The Brown-Bender Farm, once one of the most productive local farms, still commands a panoramic view of the Cuyahoga Valley. Up a steep winding drive, Jim Brown's large 1840s farmhouse sits beside a spectacular barn. Today, you can see the barn roof peeking above dense trees and overgrowth along Akron Peninsula Road, just south of Ira Road.
In 1907, dairy farmer Andrew J. Bender purchased the property as an investment in additional land to support his wife and twelve children. Andrew's son Earva, who lived there his entire life, managed the farm after his father's death in 1930. Weighing the costs and benefits of his father's dairy business, Earva chose another direction.
Brown-Bender barn rehabilitation.
NPS/Ted Toth
Through his perseverance and innovative spirit, Earva Bender developed a thriving vegetable farm that rivaled the neighboring Szalay Farm. Without children of their own to share the labor, Earva and his wife hired families to live and work on their property. As each new season arrived, Earva and his hired workers planted, harvested, and sold crops at a roadside stand and a farmers' market. Always thinking of new ways to improve his operation, Earva built a greenhouse that allowed him to bring ripe tomatoes to the farmers' markets earlier in the season than his competitors. Earva planted 100 acres of sweet corn, tomatoes, watermelons, and pumpkins on bottomland beside the Cuyahoga River. By the 1940s, the Benders' vegetable stand on Akron Peninsula Road had become a local landmark.
Work on the farm never ceased, and every day brought new successes or failures to overcome. Listen below as Earva Bender's former workers share their experiences on the farm.
Planting Tomatoes for Earva Bender
2011 Oral History Project: David Darst and his daughter Lee, describe daily life on Earva Bender's farm.
David: “He had this greenhouse now, so he was able then to raise his own plants and, therefore, he would be ahead of other farmers when you got to the tomato market. One of the experiences that Marty and I had on the farm was to be told, ‘Tomorrow we’re gonna do tomatoes.’ So we went to the greenhouse and he had a tool he made that put holes into the soil. Then he had bunches of tomato plants and we had to plant each hole so they could grow. Well that was just the beginning of our adventures. You got the plants growing; now the weather just right, we’re going to plant this in the field. ‘Okay. Marty you sit over here, and David you sit here.’ And Mr. Bender would take a flat . . . that’s a wooden 24 inch by 30 inch thing with the plant . . . and put it in our laps. And then he’d hook up his tractor to this planting machine. He’d go drivin’ along and we would plant, plant, plant. And he was a clever fella. ~chuckles~ Eight thousand tomato plants. But boy, that was just the beginning.”
Selling Vegetables From a Hay Wagon
2011 Oral History Project: David Darst and his daughter Lee, describe daily life on Earva Bender's farm.
David: “What we got involved in was having our wagon, our big hay wagon, and put our vegetables that we were raising on the hay wagon, and used that as our sales area at the bottom of the hill by the barn. We had people coming from Bath, Richfield, Cuyahoga Falls, to buy vegetables.”
Sweet Corn Competition
2011 Oral History Project: David Darst and his daughter Lee, describe daily life on Earva Bender's farm.
David: “Mr. Bender was in competition with Mr. Szalay . . . Szalay senior. He would tell me, ‘David, I’ll be back in a few minutes.’ And then as I hear him coming, I look up in the sky, and there’s this column of smoke. Well, poor Mr. Bender always wanted to know what Szalays were using for fertilizer. And he’d go up and look at the fertilizer bags.”
Lee: “It was common practice to leave your bags there in the field after you emptied ‘em, and just leave ‘em there, let ‘em decompose. Well, Szalays put a match to ‘em, and burned ‘em. Now whether they did that so the Benders wouldn’t find out the Szalay secret or it was just cleaning up their mess we never knew, but Earva always thought, oh they did that on purpose so I couldn’t know what they were using.”
Painting the Bender Barn
2011 Oral History Project: David Darst and his daughter Lee, describe daily life on Earva Bender's farm.
Lee: “It was a bank barn, so that means you have your cattle stalls underneath. So that’s your first floor, really. And this was a barn specially built for hay storage. There was a lower floor that had an entrance up the other way, on the side, and then the bottom was where the cattle came in. I’m talkin’ about three stories, plus the hay story, so it’s almost like a four-story house is what we were painting. Well, you don’t have ladders that are generally that high so you have to invent something, and Earva Bender had the brain to invent it.”
David: “He wanted to make a platform that could go up and down the sides of the barn, so that the two people who were going to do the painting could sit on bicycle seats and peddle. They would peddle up or down while they did the painting. It gave me great pleasure to have the faith of these people, because my job was not to paint. My job was to be sure that the wires go up and down, holding the painter, were proper secured inside the barn.”
Lee: “This is cable. It was attached to, like, under the roof, the eaves part of the beams, and then fed down and then the bicycle apparatus was used to bring that up and down. And he actually put brakes on this. He used a braking system so it would be safe to do that. It had a back to it because as you went higher, of course, you’re leaning back and it was [unintelligible] ~laughs~ enjoyed paint on your back because you’re trying to do the top part of the barn.”
Well I went to work for Benders, and in the winter time, we’d start the vegetables in the greenhouse. Plant ‘em, and then when they were probably a couple inches high, we’d transplant ‘em into rows and then keep ‘em in there until the last frost, and after that then we’d transplant ‘em into the field. And then we started the sweet corn in April and usually it was around the first of July, maybe the last of June, we’d start pickin’ the first sweet corn. And we’d have, usually have a patch of sweet corn coming due every week until clear into October. It was all hand-picked sweet corn. We used a horse and a skid. The tomatoes, the musk melon—we raised those. We’d pick all this stuff and sort it and basket it up, take it into the farmer’s market in Akron.
Tomato Fights
Robert Grether describes his experiences working on the Bender Farm during the 1940s.
At the end of the tomato season, when we was all done picking tomatoes and everything, we’d have a tomato fight. ~laughs~ Earvy was a short person, you know. He liked to wrestle and he’d have a fight with us three boys. He’d be throwing tomatoes at us and we’d be throwing tomatoes at him. But they were old, ripe tomatoes, you know, and they’d splatter all over him. ~laughs~ But we had a good time doin’ it.
