Roger Shaw drops his head and stares at his cowboy boots for a moment, showing the top of his green and gold Ag Pro hat. And as he lifts his eyes, they fill with tears.
“You know, I am not sure what will happen,” he said, as he scanned the farm on the east edge of Newark that has been in his family for 142 years. “I lost my brother, and it is just me and my nephew out here right now. I don’t know about the future of the family legacy.”
His family’s land holds one of the best views in the county. From the top of one of its rolling hills, Shaw can see the gleaming, golden glow of the Licking County Courthouse clock tower and an almost aerial view of the city.
The Shaw farm sits across the road from Camp O’Bannon, a children’s summer camp, and is just a few turns in the road from downtown Newark. Here, he grew up with two siblings and raised his children, with his wife, Dea, in the same home.
But it wasn’t always a sure thing that Roger Shaw, now 61, was going to take over the farm. His father made a deal with him: If Roger graduated from college, he could get a new tractor – a bright, red Farmall.
Shaw set out after high school to attend college, and ended up working on cattle ranches in Oklahoma – a different type of education than his father had in mind.
Oklahoma is where Roger met Dea. And after the couple married, they moved even farther away from Ohio – to Texas, where Roger worked on farms of up to 75,000 acres. There, he worked hard as a cowboy and learned how to raise cattle. He rode up to 30 miles a day on horseback.
In the 1980s, the two returned to Ohio, where Roger put his cowboy education to use on the family farm. After a year or so, Roger took the test to become an officer in the Newark Police Department, where he worked for 25 years on the night shift, when he often saw people in their worst moments.
He took a year off and was asked to take a security job at the same courthouse he could see from the farm. “After working as a police officer, working at the courthouse was the last thing I wanted to do, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and found most people you meet are nice.”
Roger never got his Farmall tractor, but he did take over the family farm when he was in his 20s. While Shaw has spent most of his life in Licking County, working in the community and on the land, he has always loved to travel.
“Those years I spent in Texas were amazing,” he said.
| Read Part 1: Ohio’s Historic Family Farms program preserves state’s agricultural heritage and history of its top industry
| Read Part 2: Licking County’s Historic Family Farms, Part 2: The Original Hatfield Homestead, circa 1831
| Read Part 3: Licking County’s Historic Family Farms, Part 3: The Stevenson “Crack of Dawn Farm,” circa 1890
| Read Part 4: Licking County’s Historic Family Farms, Part 4: The Shaw Farm, circa 1883
| Read Part 5: Licking County’s Historic Family Farms, Part 5: Legend Hills Orchard/The Hoar Farm, circa 1904
| Read Part 6: Licking County’s Historic Family Farms, Part 6: Dry Creek Valley Farm, circa 1906
His grandson had been asking his grandparents about Texas for years, so Roger took him to Fort Worth to show him around. “We want to make it a tradition now,” Roger said. “He really wants to see the world, and me and his grandma have always loved travel.”
The Shaw family is a group of hard workers – the type of people who open and close a pasture gate all the way every time. “You can tell a lot about a person by how they open and close a gate,” Roger said.
He grew up on his historic family farm, where his dad served on the local board of education and carried on six generations of farming fields. The family had beef and dairy cattle, and they delivered milk to the surrounding neighbors and families.
Roger grew up with two siblings, and he and Dea raised their two children on the same land. Roger’s daughter now lives in a newer home on the property passed through multiple generations, and his son has worked all over the United States for the federal government. Roger has the family farm set up in a trust for his family, but as time passes, he has become concerned about the future of his family’s legacy.
While counting back on how many Shaws the land has passed through, Roger was overcome by emotion. “You just never know what will happen to it,” he said. “I want to work on the barn – fix up a few other things – but who knows who will keep it all going.”
Roger had been offered $1 million for the farm in the 1990s, and his father always told him, “Do what you want,” but Roger spent most of his life here tilling the land that his father, and his father’s father cared for.
It means more than bales of hay and bushels of corn. For Roger, it represents what he and his family have worked for all of their lives: The land provided stability and certainty for his family for generations, and it’s hard to put a price on that.
Delaney Brown writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here. Brown reported this series as part of the Lisska Summer Scholars Program at Denison University, funded in part by the Robert F. & Marion E. Ball Family.