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All farmers face important daily decisions about which crops to grow, which animals to raise, and which products to make each year. They must constantly adapt to seasonal and other natural changes, as well as changing economic forces. The goal for every farmer, past and present, has been to gain the greatest yield with the least effort. Farmers weigh choices about which products will be most difficult to grow and profitable to sell.
This research grew out of the 2011 Farming in the Valley oral history project. To learn more and explore related topics, visit the main page.
Growing Vegetables
Farming vegetables in Cuyahoga and Summit counties began with Native Americans as early as 2,800 years ago. Ohio's Native American cultures grew corn, beans, squash, melons, apples, and a variety of garden produce. Corn remained the most important crop for farmers in the 1800s, who also grew wheat, oats, potatoes, apple trees, and other garden plants and vegetables.
As the industrial boom of the early 1900s lured farmers away to Cleveland and Akron, agriculture in the valley became more focused on truck farming. Truck farming meant that the farmer grew a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, and sold these products on a smaller and more local scale. Truck farms and gardens often provided families with all the food they needed for themselves, as well as provided additional income from roadside stands and markets.
Corn
Corn has been grown in the Cuyahoga Valley for almost 1,500 years, beginning with Ohio's Indigenous peoples. Valley farmers in the 1800s continued to raise corn and passed the tradition along to later generations. Since 1931, the Szalay family has picked and sold sweet corn at their farm along Riverview Road. The cornfields are a familiar sight to visitors in the Everett area. In Sagamore Hills to the north, the Polcens operated a full-time sweet corn business, which Gerald Polcen's grandfather founded over 90 years ago. Gerald and his wife Marilyn sold their corn from a stand on SR 82 during the summer.
Hunt Farm Truck Farming
Helyn Toth describes her family's truck farm operation in the 1930s.
“And my parents started farming, and it was mostly like truck farming, mostly vegetables. But I think, as time went on, we started doing more because of the Depression. The Depression changed everybody's lives and we started really farming enough so that we were able to sell vegetables to other people, including some of the stores. We farmed for mostly vegetables and did just acres and acres of sweet corn and melons and watermelon and other vegetables, but by going into the truck farming it meant that we were selling to other people who were reselling and also, we also had our own little stand out in front.”
Szalay Farm Truck Farming
Irene Kusnyer talks about truck farming on the Szalay Farm in the 1930s, before the business grew in scale.
“Truck . . . what they call truck farming. Because it was everything: corn, tomatoes, beans, every kind of vegetable possible is what truck farming, and that's what usually farmers do, is take all those vegetables, cucumbers and things, and farm. That's farming.”
The Fulltime Farmer
Gerald and Marilyn Polcen describe what it takes to work as full-time sweet corn farmers.
Gerald: “We're up about daylight, picking sweet corn. We hand pick a lot of it.”
Marilyn: “We do have a picker.”
Gerald: “We have a mechanical picker. If conditions are right it picks one row at a time and does a really good job. You have to sort it, you know, the small ears, it picks everything out of the field. It's a lot of work!”
Courtesy/Countryside Conservancy
Orchards
Several Cuyahoga Valley farms feature orchards with rows of trees growing juicy apples, pears, peaches, or plums. They are usually located in the uplands-for good reason. Philip Urbank, who grew up on Quick Road in Peninsula, explained, "To put in a good orchard you should put it way on high ground because you have your last frost about the third week of May. [When] the frost settles in the low ground … it frosts any of the fruit trees."
Country Maid Ice Cream & Orchard in Richfield has used fresh fruit in its home-made ice cream since 1948. Brothers Don and Steve Torma, the current owners, maintain more than 2,000 apple, peach, pear, and plum trees.
Variety of Fruit
Don Torma describes the varieties of apples and peaches that his family grows.
