The exhibit traces what the company’s current motto calls “a legacy green and growing” back to 1881, the year John J. Scarff, a settler from Virginia, planted one-quarter acre of blackberries on his farm a quarter of a mile north of Stringtown, which sat at the intersection of the current U.S. 40 and Ohio 235.
The blackberry plants so fascinated Scarff’s then 13-year-old son, William N., that the lad became a self-taught horticulturalist who, after returning home with a degree from Ohio State University, expanded the varieties of berries on the land before adding fruit trees and other specialty crops — and the business was born.
Exhibit curator Kasey Eichensehr said William’s expansion of his berry offerings coupled with his market-savvy decision to produce full-color catalogs had two consequences:
•First, “I spent the entire research process hungry.”
•Second, it produced enough wealth that in 1902 William, in his mid-30s, was able to build “White Oaks,” the family mansion that stood then and still stands as a statement of the staying power of W.N. Scarff and his nursery.
As if glimpsing out through the curtains at White Oaks, the exhibit allows us a peek at the social landscape of the day with this remark: “Scarff often employed orphaned children and widowed and unmarried women (mainly to pick fruit), people who had few other legitimate ways to earn money.”
A picture of them in the field illustrates the point.
Similarly, an article in a 1906 catalog titled “The Road to Success,” reports that farmers could net as much as $250 an acre from their berry plants — an indication that the bottom line may have been as much a draw as the taste of the fruit.
An exhibit photo of ears of corn drying on racks and an early seed house points to another Scarff product line aimed at farmers’ pocket books. And a brochure in the Heritage Center archives advertises the Aug. 2, 1923, sale of 60 bred sows and gilts from the bloodline of the boar “Roller,” also aimed at the business end of the farm operations.
By the time of that sale, the company was known as W.N. Scarff & Sons, a tip of the cap to William’s boys Max and Howard, who joined their father’s business in 1917 and returned to it after service in World War I.
When William died in 1927, “Max took over the agricultural side of the operation and Howard took over the nursery.”
Like their father, who had helped to found the Clark County Horticultural Society and was named one of Ohio’s Master Farmers, both were leaders in the nursery industry.
“Max was one of the first to introduce hybrid seed to Ohio,” the exhibit says. In this, he may have been influenced by Clark Countian George Shull, the founder of hybridization.
“Howard,” the exhibit adds, “introduced a new variety of boxwood (an ornamental shrub) from seeds he found in Manchuria.”
Howard later would develop the Wintergreen boxwood, which the company website today describes it as “probably the hardiest of all cultivated boxwood” and one that “blazed a trail for the hybridization and selection of many of the popular varieties in the industry today.”
Its classification as an ornamental plant also signals a shift in the nursery’s business interests, indicating a future that would be as much or more about adding beauty and value to urban and suburban landscapes as the latter began to take up land once occupied by farm fields.
Howard’s involvement in the then Ohio Nurserymen’s Association will serve as subtle reminder of stricter gender roles of those earlier times if compared to that organization’s current name, The Ohio Nursery and Landscape Association.
What difficulties the Scarffs faced during the Great Depression is not mentioned. But there is mention that the two opened Ohio’s first registered farmer’s market in the 1930s, a foray into the retail business that might coincide with a greater need for cash flow… The building that housed it still stands at the southeast corner of U.S. 40 and Ohio 235, where Cake Creations Bakery stands as a dark pink historical footnote.
The Victory Gardens with which Americans helped to feed themselves during World War II provided a boost to the nursery’s demand, and the Baby Boom that followed the war and produced a housing boom at the same time led to major changes.
Max and Howard split the seed and nursery businesses along their lines of expertise, and Howard’s two sons, James and William, took on separate responsibilities under him at the nursery. James ran a newly opened retail operation to fill the need of local consumers and William, a 1950 graduate of the OSU College of Agriculture, ran the wholesale nursery operation.
The consumerism that then took hold of the American economy led the Scarffs to add landscaping design, installation and maintenance to their services in the 1970s as a way of supplementing the business and moving their nursery stock.
The current website indicates that, 40 years later, the same essentials are in place. Residential and commercial landscaping customers are vital to the operation, while the wholesale nursery focuses on hardy plants that are the raw materials for that business in growth zones from Denver to the East Coast and Wisconsin to Kentucky.
By contrast, the seed company tied to the business’ agricultural past is gone, though the building that once housed it still lives on as New Carlisle Sports & Fitness, successor to the Tecumseh YMCA.
William became the nursery’s president when his father, Howard, retired in 1975, and William’s his wife, Jane, served as vice president in the 1980s and 1990s. The exhibit includes a picture of the two of them with First Lady Rosalyn Carter and mention of William’s serving on the White House Landscaping Committee.
The photo is evidence of the family’s continued leadership role in the nursery industry. Much as the handsome color of the early Scarff catalogs brings to mind the lovely catalogs put out by floral companies of Springfield’s years as the Rose City, the photo of William and Jane Scarff with Mrs. Carter will remind some of a poster on display in the Heritage Center annex. It shows a Springfield-made Champion Reaper cutting grass on the South Lawn of the White House during the Benjamin Harrison administration.
Curator Eichensehr credited the Scarffs with doing “a fantastic job preserving their family history,” praise mostly due to the late Howard Scarff, whose efforts Eichensehr said may merit attention beyond the exhibit.
“I don’t know if anyone has done a case study of the nursery industry and how it has developed (over time),” she said, “but that would be a first-rate collection” for the purpose.
It might not be too far afield to suggest that the curator was trying to plant a seed.
(NEXT WEEK: Our two-part series concludes next week when Peter Scarff, current president and the fifth generation in the family business, describes the unprecedented challenges Scarff’s faced after the collapse of the U.S. housing market — a story told with the help of an abandoned dog that took up residence at the nursery just as the crisis arrived.)
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