Hamilton County resident recalls 70 years of Northview’s Carmel grounds history

Posted by: thenorthviewblog on: August 15, 2012

• In: Carmel Campus News
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BY NANCY EDWARDS

The use of the property that belongs to Northview Church in Carmel has not changed much in the past 75 years; like today, the youth would run, trample and play across the grounds. The difference is the kids back then were horses, cows and pigs.

In 1934, the grounds, along with Plum Creek Golf Course, the Carmel water treatment plant and hundreds of homes that amounted to more than 620 acres were purchased by a man from Carmel named Charles Lynn. Lynn created a farm named Lynnwood Farms that housed, over the years, a total of about 300 cattle, 90 mares, many hogs and some bulls.

There were 54 buildings on Lynnwood Farms. A horse barn, show barn and home office are left standing on Plum Creek Golf Course. The Barn, right next to North Beach on Northview’s Carmel campus, also remains a fixture. There were anywhere from a few dozen to 60 employees working on the farm at one time. Don Wethington, a 72-year-old resident from Noblesville, was one of them.

Wethington’s father had moved his family from Kentucky and worked and lived on Lynnwood Farms. The family lived on “farm three,” located at Plum Creek Golf Course; Northview’s property was known as “farm four.”

As an 11-year-old boy, Wethington was bored during the summer and asked his father if he could help him.

“I used to walk in fields and get thistles with a spade,” he said of his first job. “I would dig all day and got 50 cents an hour and made $6 a day.”

Don Wethington stands in front of The Barn as he recalls its farm history.

Swiss and Polled Shorthorn beef cattle, Wethington remembered, began their journey on the farm as newborns in one of two box stalls under the kitchen in the Barn. They were moved across the road in summer in the pasture and came back to the Barn in the winter. The Barn could house up to 60 head of cattle at one time. Some Shorthorns were roans, cattle that were red and white. There was also a hornless bull that sired all hornless cattle.

Percheron mares, meanwhile, dwelled in different stalls in the Barn. Straw and hay were located in the center of the Barn, and stalls were on the right-hand side. The building also had mangers, hay shoots and grain, which was stored in a corner.

The farm was definitely not short on pigs, either, with two litters born each year.

Cattle on the property definitely kept the employees busy—and awake. Wethington recalled him and his family trying to sleep, hearing the cattle at night as they bellowed across the road.

“We didn’t get any sleep,” he laughed. “You could hear them a mile away.”

After many sleepless nights during the summer, Wethington’s father got up at 4:30 a.m. to take the cows to be milked in the dairy barn, and then back to the pasture for grazing, and back again to the barn in the afternoon for a second milking. Just when the employees got a chance to catch their breath, the cattle would sometimes call to them—from the roof. The cows got on the roof on the front side because the roof was low and the barn was built on the the hillside.

“The cattle would go up a roof and then get scared and wouldn’t come down,” Wethington recalled. “People had to go up and force them to walk back down.”

While some of the cattle could be a bit dim-witted, others learned rather quickly if they thought their lives were in danger. Once, a pregnant cow had a broken pelvis and had to be put down. As a nearby cow, also pregnant, in the next stall heard a shot, she took off as fast as she could. During that year—and several years after—the cow gave birth to twins, according to Wethington, as if to say “I’ll show you.”

As Wethington got older and grew tired of his summertime gig digging for thistles, he learned to plant fescue, plant and harvest corn and bale hay. The farm had two lawnmowers and five tractors.

In 1942, Lynn gave the entire farm back to Purdue University. He continued to show cattle until shortly before his death in an area that is now the far-east parking lot of Northview Church.

Wethington went on to get married and have a family of his own—two boys and a girl—and continued to live in Carmel before moving to Noblesville. He taught one of his sons, Dan, to play the banjo at age eight. Dan now plays with a bluegrass band based in Indianapolis called Cornfields and Crossroads.

Coincidentally, Wethington’s wife worked in the cafeteria with Sandy Paino, widow of Thomas Paino, former pastor of Northview. Leaders and members of the church purchased the property from Purdue in 1985. The first service dedicating the facility was in June 1995.

Tags: Nancy Edwards, Northview grounds, The Barn