Location: Historic downtown Milford near the Little Miami Scenic biking trail.
Provenance: After customers kept asking him to make bicycle parts and repairs, blacksmith John Bishop founded Bishop’s Bicycles in Winchester, Kentucky, in 1890. The shop moved to Cincinnati in 1910, subsequently relocated to Norwood and Silverton, then finally planted on Milford’s Main Street in 1971. Bruce Bishop sold the business in 2006, and now it’s owned by Greg and Lisa Linfert.
Clusters of apples begin to decorate trees in Dennis Thatcher’s orchard throughout each spring and early summer, promising the reward of sweet fruit and jugs of freshly pressed cider in the fall.
Thatcher and his wife, Angela, who reside in rural western Logan County and who are members of Logan County Electric Cooperative, established Thatcher Farm in 1972, when he planted a few apple trees. Today, the farm has more than 420 trees that produce 25 varieties.
Farm life often is seen by outsiders as slow, easy-paced, even leisurely. Actual farmers, of course, know that’s not the case, as the nearly endless to-do list almost always seems to require 26 hours in a day to complete, even at top speed.
So perhaps folks will be inspired by some of the work going on at Ohio State University’s Center for Automotive Research — a piece of which will be on display in the Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives Education Center at this year’s Farm Science Review, Sept. 18–20 at the Molly Caren Agricultural Center just outside London, Ohio.
With its tattered seat and uneven slats, the ladderback chair looks rather uncomfortable, but it was pioneer James Galloway’s best chair. “Since this was the ‘guest chair,’ it’s where Tecumseh sat whenever he visited,” says Catherine Wilson, director of the Greene County Ohio Historical Society in Xenia.
North America’s prairies once stretched from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains east into western Ohio, a staggering 1 million square miles or more of native grasslands that covered a third to nearly half of our country.
But what took millennia to develop disappeared in only half a century. The transformation began in 1833, when John Lane Sr. created the polished-steel, self-scouring plow, which could penetrate heavy prairie soils. A fellow blacksmith then improved upon Lane’s original design and marketed the new plow aggressively. That second blacksmith was John Deere.
Somewhere among the archives belonging to Pioneer Electric Cooperative in Piqua is buried a postcard from a member notifying the cooperative that the power was out at his home.
“…So, the next time that you are out here, please check it out,” says Nanci McMaken, paraphrasing the document. McMaken, vice president and chief communications officer at Pioneer Electric, has seen lots of changes during her 36 years at the co-op, which serves 16,700 members in Champaign, Shelby, and Miami counties — but methods of communication has been a big one.
Belgians — those big draft horses with gentle dispositions — are beautiful. Just ask brothers George and Ted Barhorst of Fort Loramie. The Barhorst family was honored at the 2017 Ohio State Fair for 75 years of showing Belgian horses. Their grandfather, Bernard Barhorst, started the tradition, which continues today.
“I don’t ever remember a time when we didn’t raise, breed, and show Belgians,” Ted says. “We have 12 of them right now.”
