The oldest in Ohio is an Adams County farm in the same family since 1772. There are about 1,500 registered Ohio Historic Family Farms, including nine in Medina County, 11 in Portage, 12 in Stark and 14 in Wayne. “Now it should stand for another couple hundred years, hopefully,” LittleBear said. But now it’s secure, housing horses, sheep and quail. The barn, which still has the original wooden beams, tree bark and all, had to go up on stilts. The farm’s only worker, she doesn’t have children but plans to keep it in the family.Ī few years ago, the barn’s original stone foundation had to be replaced with cinder blocks when the whole barn started to tip over. LittleBear works in international sales for a local plastics company four days a week, working on the farm in the early mornings, evenings and weekends. She takes orders for meat, but she also sells products, from honey and plants to fudge and jelly, at a self-serve farmstand on her property. LittleBear sells most of her female livestock for breeding and uses the male livestock for meat. She also raises a rare Hungarian breed of pig, Mangalitsa, which makes a rich, lard-heavy pork. LittleBear tries to keep the farm as traditional as she can, farming the “old ways” of her great-grandparents by using natural methods instead of chemicals and raising “really traditional Hungarian” livestock, including about 16 aptly-named Jacob sheep, three horses, about eight quail, four hives of honeybees, geese, ducks and chickens. Over the last decade or so, LittleBear has been working to change the property back over to a farm from the golf course. “I’ve always been drawn to it as a farm…. “I was kind of raised between the two houses,” she said. LittleBear’s mother, Mary Surowski - who built a home on the property in the 1960s and still lives there today - had little interest in farming, so LittleBear’s uncle, Frank Jacobs - who also lived in a house on the property - took over the farm and turned a large portion of it into Copley Greens Golf Course, which closed about five years ago.īecause her mother’s house was on the property, LittleBear spent a lot of time with her grandparents growing up, which helped convince her to run the farm. The Hungarian pepper farm was handed down to LittleBear’s grandparents, Frank and Vilma Jacobs, who farmed until the 1970s, including raising pigeons for meat. The couple, who spoke only a few words of English, purchased the Copley Township farm on a road that would come to be named for their family - Jacoby, with the S at the end of their name becoming a Y when a county representative mistook the flourished S in Jacobs’ signature. LittleBear’s great-grandparents, Frank and Agnes Jacobs, immigrated to the United States from their native Hungary, settling in the Akron area, where there were many other Hungarian immigrants. The farm’s been in the Jacobs family since 1919. The house and barn on Jacobs Heritage Farm were built in 1859. “It’s kind of a tribute to all the work that they put into it,” said LittleBear, 39. The birds are some of the menagerie that lives on LittleBear’s 25-acre farm, which has been in her family for four generations - 100 years, making it a Century Farm recognized by the state. Copley farm remains in the same family for a century COPLEY - Jennifer LittleBear squats down, opens the door of a metal cage in the lower level of her family’s 160-year-old barn and pulls out first a speckled quail egg and then a brown female quail. Click here to read the article, or view the text, below.
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