Tom and I recently met our friend Wendy at Malabar Farm State Park in Lucas, Ohio.  Wendy loves the Mohican area and willingly travels the extra distance to see us.  I wanted to do something Christmas related that wasn’t outside (weather can be so unpredictable in December).  Turns out that Malabar Farm was decorated for Christmas and open for tours, so we made arrangements to go there.

Malabar Farm State Park, for those who don’t know, was the home of Louis Bromfield and his family.  Bromfield was born in Mansfield in 1896.  He served in World War I and published his first book in 1924.  Bromfield lived in New York City for a while, but, after he married, moved to France.  He stayed in France, with extensive trips to India, until the rise of Facism.  By that time he was a successful author and Pulitzer Prize winner.  With the idea of raising his three daughters on the land, he came back to the Mansfield area and bought a farm.  Bromfield was a pioneer in new agricultural techniques.  He lived on Malabar Farm until his death in 1956.

Because Bromfield was a screenwriter, he met many famous people and Malabar Farm became a place for them to “rusticate.”  The most famous incident at Malabar Farm was the marriage of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in 1945.

We visited Malabar Farm State Park on a Friday.  The house was open for self-guided tours beginning at 3 p.m.  We paid for our tickets at the Visitors Center and then walked up to the “the Big House.”  The house was built in 1939 and has 32 rooms, including ten bathrooms!  Although the Christmas tours were self-guided, there were volunteers in nearly every room ready to talk about the things in the room.  Most of the furniture and other items in the house are original from the Bromfields.  Louis had arranged for the state to take over the farm before he died.  As we toured the house, I got the feeling that the family had just stepped out for a while and would be right back.

We especially liked seeing Louis Bromfield’s huge desk.  Bookshelves were scattered all through the house and were packed with books.  One interesting room was an apartment for Louis Bromfield’s agent, designed to look like his apartment in New York City.  The tour guide told us the agent hated the country and being outdoors.  We saw the area of the house where the daughters lived, each with her own bedroom.  The area included a room for their nanny and their housemaid.

The house was beautifully decorated and we enjoyed looking at all the trees and other decorations.  Louis Bromfield’s beloved boxers were represented in paintings and figurines.  It would take a little while to figure out the layout of the house, because it felt like it just kept going and going.  We ended our tour in the garage, with a restored Jeep that belonged to Bromfield.  The garage also had cookies for those who had toured the house.  The cookies were a nice, final touch.

Malabar Farm State Park has many of the buildings related to a working farm.  There is a dairy barn with cattle and the beef is sold in the Visitors Center.  There are chickens and sheep.  A sawmill still makes lumber for use on the farm.  A maple sugaring center has a festival every winter.  We walked along some of the roads to view other areas of the farm, such as the sediment pond and terraced fields.  The Visitors Center has a museum that explains more about the agricultural techniques used on the farm.  It also has a parrot that says hello to everyone who enters.  We drove up to the Mount Jeez Overlook, which has a great view of the entire operation.

We really enjoyed our visit to Malabar Farm and seeing it with Wendy.  Wendy said they had areas of the house open that weren’t usually open on the tours.  Obviously, Wendy had been there before.  I was there when I was a kid, so I didn’t remember anything about it.  Tom had never been there before.  But now that we have been, we will probably go back again.  It is an interesting farm with a fascinating history in a rural and out-of-the-way area of Ohio.