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Feature Article on 19th century
farming. TOPIC: AGRICULTURE
Written by Jim Sayre in September,
1999
19TH CENTURY SIDNEY HAD ITS SHARE OF LIVESTOCK AS TOWN
RESIDENTS WERE ENGAGED IN FARMING...Pg 2 |
| Perhaps some ancestors of this stray cow
mobilized the citizens of Sidney to protect the courtsquare: "In June, 1839, a few of
the residents of public spirit, desiring to improve the appearance of the square, and
hoping to keep the stray cattle from making a resting place of the ground, took a
subscription and a contract was let at $329.25 to Samuel Mathers for fencing the
same..." (SJ, July 14, 1893). Cows were not the only, and
certainly not the first, wandering offenders in downtown Sidney. An ordinance
directed against hogs was enacted over Mayor Samuel Mathers’ signature in 1864:
Be it enacted by the Town Council of the Incorporated Village of Sidney that
after the passage and publication of this Ordinance, it shall be unlawful for the owner or
owners of any hog or hogs, of any size or description, to allow the same to run at large
within the limits of said Incorporated Village.
The ordinance instructed the village "Marshall" to impound all such hogs and
sell them within four days at a public auction. He could charge the owner fifty cents for
each impounded animal and fifteen cents a day for taking care and feeding it (SJ,
Mar. 11, 1864).
Prominent Sidney resident and businessman W.H.C.
Goode, owner of Sidney’s American Steel
Scraper Co. and builder of Whitby Place (now GreatStone Castle) in 1891, may have
been Shelby County’s preeminent farmer, with extensive farm holdings in Shelby
County, North Dakota, Texas, and Mississippi. No absentee, hands-off farm owner, Goode
never rented out his land, but rather hired farmers and directed the farm work himself,
according to his wife, the late Ida Haslup
Goode.
Mr. Goode’s inherited love of the soil and its cultivation led him to purchase
large tracts of land in various states. In 1885 he bought three sections in the Red River
valley in North Dakota. Through good years and poor years ‘"Goode Farm" has
always kept pace with its neighbors in sending to the markets of our Country its share of
the Nation’s wheat. During all these years Mr. Goode never failed once to be present
during the harvest and generally at the spring seeding. He knew and loved stock and while
busy with the factory in Sidney, he carried on for a number of years six farms in Shelby
County raising both grain and stock...(Ida Haslup Goode, booklet titled W.H.C.
Goode, of Sidney, Ohio, n.d.).
Perhaps the county’s largest farming enterprise at one
time, the Mary L. Poultry Plant, was located in Sidney, or very nearly so. Bonnyconnellan
Castle owner and Sidney’s prominent school desk manufacturer, John Loughlin, built
the huge chicken production complex just across the river on South Brooklyn Avenue
property just north of where the Big Four Bridge would be built nearly 30 years later.
"Mary L." was touted as the "largest poultry plant in the world"
when Loughlin built it near his farm residence in 1895. The residence is now the home of
Eric and Gay Smith. The horse-shoe shaped chicken house had a capacity of 21,000 birds,
while a separate egg house contained 3,000 Leghorn hens producing 200 dozen eggs daily.
Loughlin kept 900 Plymouth Rock hens for hatching eggs, some 300 a day. He reportedly
shipped 300 broilers each day (Atlas and Directory of Shelby County, Ohio,
American Atlas Co., Cleveland, 1900, pp. 106-7). |
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