10/19/2026
Awesome State park to visit now. Malabar Farm State Park is only 15 minutes from Quality Inn & Suites in Bellville, OH. Make your plans and see fall colors too in Mohican State Park. It is just 14 miles from hotel.
When Louis Bromfield came home from France in 1939, the hills he bought near Lucas were washing away. Every hard rain carried a little more of them downhill, and the farms he put together in Pleasant Valley had been worn down by years of hard use.
He did not look like the man to fix that. He was born in Mansfield in 1896, finished Mansfield High, spent one semester in Cornell's agriculture college and then went off to study journalism. In 1927 he won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for Early Autumn, and eleven of his works were eventually turned into films.
From 1925 to 1938 he lived in France, a good part of it in an old rectory at Senlis, north of Paris. As war closed in on Europe, he came back to Richland County, where he had grown up.
He bought about 600 acres of adjoining farms near Lucas and named the place Malabar. With the architect Louis Lamoreux he designed a house in the old Western Reserve style, and it ran to thirty-two rooms. People still call it the Big House.
The farming is where it got interesting. With his farm manager, he put grass back on the steepest hillsides and farmed the rest on the contour, following the curve of the slope instead of cutting across it. He planted in alternating strips, corn or wheat and then a band of grass, so a heavy rain would run into the grass instead of down a furrow. He used cover crops, compost and manure in place of chemical fertilizer, and he mulched heavily.
By 1942 Malabar was running as a teaching farm. Farmers came to look at the hillsides, and Bromfield talked to anybody who would stand still long enough.
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were married in the Big House on May 21, 1945. He was 45 and she was 20. For one afternoon a farmhouse in Richland County held the two most famous faces in Hollywood, and then it went back to being a farm.
He wrote bestsellers about the place, Pleasant Valley and Malabar Farm. He testified before Congress and gave hundreds of talks to farm groups, and for a stretch he was the most famous farmer in the country.
Here is what people get wrong.
The verdict that stuck to Bromfield goes like this: a Pulitzer novelist who went soft, bought a farm as a stage set and lost money on it. Plenty of sharp people said so. E. B. White published a poem poking fun at Malabar in the New Yorker in 1948, and by the 1950s a good part of the literary world had written him off as a hack. The money piece is true, too, because the farm never returned what he put into it.
But Malabar was never built to turn a profit. It was a demonstration, with a payroll, a steady stream of visiting farmers, and a program set up to try things that might not pay. Judging it by its balance sheet is like judging a classroom by what it sells.
What came out of it were methods. Contour plowing, strip cropping, cover crops and grass on ground too steep to plow are ordinary soil conservation practice now, the kind of advice a county office hands a farmer without a second thought.
So the scoreboard flipped. Hardly anybody reads the novels that won him the prize, and the farming he was laughed at for is standard. He was right about the thing people mocked, and the thing they praised him for faded first.
He died of cancer in 1956, at 59. After that the farm nearly slipped away, and it was money that decided its fate. The Noble Foundation wiped out about $280,000 in mortgage debt so the State of Ohio could accept the deed in August 1972.
Today it is Malabar Farm State Park, run by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. You can tour the Big House, walk the farm and stand in the rooms where a novelist decided to spend his fame on dirt.
Somewhere in Ohio this fall, a farmer will plant a cover crop on a slope and run the rows along the curve of the hill. Odds are good that farmer has never heard of a Mansfield novelist who got laughed at for doing the same thing in Pleasant Valley.
Real photograph, not AI. Photo: Niagara66, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (text added).
