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Farm Wedding Venue In Northeast Ohio, Focused on Creating a Memorable Guest Experience

Restoring The Farm

So the project began. The barn was starting to lean and hadn’t been cleaned out for 30 years. It needed a lot of tender loving care. We hired an Amish builder to restore the barn. They saw my vision and wanted to help keep the barn as original as possible.

The house was not habitable and had to be torn down. I really wanted to save as much of the original history as possible so we recycled the beams, stones, and headers from the old house and put them in our new house. The barn got a new floor and we put that gorgeous old barn floor in our house. The builders thought I was crazy!

As time went on we continued to restore the property, dug the pond, and created our own little oasis. Our friends really wanted a barn wedding and asked me if we would consider having the wedding in our barn. I jumped at the chance to help their dream come true and we started planning. We had so much fun at that wedding that I thought “I really enjoy this”! And that’s how it started.

History Of The Farm

The Horst family first settled this farm in the mid-1830s, traveling by wagon train from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, before making North Lawrence their home. For generations they raised cattle and worked the 83 acres with care and determination.

In the 1920s and 1930s, coal was discovered in the area and the quiet town began to change. It was renamed Bowdil, after the company that built mining equipment, and railroads were laid through the woods to move coal to the main line. Even now, if you wander the forest, you can still see traces of where those tracks once ran.

When the coal boom ended, the town returned to its name of North Lawrence and life settled back into farming. Over the years, though, the farm itself fell into disrepair. By the time it was put up for auction in 2008, it was a shadow of what it once had been.

I’ll never forget standing there, looking past the broken pieces and the weeds, and seeing something beautiful waiting to be uncovered. Jim needed some convincing, but I knew deep down this land could be so much more. The day we bought it, our journey began.

My dream was simple yet powerful: to breathe life back into this place and create a sanctuary—a refuge for animals, for wildlife, and for us. What started as a vision has grown into a space filled with peace, purpose, and renewal.