In 1772, four years before the start of the revolution that wrested control of the colonies from Great Britain, the British king, George III, gave hundreds of acres of land in what was then the Colony of Virginia to an Englishman named Alexander Smiley, for the purpose of farming the land and helping to “civilize” the Northwest Territory.
Soon after, of course, came the Declaration of Independence, and not long after that, the Northwest Territory was divided and those same 500 acres became part of the county of Adams in the new state of Ohio in 1803. And there remained the Smiley farm.
Today, 252 years after that original deed from King George, John Smiley, a member of Adams Rural Electric Cooperative, is the seventh generation of his family still farming on that acreage in the rolling countryside near Seaman.
In 1772, King George III gave hundreds of acres of land to an Englishman named Alexander Smiley. That farm remains in Ohio today.
Smiley, with help from the eighth and ninth generations of Smiley farmers — his son, James, and two grandsons, John and Alexander — raises corn, soybeans, hay, and Charolais beef cattle on 100 acres of the original Smiley farm, plus additional farmland they either own or lease.
“The deed from King George was for at least 500 acres, but might have been for more than 1,000 acres,” John says. “We’re just not sure because parts of it were parceled off when people got married, and lots of the property records were destroyed in a courthouse fire.”
More than 2,000 farms that have been in the same family for at least 100 consecutive years are registered in the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s Historic Family Farms program, and according to its records, the Smiley farmstead is the state’s oldest continuously operated family farm. In 2022, the Department of Agriculture presented John with a certificate commemorating his remarkable heritage and ownership of the state’s first sestercentennial (250-year-old) family farm.
To the best of John’s knowledge, it’s also Ohio’s only remaining historic farm that began with a land grant from George III. (Interestingly, his father’s extensive research into their family history during the 1970s hints that the 1772 deed was written on sheepskin.)
The densely wooded territory north of the Ohio River was occupied by Native Americans when Alexander Smiley settled there in the 1700s, and John vividly recalls finding arrowheads in freshly plowed fields during his boyhood. The Smiley farm’s first dwelling was a log cabin that sat high on a hill on the ancestral 100-acre parcel, where John has lived his entire life. After a fire razed the cabin, his forebearers constructed a 1.5-story limestone house on the same location in 1813.
“My dad told me they quarried the rocks for the house on the farm and hauled them in a four-team wagon every day for six weeks,” John says. Covered with white stucco, the 1813 house had three double chimneys and hand-hewn 8-by-8-inch timbers on 16-inch centers. John was born in that house in 1952, and he and his late wife, Debra, also raised their son, James, and daughters, Sherry and Nancy, there.
In January 2004, a fire damaged the nearly 200-year-old house so badly that it had to be demolished. The flames also consumed treasured family antiques including a three-corner cupboard first used in the log cabin; a spinning wheel that belonged to John’s great-great-grandparents; and a Jenny Lind-style spindle bed in which generations of Smiley children had slept. “Losing the stone house and all its antiques was hard, but I realized they were just things and was very grateful no lives were lost,” recalls John.
He soon replaced the stone house with a four-bedroom brick home with double front porches that not only afford panoramic views of his farmland but also give a nod to Virginia’s traditional Southern-style architecture. The home’s interior features an oak staircase and trim that came from trees on the farm that were cut down and milled into lumber decades ago. “I didn’t just build this house for myself,” John says. “I hope others in the family might want to live here someday too.”
Although John considers himself “just an ordinary farmer,” he’s proud that his people have always farmed and that they kept their land and their lifestyle through two and a half centuries of good times and bad. Over the years, Smileys raised tobacco; milked Holstein cows; did custom threshing with a steam engine; ran a sawmill, a gristmill, and a sorghum cane mill; and even made maple syrup. The farm’s oldest structure is an early-1800s horse stable that John now uses for storage, and one of his prize possessions is a John Deere 520 tractor his dad bought new in 1957. John once rode the 520 through Moline, Illinois, during a John Deere heritage tractor event, and he intends to ride it again in this year’s Seaman Fall Festival parade.
“Ever since I was a little tyke, I wanted to be a farmer,” says John. “I’m blessed that I was able to do it here on the Smiley farm.”
