Robert Fitch recalls early days of family farm

Family patriarch Robert Fitch recalls early days of family farm

In the fall, there’s plenty of work to be done to get fruits and vegetables from the field to Fitch’s Farm Market, 4413 Center Road in Avon.

Family patriarch Robert Fitch, 94, oversees the labor, that is, when he’s not actually doing it.

“This is what he does every day,” his grandson, Adam Fitch, said as Robert used a knife to cut leaves from cauliflower plants picked that morning. “He’ll make it look nice and presentable so people actually want to buy it.”

Robert has seen harvests from the land since his boyhood in the 1920s and 1930s. Today the work is similar, but different, with new varieties of vegetables, new technology to plant them and new family members to help.

“There’s four generations that work every day to keep the family business going,” Adam said.

Robert’s father, Leslie Fitch, had the last team of working horses in Avon. The farm had an advantage because the horses could get into fields when the ground was too wet for tractors.

“There was 60 acres in the farm,” he said. “My dad bought 40 and my uncle bought 20 next door.”

Now the farm market sits next to Bob-O-Link Golf Course, which is owned by Robert Fitch’s son and daughter-in-law, William and Donna Fitch. Years ago it was a 100-acre vegetable farm, Robert said, and the owner had six white horses.

In the summers, the Lorain County Fair was in Elyria, where Robert showed a colt the last year there before it merged with the Wellington Independent Fair in 1941.

That was the same year Robert graduated from Avon High School, in a class of 28 students guided by 10 teachers.

He was a high jumper on the school track team, but his favorite sport was basketball. Players would rotate among positions on the court. When a player scored for his team, there would be a jump ball to determine the next possession.

The girls team would play half-court ball, Robert recalled.

“Avon and Avon Lake was really the rivalry back then,” he said about the sports teams.

In the days before Interstate 90, local residents considered Avon Lake the more developed community, with businesses such as the B.F. Goodrich Chemical Co. and Fruehauf Trailer Co., he said.

Upon graduating from high school, “a good share of the men went into the service,” Robert said, but he had a farm deferment in World War II.

Years later, he turned 28 the day before he finally was due to report to Cleveland for his examination, so he was deemed too old for the Army.

The family grew vegetables to sell at wholesale in Cleveland.

In 1963, Robert wanted to do something off the farm, so he went to work at General Motors. He worked in security there and in 1980 took early retirement from the car company.

His wife, the late Frances Fitch, taught the first advanced biology class at Avon High School and became a guidance counselor there. She died in 1982.

Off the farm, the family has a number of members who are educators and many are no stranger to hoops.

“Basketball is kind of our thing that we’ve always done, generally because winter’s our slow time,” Adam Fitch said.

In 1983, Richard and Rita Fitch, who are the son and daughter in law of Robert Fitch, opened the farm market. It has been a growing family business ever since.

As a boy, Robert Fitch recalled using a planter and a cultivator drawn by horses. The combine was pulled by a tractor.

Now the family has three cultivating tractors and five planters.

“All of our equipment, somebody in the family runs,” Robert said. “We don’t hire anyone to run the machinery.”

“A couple years ago we finally put the kibosh on him climbing up on the tractor,” Adam said. “You take a fall off one of those and it’s not so easy to recover.”

The family has four ATVstyle utility vehicles to get around the farm. “Years ago farmers would take an old car and cut the cab off and use them,” Robert said.

Modern large-scale farms want to have uniform rows of crops, Adam said.

They don’t cultivate the soil as much now, but instead use corn and soybeans that are resistant to the herbicide Roundup, which then is used for weed control.

But for the Fitches, every implement is customized for specialty crops of fruits and vegetables.

“We have way more work and workers to farm 100 acres for vegetables than 10,000 acres of corn and soybeans,” Adam said.

Avon has lost farms as more people move there, but the population growth has helped the farm market. It is faster and easier to shop there than a farmer’s market in Cleveland, Robert said.

The family will grow some produce based on demand, which varies widely.

They gave examples such as buyers coming from Texas to pick seven bushels of peppers, people who want large or small tomatoes, and shoppers of Eastern European descent who like yellow beans, peppers and potatoes because that’s what they grew up with.

The market is replenished daily, so Robert tends to work in the morning to help with chores. He’ll take a break in the afternoon, then return to help the farm wind down in the evenings.

Meals include plenty of vegetables, grown on the family farm, of course. They’re all good, Robert said.

“I don’t have any favorite,” he said. “I like just about all of them.”

ERIC BONZAR — THE MORNING JOURNAL At 94, Robert Fitch continues to work at his family farm located at 4413 Center Road, Avon. Since 1855, The Fitch family has been farming in Avon.