And from atop the knoll in the old Brandenburg Cemetery near Donnelsville, it’s possible to get a look at the land of the Frees.
Just north of t5he village, Free Road doglegs northwest off Milton-Carlisle Pike to the place where German-born Frederick Free built his homestead in the 1840s. What was at first a farm lane eventually became a road when it took a hard right and was extended on a razor straight line to New Carlisle Pike.
Why Frederick’s father, Phillip, moved the family from Germany to Pennsylvania isn’t clear, although better financial opportunity seems a good guess. Third-born Frederick and wife Frances likely had similar reasons for migrating to Ohio eight years into their marriage and with the first two of their six children.
A more solid clue for the reason can be found in Frederick’s burial in Brandenburg Cemetery. The Brandenburg Gate has been a feature of a Berlin for centuries now, and German J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos are considered some of the best of the Baroque age.
That a church denomination named for German Martin Luther was formed just before the Frees came helps to provide an answer, along with a strong hint from the name of one of Bethel’s neighboring townships, German.
The 1881 Beers history of Clark County notes that the first Donnelsville Lutheran Church building sat on land donated by George Croft. A Lutheran and Pennsylvanian like Frederick Free, he arrived in 1804, and in that time before corn was used for ethanol, Croft poured crop he raised into a different distilled product, whiskey.
Seventy-seven-year-old Jerry Free soberly explains that after his great-grandfather set up the Free homestead, his great-grandfather, David, grandfather, John, and father, Joe, lived there in succession.
Jerry’s most enduring memory of the homestead dates to 1946, when he was 7 and was sitting across the living room when his grandfather died in a chair.
“He’s the only person I’ve seen pass away,” Jerry said. “It was just different.”
At that age, “I didn’t know him real well,” Jerry continued.
Because of his age, his other memories of the house are scant as well.
He recalls spending a night there and watching the sheer curtains billowing a steady distance from the sashes, kept there by a steady stream of wind coming through the cracks.
He also remembers that upstairs bedroom being only slightly warmed by air rising through a register from the kitchen below.
But Jerry also carries with him stories from his father, Joe.
One involves his father’s mowing the Donnelsville cemetery in which David, John and father Joe now rest and where Jerry also will go.
Although John Deeres owned by the township now “eat it alive,” Jerry’s father mowed the grass by hand and “probably didn’t get a nickel” from his trustee father, Jerry said. In that era, the thinking was that children who never paid room or board to their families didn’t get paid for the work they did on their families’ behalf.
For years, a wrought iron archway naming John Free as a trustee stood at cemetery entrance. But when horses and buggies made way for slightly wider motorized vehicles, the archway was taken down.
Jerry grew up in a house just down Free Road from the original homestead, a place at which Jerry’s father and grandfather dug out the basement with a Fordson tractor and hand-guided scoop.
At the time, that method represented a vast improvement over the horse-powered arrangement that had been used to notch out a small cellar at the homestead.
While working the Free land as a teenager with his uncle, Jerry remembers seeing the old split rail fences in the Free Woods while tying up hay bales his uncle pushed with a stick through an old Case baler.
Jerry later ran an automatic bailer, getting 2.5 cents a bale from farmers who followed gun with a tractor and a wagon.
That money sometime went for pop at Hidy Shell in Donnelsville. Although he wanted to farm, Jerry lacked the money to buy land and instead worked 25 years at Hopkins Chevrolet, then 29 for the Tecumseh Local Schools, first as a custodian, later as a bus driver for special needs students.
And just as he has an album with pictures of a series of cars he bought over the years, in his mind he can see students he wished well at graduation realizing, as they did not, it probably would be the last time they spoke.
Along the way, Jerry and his wife, Cheryl, built two houses on the Free Road and had two sons of their own, Doug and Shawn.
Doug now lives in the second house, which has an S-curve driveway Jerry decided to put in not realizing how difficult it would be to follow through snow drifts constantly created by the unceasing west wind.
On Thursday, he’ll drive back to that house with his wife and the sweet potato dish that’s now a tradition at the Free Thanksgiving, a holiday that’s a reminder of the Sheely Turkey Farm that once operated in the neighborhood.
Jerry has pined for Free Road since moving to Northridge about two years ago.
“I lived on that road for 74 years in three homes,” he said. “I’d go back tomorrow if I could.”
As it is, he makes at least a weekly pilgrimage down the road while making his way to lunch at Studebaker’s Restaurant in New Carlisle.
With no boys in the youngest generation of Frees, he’s worried that the family name may disappear from along the road and then, maybe, from the road itself.
That probably gives him something in common with generations of Bischoffs, Funderburgs, Sintzes, Johnsons, Spences, Sniders, Ballentines, Ayreses, Anspaughs and Stotts who gave their names to roads back in the settlement days.
But Thursday will also give him a chance to pause and give thanks. He’s thankful the homestead is in the hands of a new family and tickled about the children’s play area there. He’s grateful the house he grew up in and the two he built still look good.
He’s thankful, too, for the harvest of memories he’s reaped along the road that started as a winding lane to his great-great-grandfather’s farm more than 170 years ago.
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