Overmyer-Waggoner-Roush Farm

About this property

The Overmyer–Waggoner–Roush Farm (also known as "Creek Bend Farm") is a historic farmstead on the southern edge of the village of Lindsey in the northwestern part of the U.S. state of Ohio. Composed primarily of buildings constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century, it has been converted into a park and designated a historic site. A family of Overmyers departed one of the German principalities to settle in Pennsylvania in 1751. One of the sons of this family, Phillip A. Overmyer, was born in 1823; after moving with his family to Washington Township in Sandusky County, Ohio at the age of ten, he married Margaret Waggoner in 1848, who had moved to the same vicinity in 1830. Besides farming, Phillip operated a sawmill and engaged in wagonmaking for many years. In 1862, the Overmyers erected a farmhouse on the present property; constructed of brick, it was built in the popular Greek Revival style of architecture. The family also arranged for the construction of barns and several other buildings on their property; seven historic buildings remain to the present day, including at least one that features elements of Gothic Revival architecture. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Overmyer farm had passed into the ownership of a new family, the Roushes; this family owned the property and operated the farm for more than a century while transitioning from traditional draft animal power to modern mechanized equipment such as tractors. Before his 1999 death, family head Robert Roush operated the farm; his interests in conservation led him to attempt innovative techniques, such as establishing a tree farm and plowing his fields in circles to avoid damage to those fields. In 2004, Robert's widow Frances agreed to donate the farm to Sandusky County for conversion into a county park; besides the land and buildings, the donation included family journals and money to restore two dilapidated barns. Local officials welcomed the chance to convert the property into a park, due to its conservation potential. Among their premier interests was the tree farm: they saw it as significant because Roush had established it at a time when the typical Ohio farmer saw woodlots as nuisances that needed to be removed in order to make use of vacant land. This recognition was not the first that had been accorded to the farm: it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, qualifying both because of its place in local history and because of its distinctive architecture — historians saw it as one of the area's best preserved nineteenth-century German family farms.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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