PENDLETON — Nathan Wood’s family of southern Madison County recently commemorated its farming history, having received two Indiana State Department of Agriculture Hoosier Homestead Awards recently at the Indiana State Fair.
The achievement was made after a helpful stranger — who ended up being a distant relative — helped the family gather the required information and documentation for the application.
To be named a Hoosier Homestead, farms must be owned by the same family for more than 100 consecutive years, and consist of 20 acres or more, or produce more than $1,000 in agricultural products per year. The state awards centennial, sesquicentennial and bicentennial versions of the award for 100, 150 and 200 years of ownership, respectively.
Nathan Wood, along with his father Charles, brother Justin, and uncle Stuart, own the 160 acres that is their family farm, located southwest of the intersection of county roads 400 West and 1050 South. Nathan and Stuart also farm about 2,800 acres belonging to other landlords in the area.
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The family has owned its farm since 1854. That more than qualified it for 100- and 150-year awards.
“My wife (Jen)and I wanted to (get the awards) while we still had three generations we could get a picture with — I mean my uncle, my dad, me, and then my boys (Wyatt, 12, and Walker, 11) would be the three generations,” Nathan said. “That’s kind of cool when there’s seven (generations who have lived) there — we’ve captured a picture of three of them.”
But getting to that point would be a challenge. There was digging to do in courthouse records, tracing deeds and proving relationships.
It was something Nathan and Jen wanted to do but were finding difficult.
“The genealogy stuff is just somewhat of a foreign language to me,” Nathan said.
It wasn’t until he was talking to one of his landlords that he found a way to pursue the goal that had seemed so daunting.
The landlord passed along the name of someone who helped her get her Homestead award: Linda Shelton.
“I did the work for her Homestead — that’s been a few years back,” Shelton said, recalling her work for the landlord. “There is — you have to prove the relationships and get a lot of history, and you have to look up all the deeds, get those all cleared. So, it does take quite a bit of work.”
Shelton said Clark Cooper Haines was the first owner of what became the Wood homestead. He had a daughter Eva Haines, who married Albert C. Wood.
“And then it comes down the Wood family from there on,” Shelton said. “Like all families back then, everything passed down through the sons.”
Nathan said the family knew a lot of the information, but Shelton was able to find the proof.
“With Linda’s help, it was a very quick process — in retrospect, it’s still a long process, but she made it much easier than it ever would have been,” Nathan said. “She was very instrumental in discovering a lot of stuff that we knew, in oral history, right, but … we didn’t have all the deeds and that kind of stuff to back it up.”
Nathan said Shelton turned up a newspaper clipping of one of the most significant moments in the farm’s past — a May 1915 fire that destroyed the original house that stood where he and family live now.
The article includes some details that are different from the story the family has been telling, such as the fire having been started by a spark in the flue, not someone leaving a fire unattended.
Nathan said Shelton also turned up a newspaper story about school field trips that used to take place to the farm around the same time, something he didn’t know.
Furthermore, “there was, in the court documents, there was some interesting twists and turns on inheritance and stuff like that that we would have never known. I mean, what, history is written by the winners, right? So sometimes they forget to mention, you know, pass that little stuff down, and it was there in the documents.”
Shelton also was able to expand the Wood family tree, and in the process, discover a link to someone Nathan had only recently met: Linda Shelton herself.
“She was able to trace us back all the way to England … never had that before, and down to the county in England,” Nathan said. “The information that Linda was able to compile for us was mind-boggling.
“It was interesting — I’m actually related to her (Linda’s) husband’s family.”
Shelton said she is connected to Nathan through her husband’s great-great-great-grandmother’s farm. She said her husband and Nathan are “distant cousins.”
The Woods had an open house a few days prior to receiving the awards at the fair.
Jen said the party was her idea.
“We wanted everybody to just come and see the uniqueness of the house,” she said.
More than 100 attended, including landlords, friends and family.
It was just a celebration, Jen said.
Nathan said the plans are to frame the award certificates “in high-quality UV protection frames so that they’ll last for generations,” and they’ll go up on a wall with similarly framed original blueprints of the house.
“It is a milestone for my family, and I’m very proud of it. Especially that we still are in agriculture and still working it every day, still loving the land, being stewards of the land.”
