Auction
Four acres with pond, tools and farm equipment
10:30 a.m. June 30
5021 Hamilton-Scipio Road
John Anglin and Associates Auctioneers
(513) 423-8555
MORGAN TWP. — The Garner family has been repairing farm equipment in Morgan Twp. for nearly 90 years, but the era comes to an official end June 20 when the remaining shop will be offered for auction.
Harold Garner, 87, kept the shop in operation up until last year when health issues pushed him into retirement.
The shop is dark and quiet now, sooty and cluttered with the tools of the trade, a mountain of C-clamps, a collection of antique “hit and miss” engines that were the farmers’ main power tool until the advent of the tractor, and dozens of lawn mowers, many of them on a high shelf where Garner’s friend, the late Dick Fitton, helped him put up there.
Garner said his father, Clayton Garner, came from a Morgan Twp. farming family but decided that he’d rather be a blacksmith, Harold Garner said, and went to Harrison, Ohio, in 1922 to learn the trade from his wife’s brother. He returned to Morgan Twp. when Harold was six months old and set up shop at the corner of Robinson Road and Hamilton-Scipio Road in the town of Isis, and doubled the amount of commerce there as the only other business was a gas station.
“It was just a crossroads,” Garner said. “When the sun went down, there was nothing else here.”
His father plied the traditional trade of the blacksmith, making and repairing plowshares and shoeing horses.
“I was always fooling around out there,” Garner said, but never really joined the business until he returned from World War II in 1947 after serving in the South Pacific and in Japan for the occupation.
Garner added welding services to his father’s blacksmithing. According to his wife Virginia, he didn’t like getting his hands dirty and tried to work with gloves, but soon gave up on that.
The father and son worked side by side until the mid-1960s when Clayton’s health started to decline. He died in 1975.
Around the time of his father’s death, Garner started working on a new building, but he barely had the walls raised when he suffered his only injury when he was hit by a car zooming down Hamilton-Scipio Road and missed a year of work.
But other than that, he worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. six days a week until last year when his heart started giving him trouble. He tore down his father’s original shop, which dated back to 1888, five years ago, so now only the welding shop remains.
Virginia said they had to hire people to come in to help clean up the shop and get it ready for the auction, going through the mounds of old farm equipment and metal outside and mowing the high grass.
“Harold said he couldn’t get rid of anything because he saw the future in every piece,” she said.
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.
About the Author