DYKN? Remembering Owen Potato Farm

Mention the name Owen Potato Farm and I bet you can almost smell those fields of luscious strawberries or envision a beautiful array of orange pumpkins.

For many years, the fields along Sharon Valley Road provided potatoes, then corn, as well as pumpkins.

It became known as “The Berry Barn,” with juicy strawberries you picked on your own or bought already picked along with other produce and goodies at their farm market. My daughter always looked forward to our yearly treks to the fields where she could pick the most perfect berries all on her own.

The Owen family started farming mostly potatoes along Sharon Valley Road in the 1850s. Thomas Owen passed the farm down to son Wilfred, and by the late 1950s, the farm had grown to about 500 acres, with Wilfred’s son Ferris then in charge. In its heyday, it was the largest potato farm in the county.

Ferris was dedicated to representing farmers and agriculture on a global scale, and he and wife, Helen, left Newark for Washington, D.C., in 1965. Ferris became the vice president of the Cooperative League of the USA, a group that helped establish agricultural cooperatives in underdeveloped countries.

Left in charge of the farm was Ferris’s son, Jim Owen, and his nephew Dave Miller. Through the mid-1990s, the cousins sold strawberries and other produce at “The Berry Barn.” The two also added an array of fireplace hearths and wood stoves for sale.

But with high cost of irrigation for growing the strawberries, they decided to switch to soybeans and field corn. The crops prospered for a while, and then they continued with only the fireplace products available in the barn.

Sadly, you don’t see a trace of those strawberry fields along Sharon Valley Road anymore. What do you see there today? Mostly housing occupies the farmland: The Berryview Apartments, Coventry Apartments, Sharon Glyn development and The Inn at Sharonbrooke, as well as the Evans Athletic complex and the Reese Ice Arena.

Growth, progress and change are unavoidable, but it was hard to see something that was such a mainstay in Newark come to an end.

Linda Leffel is a retired teacher and is the Immediate Past President of the Licking County Historical Society.

Next Week’s Question

What was good to the last drop?