Peninsular Farms
Inside a deep curl in the Sandusky River near Fremont are about 500 historic acres that have been saved over and over again. They are now saved for good but it’s been a long and crooked path.
Peninsular Farms can trace its history to about 1782, several years before the first official settlement in the Northwest Territory. At that time, two English-born people, James Whitaker and Elizabeth Foulks, were granted 1280 acres by the Wyandot tribe who had held the pair for years. The gift from the tribe could have been ignored by the local government, but in 1830 Foulks was given official title, keeping it together as the Whitaker Reserve. After the death of Foulks and as years went on, the land was whittled away to development. By the late 1920s it was a series of small farms with separate owners. Then John J. Mooney, who raised harness horses, purchased all the farms, consolidating the land into the 480 contiguous acres, and named it Peninsular Farms. It was a working farm and horse stable for many years but then fell into disrepair on the death of Mooney. Again, there was danger of the land being broken up for development. In 1979, Don W. Miller, a businessman who lived nearby, succeeded in purchasing the land from Mooney’s son and heir. He’s the hero of this story.
Miller was a conservationist and preservationist. After he purchased the land, he was bombarded by developers but he refused to break up the property. He was bitten by its history and beauty and began to slowly rehabilitate the old buildings. He moved into the pre-1920 home and worked steadily to restore stream banks and plant thousands of trees. When the bald eagle population began to recover, Peninsular Farms was one of the first known nesting sites on the Sandusky River. It’s also home to deer and fox and other wildlife. The farms became a local landmark and the site of family weddings, neighborhood hayrides, and other celebrations. Occasionally Miller allowed Sandusky County Park District to host tours. In 2001, he took a big step and arranged to transfer ownership to the Black Swamp Conservancy after his death. He wanted to ensure that Peninsular Farms would never be sold off, split up, or developed.
But challenges to the farm and its preservation were not over yet. In 2014 First Energy proposed to use eminent domain to cut a swath through it to install transmission lines. The plan called for clear cutting a 60-foot-wide path and erecting 80-foot towers on the land. This would have broken up habitat permanently. Now the public rallied. Pushed by warnings of a conservation tragedy from the Black Swamp Conservancy, neighbors and friends of this special place wrote, called, and showed up at public meetings to make the case that the land should remain intact. They won. First Energy put the line elsewhere.