Letter to Murrin Cellar from Frame Brown

This end-of-the-year letter from Frame Brown to Murrin Cellar thanks him for his service to the Brown Fruit Farm over the year. It mentions an accompanying check (not shown) that was his share of the year’s business.

The Brown Fruit Farm operated north of Worthington for nearly fifty years, from around 1912 to 1958. The farm grew and sold apples and apple products such as juice, candy and apple butter, as well as cherries, plums and honey. As of 1925, the farm encompassed 100 acres planted with 4000 fruit trees and was the largest fruit farm in central Ohio. It was renowned not only for the quality of its produce, but also for its innovative roadside marketing, including signs telling motorists how many miles they were from the farm.

The farm’s original apple orchards were planted around 1901, by Frank Bower, on property once owned by the Pool family. Sally and Joseph Pool came to Sharon Township in 1812, and their family gravestones have been incorporated into a restored cemetery at Highbanks Metro Park. Bower sold the orchards to William C. Brown in 1909, who few years later turned the property over to his son, Frame. Over the next couple of decades, Frame grew the farm with cutting-edge farming and marketing techniques. Frame and his wife, Marie, and daughter, Molly, lived in the old farmhouse on the property that had been built by the Pool family. Frame and Marie Brown both passed away in 1936, when Molly Brown took over ownership of the farm.

Murrin Cellar was farm manager from 1936 through the farm’s closing in 1958. His father came to work on the farm in 1913 when he was fourteen years old and attending Worthington High School, and he started working in 1915, becoming full time after his high school graduation. At age 19, he supervised the picking of apples and cherries by crews of transient labor. In 1936, after the deaths of Frame and Marie Brown, Murrin worked with Molly to keep the farm running until 1958.