“The best sellers usually are Yellow Delicious, Melrose is a big seller for us, a variety called Mutsu is pretty good. And then we had some standards, the Red Delicious, Jonathon, McIntosh, and it's hard to keep up with all the varieties that are out there. Then every once in a while you'll get some old-timer who wants some apple that, you know, we don't have anymore, but you know Granny Smith always comes to mind. But we have about, I would say, ten or twelve different varieties of apples now we grow. So that's been pretty good. The peach season has really helped us, also. Peaches are hard to grow in this climate, but when we do have them we sell them really good, so they sell like hotcakes, and the main variety of peaches we sell are Red Haven peaches.”
In the early 1900s, farmers used a steam engine to power their threshing machine.
Courtesy/Bath Township Historical Society
Straw and Hay
Livestock farmers need to feed and provide bedding for their animals. They either grow hay and straw themselves, or purchase it from others.
To make hay, farmers grow certain grasses, which they then cut and cure. Several nutritional grasses and legumes can be used for hay, including alfalfa, clover, and timothy. Farmers cut and dry the grasses and then use the hay as animal fodder. Hay-making requires an understanding of when to cut each particular type of grass. Farmers need several consecutive days of fair weather for the hay to dry. Hay-making is both a science and an art.
To make straw, farmers grow wheat and other grasses, which they then cut and dry to form hollow stalks of grain. Straw is mainly used for bedding, mulch, and feed, although it has less nutritional value than hay. In the 19th century, farmers knocked grass heads off the stalks over a threshing floor. They then raked up the straw and gathered the wheat separately for animal feed or to make flour.
In the 1800s, threshing wheat brought neighboring farmers together as a communal labor pool. Before farmers had modern methods to process wheat and other grasses, friends and neighbors volunteered to help each other. During the threshing season, farmers moved from field to field with a noisy steam engine that rattled and shook as it powered the threshing machine.
In Their Own Words
Hear stories about Cuyahoga Valley life below.
Since the mid-1800s, Dorcas Snow's family produced straw and hay on their farm in Brecksville. In the following passage, from her memoir Dear Brecksville, Dorcas describes neighbors helping her father thresh wheat.
"At threshing time, Father never had any trouble getting enough help as Mother had a dinner for the men that was fit for a king, all the way from fried chicken to apple pie. I was always worried for fear there would not be any left but Mother assured me that she had some extra saved for the helpers." Dorcas Snow, Brecksville, 1976
Wheat Threshing
A recollection of wheat threshing along the valley.
The threshing of the wheat that occurred each summer, or fall I guess it would be, farmers came from all around the valley and up toward Bath and wherever. And they would trade off every time threshing needed to be done. They would help each other.
Threshing by Steam Engine
Pat Morse, who grew up near Hale Farm, describes community wheat threshing in the 1940s.
That might have been Hale Run Creek that went right through the corner of our property, and they would always stop with this huge steam engine with a threshing machine, to fill up with water, that had great big wide belts and it was really large. But it was really a big engine, and you would – well, like you would with steam trains, you would have all the steam and looked like smoke, whatever it was, and it was very noisy and we just thought it was pretty cool. ~laughs~
Curing Hay
Ernest Ogrinc, a Valley View farmer, describes the modern process of curing hay.
Today’s process is a combination called a [indistinguishable] disk bind or maybe a new idea had there [mumbling] cut conditioner. What you do is you cut it and crush it to some extent to open up the stems to allow it to cure better, to be able to dry. And you don’t really dry hay, you cure. There’s a difference. And we’ll come in with a tedder, and we’ll ted the hay up to fluff it, to help the air and sun get through. Mother Nature was drying, or curing hay—I want to use the word “curing”—is amazing that this stuff is so wet, so thick when you cut it, and yet it cures up and dries the moisture out of it so quick. It’s unbelievable. And then we come by. We have to rake it into what’s called a “windrow” and generally I don’t like to windrow unless I don’t got a bailer, ‘cause it’s—when—if you don’t have to—if you have to let it go overnight ‘cause you didn’t get it bailed up, now you got moisture underneath so you gotta flip it or fluff it or somethin’, so the least you have to handle that hay, the better off you are.
