Eddie Creighton stands next to an old railroad tie used in a fence line many years ago on the former Myers farm in Harrison Township. Behind him is corn waiting to be harvested.

KOSCIUSKO COUNTY — Though it has been many years since the Myers family owned the farm, the name still carries on today. A slightly more than a 197 acre tract of ground abutting CR 900W to the west and Shilling Road to the south, between Palestine and Mentone in Harrison Township, was once part of a considerably larger farm owned by the prominent Myers family.

Today the farmland, and much of the surrounding land, is owned by Creighton Brothers Farms LLC. Ron Truex, president and general manager of Creighton Brothers, said the company still refers to the farm as the Myers farm. He noted cows were pastured for many years and corn and soybeans have been grown the last few years.

Eddie Creighton, of the family which started Creighton Brothers and now retired, said Creighton Brothers purchased the old Myers farm in 1973 from Billy Grimm. He also remembers young egg laying chickens, or pullets, being raised on the farm many years ago and crop rotations occurring from year to year.

An old farmhouse remains on the property, as well as remnants of a fence line from when the field was a pasture, but a barn was torn down several years ago.

As far back as the 1870s, and possibly before then, the Myers family owned the 197 acres and much more. George Washington Myers, a native of Ohio, involved in many enterprises during his lifetime, was the first in the family to own the land. The 1879 Kosciusko County Atlas shows he owned an incredible total of 1,120 acres with the tracts being contiguous to each other.

Myers was involved in merchandising in Ohio at a young age. When the gold craze struck California, he was part of a team journeying to California in the late 1840s with wagons pulled by oxen. He arrived there in September 1849 and remained until 1852. During those three years, according to his obituary, Myers was quite successful in finding large amounts of gold.

After leaving California he relocated to Indiana in Goshen where his obituary says he was engaged in the jewelry business and then later worked in the postal department for the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad. It may have been during these years he purchased the land in Harrison Township, though no references could be found showing he actually lived on the land.

The obituary indicates Myers returned to Findlay, Ohio, in 1858 and built grain elevators he operated for nearly 30 years. He was elected and then reelected as a probate judge before dying of heart failure in November 1898.

A son, Squire Carlin Myers, commonly known as Carlin, was living in Harrison Township on the family owned land at the time of George’s death. Carlin’s obituary says he had moved to Mentone 55 years ago and he died in 1935, so that would mean he moved to Indiana in about 1880.

Eventually the 1,120 acres was whittled down through the selling of various tracts in the early 1880s, according to property transfer books in the Kosciusko County Courthouse. The 1914 Kosciusko County Atlas shows Carlin Myers owned 440 acres, still a considerable amount of land.

Carlin was well known in the Mentone area and in 1912 was elected as a state representative and served two terms. Prior to his death in 1935, he wrote a history of the Mentone area and in that history it is noted he brought the first owned automobile into Mentone, a one-cylinder, four-passenger Cadillac with a top speed of 15 miles per hour — downhill.

Myers farmed and was a bank president, too, and it is known he moved into the town limits of Mentone sometime prior to his death.