2-18-2012-city of canton sewage farm 

part 1

      cant say exactly when it was when the city of canton oh. originally bought up the farms that make up the city of canton farm but knew that when finished , was made up of 640 acres. as you drive up the lane the land on the left and the right belongs to the city of canton. i have been maintaining the road as it is our access road . once you get to the point where it appears the road separates into a y , this is the beginning of our 40 acres. and we still live another quarter mile back or a total of about a half mile. may not be exactly a half mile , but believe me there were plenty of days it seemed longer especially when you had to walk it. and at night , it seemed a for sure that something would be along the road before you ended up home half scared. long enough as i said., 

     when we were younger we had neighbors , in fact a couple i could think of. most notable was kenny and nancy capes , and their kids , kenny , lori, and cindy. kenny was a year younger and cindy the tomboy was closer to my age , and lori who was my age and went to school same as i did and most notably their dad farmed dogs it seemed .  . before that was tex whitted , tom whitted's dad, they had horses. and at times we had our cattle over there also pasturing the land and using the barn. 

       the house and barn were huge and the place was laid out like a mansion. it had a huge house that was actually 2 separate houses, yet were still attached with a door to separate the 2 houses. one side was 10 rooms at least as it had a study upstairs and 4 bedrooms i believe. and down stairs a huge kitchen , and a huge dining room and living room with 10 foot ceilings and a large welcoming front door and an off the kitchen pantry. the other side was a modest 2 rooms down and 3 rooms up,and both sides were connected in the front of the house with a wide L shaped covered porch extending the whole length of the house.

         the barn was at least 40 by 100 and had horse stanchions and was set up to milk cows as the sylers did when mom was growing up back here on farm around 1946, or just after the war. the barn was a well built bank barn w/ wood siding . some of the boards used in building this barn were virgin timber. we still have a couple of the boards here on our farm that were salvaged when they tore the barn down. they are over 36 incches wide planed poplar. square cut corners and finished boards . go to a lumber mill and try and find that in a 16 foot length. it was all barn,ornate and white washed , with a grainery to store grains produced on the farm . it also had a milk house and spring that produced really ample amounts of water but had an unpleasant smell. i would wait till i was home before drinking water. there was also a couple of large equipment sheds around the farm serving a dual purpose as storage and corn crib. at one time there was a silo but that was tore down. 

       this was our closest neighbor and they were not even close as their house is still a good quarter mile away. the picture above is looking at where the house and barn used to be and now there is nothing . as kids our legs made up the difference. cindy and myself soon found our way to every corner of our farm and theirs. and where we didn't go then my brother would take me. we would visit the shacks on the hills around the farm where the black folk who worked for the city. they would work and stay during the day tending the ditches around the farm . these little shacks were not big enough to lay down in but gave the help a place to beat the summer heat , and eat their dinner somewhat free of flies. a few feet away a ditch would flow with human sludge , letting gravity pull it through the ditch and course its way down over the hillside to an open side cut through the matted grass . the black sludge would cover the sides of the hill in its tell tale black ooze , soaking all  plants and eventually running to the streams. the pungent smell of human waste would just about knock a maggot off a gut wagon in the summer heat as dad would say. the city guys as we called them were to keep the ditches open and flowing the waste over the hills. this is why it is called the sludge farm. for years and even before my grandparents bought this property they were spreading it here on this farm and back on other properties too. but overwhelmed with a lot of waste, the city put to much down or it became a nuisance so the other farms stopped taking it . 

       

      well the city rented to whitted's and the capes' families all the while running their waste all over the hillsides above the house. a spring house in the back of the main house had clear water in it but steps from the door would end you in a swamp that was oozing black and it isnt gold or texas tea. this flowed in back of the house as at times when the city was under pressure to quit dumping sewage in the nimisilla creek , they increased the dumping on the farm. originally across route 800 , there was a sewage treatment facility , and the idea was to pretreat the sewage, or take out the solids and then dump the rest. if they couldn't spread it then they would dump in the creek. the nimisilla creek was running black w/ shades of orange or what ever the flavor or color of the waste today was. it was not only human waste but also industrial waste , as names like timken and republic steel , as well as superior meats,were no doubt living in an era of relaxed environmental codes or they were non existent. when the city guys would get to much sludge on an area and a storm would hit the streams on the farm would turn black as the water rushed to nimisilla creek. all the time us kids and our parents took it all in stride and never said to much for the fear of the stigma attached to living in a septic tank. and basically for both our families that was what we were doing. 

       as kids it never bothered us as our parents passed it off as something that wasn't that bad. and kept telling us stories of how we should have seen it when they were kids if we think it is bad now. well couldn't think how running human sludge up to someones back door and polluting their water, and then charging them rent to boot would or could be much worse, but rest assured my parents and other adults in charge assured it was. but it did get worse

      the epa i think was just forming when i was going to grade school and they imposed one of many building bans on the city to get them to improve their waste handling. the sewage plant at canton was inadequate in capacity to process , doubling the efforts of the farm and sewage disposal plant to keep up. mysteriously their would be a plant malfunction during a flood stage and suddenly 2-3 million gallons of waste would be dumped into the nimisilla creek. part of the excess was due to water infiltration of the sewer lines in the city. but the epa found it to convenient and opted for better control. then they decided to set up a temporary sewage plant that would treat reprocessed sludge and then pump the effluent through water sprinkler and distribute it on the hillsides. it worked well in theory but lacked any kind of effectiveness in real life and soon the city was spraying everything black and stuff was hanging from the trees an at same time they were still running the sludge in ditches , but these were still draining back to the nimisilla creek. 

      the epa in a new mandate ordered the city of canton to cease and desist issuing building permits , banning development anywhere that the city of cantons sewer lines went. this was a blow to canton and they came up with yet another plan. this time they were going to build an artificial lake and fill it with overflow waste , while the city of canton expanded their current waste water sewage treatment plant. this lake covered an area of 16 acres surface wise and was about 15 foot deep. thats a lot of stuff. imagine someone taking a carp that big. well the city of canton did. and it was on the lane beside the first pic i put up today. i was probably 12 when they started that. my brother and i would frequent the job site and soon we had a job cleaning tracks and equipment so it didn't freeze.we did this for 20 dollars a day. but that was also where i first had a chance to run a dozer. i had sit beside others but never actually ran one. the first i ran was a d-9 pushcat. no blade , as it just pushed pans in the borrow area. and i didnt drive it far,as they only let me run it for 50 feet. but at 12 years old , it might as well have been a mile.  

      tomorrow will be part 2 of the city sludge farm when it all goes up in smoke.