Bicentennial Farm Profile - Chenoweth Family Farm

The farm today. Charles and Ralph Chenoweth rotate corn, soybeans, wheat, and hay on 486 acres of the original farm tract. (They also farm additional acreage.) Beef cattle are the only remaining livestock on the operation, which in the past raised sheep, chickens, dairy cows, and hogs.  

The farm in 1803. White Brown of Sussex County, Delaware, along with his son-in-law Rev. Stephen Timmons explored the Scioto Valley, where he returned with his family of ten children in the fall of 1801. He also brought three “able-boded and willing-minded men whom he had purchased [and] liberated” along with their families. Those men helped him to open up a farm and a sawmill. A gristmill was probably built adjacent to the sawmill on Deer Creek. The earliest farm records date back to 1842 when White Brown died in possession of items that would indicate he had cattle, horses, and hogs, and grew corn, wheat, and hay. The current home was started as a three-room log cabin about 1802, which still exists as the base of a home that has undergone many renovations. 

Notable ancestors and accomplishments. White Brown was a surveyor for Virginia Military Survey and founded the early Methodist church named Brown’s Chapel in Sussex County, Delaware, about 1781. The first service for what became the Ross County Brown’s Chapel was held in White Brown’s home in the fall of 1802. In each case, the land for the church came from his farm. Both churches survive today as active units of the United Methodist Church with the current sanctuaries built long after the death of White Brown. 

The family has a long history of civil service. A grandfather of the current owner, Frank Allison Brown, was a state representative in the Ohio Legislature about 1920 and his son, Ralph Peck Stitt, was a Ross County Commissioner in the 1950’s. Today, Charles Chenoweth, son of the current owner, is a Township Trustee in Deerfield Township. 

“Quotable Quote.”  “He was what has sometimes been called a natural mechanic. He could work in wood, iron, steel, brass, tin, etc. was a cabinet maker, smith, shoemaker, and an excellent millwright, a good surveyor, and a systematic farmer. He was a firm Whig in the Revolution and a lieutenant in a company of volunteers called minute-men; had the interests of his country deeply at heart through life, but was never an aspirant to office, or a hot political partizan. – Quoted from a extended obituary MEMOIR OF THE VENERABLE WHITE BROWN a lay pioneer and patriarch of the Scioto Valley by James Quinn Published in the Western Christian Advocate July 22, 1842 

Special Notes – Joe Cory, Sue Cory Williams, and Janice Cory Bexfield connected to the Cory Bicentennial farm are also descendents of White Brown. They are additionally descendents of Henry Bowdle of Union Township, Ross County, whose Bicentennial farm is currently owned by their cousins.