The Plummer House

Abraham Plummer settled the property in 1801 and the first house in Warren Township was built in the front yard. Plummer was the fourth citizen of Barnesville and the first Quaker to settle in town. The original part of the current house was constructed around the late 1820s or early 1830s by Robert Plummer, his son. The farm was a weigh station on the Drovers’ Trail. Farmers could get better deals by selling on the eastern market in Baltimore or Philadelphia and to get their animals there, they had to drive them by foot. The north end of the Plummer house is where the drovers would stay while the animals would be put up in the pastures around the house. The Drovers’ Trail came through Quaker City into Barnesville, then out to Tacoma, into Belmont, then down to the Ohio River where they would cross somewhere around Shadyside.

The trail lasted until sometime around the 1860s. That’s when the railroads came in, and they ran right past the Plummer house. The house was a landmark for students coming to Olney, because when they saw it, they knew they would be stopping. There was a station in Tacoma where they would exit the train, and somebody from campus would come out with the horse and wagon to bring the students to campus. With a desire to contribute something that would be of “both present and future value to our beloved boarding school,” Charles and Ellen Moorlan purchased and donated the Plummer Farm in 1940. From then on, it was used for faculty housing while the barns were used to store square hay bales. We would have animals downstairs — usually heifers for the dairy herd. We also had our corn cribs out there.

The Plummer Barn

I don’t remember the floors in there making for a good place to hold a dance…

The Plummer barn was used for Halloween socials a lot. They also did a couple great socials up at the house.

The barn was easy to back a wagon into. It’s where I learned for the first time. I did that and stacked lots of hay in there. That’s what I used to do all summer long with Leonard and my other brothers — pick up bales of hay by hand, put them in the wagon, and take them to the barn. We would stack all the way to the roof. We could fit over 6,000 bales in that barn, maybe more. I lost about ten pounds one day stacking hay.

Once we started with the big bales, there wasn’t the need for the labor and the barn wasn’t as important anymore. We had it torn down in 2000. The beams were sold off to someone who used them as decorations in his house. I’m not sure who built the barn or when — we don’t have that history, or at least I’ve never been able to come across it — but it was built around 1870, I’d imagine, some time not long after the Civil War.

It was always a place that was available to be used. There were junior socials in the woods. There was more than one Halloween social out there. It’s off campus, but it’s close. You can get kids out there easily enough. Leonard still has sleepouts there.

When I was a student, Olney had an old school bus. They’d haul us out there every Friday night for a social. One time, we got there, unloaded, then climbed across a fence and we were walking through this pasture. It was dark. People lost their shoes going through the swamp by the creek and all of a sudden, this 4-wheel drive truck goes roaring through and slams on its breaks. Somebody gets out and pulls out a shotgun and shoots it. He starts yelling at us, “Hey! What are you doing in my field? I’ve got horses in there worth $10,000!”

This was back when $10,000 was a lot of money. What had happened was we failed to get permission to cross his pasture. Larry Mott was leading us and he went back and talked to the guy and made things OK. Then we walked on through the woods and the hay fields and up to the barn and we had our social.