Ohio Heritage
Todd Evans, Founder
Todd's heritage begins in Champaign County Ohio, where his paternal great-great grandfather Charles Evans was a horse trainer at Nut Wood Farm from 1867 through 1895. The Round Barn at Nut Wood Farm stood as an architectural wonder of its era – most barns were purpose-built by farmers, but this one was architect-designed. From bay floor to cupola dome it rose 100 feet, circular in shape and 300 feet in circumference, built of brick and roofed with tin. The timber frame structure used enormous American Chestnut tree posts nearly 75 feet tall, with a precarious winding round staircase in the center of the barn that ascended to the top of the cupola.
As a child, visiting the farm meant walking around this remarkable barn, running hands over the chestnut beams, laying on the outside approach ramp with cousins to watch 4th of July fireworks. Sometimes, his uncle would lead him up the round stairs to the top of the cupola to peer out of windows that looked out over a once enormous farm and ponder the ancient names engraved underneath the cupola windows.
His maternal grandparents lived on another farm Champaign County, land granted as muster-out pay to a Revolutionary War officer. The farm's brick home, built in the early 1800s, used clay collected and fired from the surrounding fields. Here, starting at age ten, Todd learned farm life through summer hay baling. They would cut the hayfields, toss the cut hay to dry, rake it into rows, then bale. His grandfather drove the tractor and operated the baler while grandkids stacked bales on the wagon – hard work at fifty cents an hour. More valuable were the lessons learned about teamwork, responsibility and farm safety.
Ten years old was the age that his grandfather gave pocket knives to all the grandsons – the determined age that you could be responsible and careful in its use. So lessons came to reinforce responsibility and work ethic. A pivotal lesson came when Todd was watching his grandfather work on. a broken combine harvester. When Todd suggested taking it to the store for repairs, his grandfather smiled and taught him something essential: We have to fix things ourselves. To repair the combine, we need to think about what's broken, how it might have broken, walk through all its movements and steps and how it's all connected. Then, we can determine what's wrong and how to fix it. This lesson of ingenuity and resiliency became etched in stone – a core belief that shaped his approach to life.
Beyond the 1950s hay barn stood older structures from the 1840s, their timber frames built from hand-hewn Chestnut trees. These barns revealed the craftsmanship of mortice and tenon joinery, held together not by hardware but by round wooden pegs of Chestnut. In the corn crib barn, climbing through rafters one day, Todd discovered two wooden pegs atop a high post – original round wooden pegs placed there by a craftsman during the barn raising. These simple chestnut pegs, not nails or metal hardware, held together the massive hand-hewn beams. Todd kept one peg, a totem that connected him to the farmer who, a century before his birth, had transformed trees into a barn that would stand for 150 years.
The farm instilled within Todd the values of hard work, independence, and resiliency. Here he learned to roll up his sleeves and logically figure things out. Walking the land with his grandfather, Todd learned to see the farm's natural surroundings differently. Standing trees held tomorrow's barn beams within them. Fields with clay could become the bricks of a family home. These raw materials of the land, shaped by skilled hands, could transform into beautiful, purposeful buildings that would stand for generations.
These lessons and passions fostered as a child provided the ability to see a tree for what it could become. As an adult, this transformative sight has provided the ability to see the heritage within standing barns beyond their useful agricultural life, and within vintage prints to see their essence and to renew them as new Buffalo River heirlooms.