Repeating history

By Matt Reese

Ohio’s historic farms have been a favorite topic of Ohio’s Country Journal since the very beginning of this publication. The first editor, Tim Reeves, began work highlighting these farms in cooperation with the Ohio Department of Agriculture and Ohio History Connection in 1992. Since that time, it has been a privilege and a pleasure for Ohio’s Country Journal to highlight Ohio’s historic farms each year (which we did this year in the Mid-September issue).

To follow up on that, I wanted to share a little about my Reese family history as well. My brother currently lives on our home farm where I grew up. It was designated a Century Farm a few years ago in Hancock County. I currently live about 120 miles to the southeast in Fairfield County, but I regularly make the roughly 2-hour drive back to work on the farm.

In just the last couple of years, a historian in our extended family, Judy Shick, shared with me some interesting family history that shows my regular journey from Fairfield to Hancock County is nothing new, nor is the penchant for writing about agriculture in our family.… Continue reading