By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
Old black and white photographs provide proof that residents of Wood County’s Poor Farm liked to socialize. The infirm, poor, mentally ill and physically disabled who lived at the site of the county infirmary hobnobbed with others who called the site home.
So it wasn’t a surprise to Wood County Museum Director Annette Wells when a crop of hops was discovered on the infirmary grounds – now the Wood County Museum.
It was a bit of a surprise that the beer-making hops date back to World War II.
The hops were found crawling up an old rusty fence by the hog barn, and in 2021 the museum contacted OSU Extension horticulturist Craig Everett to care for the crop.
“He has taken on the hops as one of his projects,” Wells said.
“They were found by accident,” Everett said. “I am helping grow these guys for them.”
Everett sent away a sample of the hops harvest to a lab in Wisconsin that analyzed the hops to determine when the crop was planted.
The lab found the hops were of the Cluster variety, one of the very early varieties of hops that were produced in the U.S. around World War II.
“It’s really unique” for hops to be found growing on grounds of an old county infirmary, which during the last century housed the less fortunate in nearly every county in Ohio, Wells said. But it makes sense, she added.
“They liked to gather and have parties,” Wells said of the residents. “We know they liked to gather and socialize. It doesn’t surprise me that they had them here.”
Everett has replaced the rusty fence with strings stretched vertically to a clothesline type structure. And the hops are climbing skyward.
The first harvest of the hops by Everett last year netted 11 pounds of the cone-shaped flowers used to brew beer. The hops were taken to Arlyn’s Good Beer, where they became 150 gallons of a brew dubbed Wood County IPA.
Plans are for the hops harvest to be taken to a different brewery in the county each year.
“We’re going to move it around,” Wells said.
Everett said the Wood County IPA was tasty, but he is hoping to see the hops brewed into a beer that more reflects the nature of the Germany heritage of the county.
“I’d like to see it brewed into a lager or an ale,” he said.
