prairie and the animated film
Ferdinand the Bull. Given all that, Bromfield’s real passion was agriculture. He writes lovingly of farming and nature in his nonfiction books, such as Malabar Farm, Pleasant Valley, A Few Brass Tacks, Out of the Earth, Animals and Other People, and his autobiographical From My Experience. He attracted agricultural experts and countless others from throughout the nation and from overseas as he illustrated his successful farming techniques founded upon an ethic of working with rather than against nature, ideas explored in his book A New Plan for a Tired World. Bromfield writes passionately of such seasonal labors as mowing alfalfa, tapping maple trees to make maple syrup, planting vegetable gardens, harvesting wheat, oats, corn and other crops throughout the year, realities that our ancestors took for granted but that so many have now forgotten. Among the thousands of visitors to Malabar Farm today, societal naiveté sometimes raises its head. During the annual Maple Syrup Festival in February and March, visitors have been overheard by rangers complaining, “I don’t see why they have this at this time of year with all the cold and the mud,” clueless that it is only in late winter when maple trees produce. On one occasion, a bus loaded with school children from the city arrived as the park’s dairy herd was being milked. A common response was, “Ugh! I would never drink that stuff! We get our milk from the supermarket.” Some of Bromfield’s most kindhearted writings involve the many animals, both wild and domesticated, that shared his bucolic farm life. In such books as Animals and Other People, he writes warmly of the six dogs, four of them boxers, who follow him everywhere. When his oldest most beloved boxer Prince dies unexpectedly, he writes most movingly of his great sense of loss in the story “Goodbye to a Friend,” a sentiment that all dog lovers can share. Other animal friends and their antics fill the pages of Bromfield’s many volumes. He speaks of a herd of goats who will never go far from their beloved porch swing, of a duck who doesn’t realize that he is a duck, of a Guernsey bull named Sylvester and a mongoose named—what else— Rikki. He speaks of the joys of raising pigs in a chapter of Animals and Other People, entitled “A Hymn to Hogs.” His “Cycle of a Farm Pond” depicts the realities of the food chain by describing the relationship between food fish, such as bluegills and sunfish, and predator species like largeContinued on page 10
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El Ojo del Lago / June 2022
