ADENA – The 1247 state Route 150, Adena, address for the Farm Restaurant and Pub is misleading as it can be considered outside of Mount Pleasant, close to Harrisville or near Colerain.

But all who want to enjoy a home-cooked meal with personality-filled service seem to locate the big, white brick farm house with many farm acres in the background easily enough.

Sally Culler, owner of the farm that was turned into a distinguished place of dining and enjoying the company of friends, tells that the structure was built in 1857, taking two years for completion, by the Grubbs family of California. They came to the area due to their involvement in the Quaker Meeting House in Mount Pleasant but only stayed and lived in the home for two years.

Sally said that some historians tell that the Grubbs were the great aunt and uncle of President Richard Nixon.

Next a doctor and his family became the owners. Then Hugh and Mary Erwin purchased the farm, raising chickens and selling eggs door to door to area customers. There is still a chicken coop on the property, it was noted.

“I went to check out the farm and the house at the insistence of my daughter, Butch. It needed work done, there were no kitchen facilities, no water and a furnace that put out a huge amount of oily smoke when I tried to turn on the heat. But I said ‘I’ll buy it.’ At the time, I just wanted a little place but this really grew on me,” she said, expanding her arms to include all the rooms.

“It started as a hobby, a place where people come to socialize, where they felt like it was home. I have been here 11 years in November and still going strong. Some days I do not feel so strong. At 73 years old, I get up sometimes with stiff muscles and aching bones but once I get to cooking I forget everything, even to eat,” the tiny owner confided.

“We started with no kitchen and no water. For almost a year, I cooked everything at my home and hustled it to the restaurant and then hauled all the dirty utensils back home to clean up and start again the next day. There was a stove in the basement and since we were famous for our rolls, I would bake them downstairs to keep up. Ben would make sure there were no customers back in that area at the time so no one would see me hauling up rolls from the basement.”

“My daughter, Butch, has been in the kitchen the whole time. And I had a chef back then, Vince Iadanza, and worked with him. He was young and we combined my older way of preparing foods with his newer procedures and it worked out well. There is not much frozen food served here. Mostly everything is fresh”

“I have Ben Thompson, a potter who built his own kiln, back giving me help through the holidays. He knows the workings of the dining room well and is a real asset. We had about 400 coming in and out for meals at Thanksgiving. It was Ben’s job to plan the time requirements so that there was no long wait when a new wave of customers arrived. Soon, he and his wife, Steff, will be flying back to Scotland,” Sally explained.

Because more space was needed, the deck at the back of the house, where there was once outside dining, was enclosed and this added 45 places for seating. One of the tables is the actual back door to the house. It was painted red and bears the signatures of many of the diners, including Oliver Bacharach who was the first to sign it.

There is a half tractor high on the wall with a wide-eyed deer over the hood. It looks as if the tractor wanted to miss the deer and came through the building.

The pub is called the Olde Crow Pub because there was a corn field where the parking lot is now located. Crows would gather there to eat all the dropped kernels. When Sally would come to work all the crows would scatter in a huge black cloud but soon return again.

The step up to one of the dining rooms from the pub is the actual step to the outside of the house before the pub was added on. The state let her keep the worn-down stone for historical purposes. It is the step taking customers up from the newer part to the older house.

And anyone who leaves the Farm Restaurant without sampling their bread pudding has missed a tasty experience. It is the recipe of her grandmother and neither it nor any of the chicken, crab cake or shrimp dishes have changed since the opening.

“I saw a purpose when Butch urged me to buy this place. The restaurant business is the hardest work anybody can do. It has been a hard job but I get excited every day that I can serve the people who come in here,” she said.

(McCoy can be contacted at emccoy@heraldstaronline.com.)