The Ohio estate where Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall wed

Louis Bromfield had a specific vision for his Ohio estate. After a trip to India inspired his 1937 bestseller, The Rains Came, he used the profits to buy up 580.6 acres of land in Richland County. He named the place Malabar because his book was inspired by India and financed the farm. It is a case of a man using his literary success to build a personal estate in the woods.

Bromfield spent the late 1930s and early 1940s designing a home with a level of persistence that extended the project's timeline. He hired Louis Lamoreux to design a 19-room Greek revival home he called the Big House. While the family lived in the Fleming house while the Big House was being built, Bromfield ordered constant changes to rooms and walls, dragging the project out for 18 months. He even designed the house to look like different sections had been added over the years, a move to create an artificial sense of history.

Once the Big House was finished, it became a destination for visitors. It was a 32-room Western Reserve-style homestead where film stars like James Cagney and Joan Fontaine would visit. Sunday tours of the farm attracted 100 to 200 people at a time. The peak of the social calendar hit on May 21, 1945, when Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall held their wedding and honeymoon here. It served as a site for high-profile guests and attracted up to 20,000 visitors every year.

Bromfield was also focused on what he called conservation farming. He stopped producing eggs, sheep, and hogs to focus on beef and dairy. He used labor from the Soil Conservation Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps to overhaul the land. He replaced standard square fields with contours that followed the lie of the land to stop erosion. He also experimented with green manures, strip cropping, and sheet composting. He was engineering a more efficient ecosystem through techniques like contour plowing and trash farming.

By the time the Bromfield children gave the land to the Friends of the Land foundation in 1958, the property was a relic of a vanished era. The state of Ohio took over in 1972 and turned it into a state park in 1976. You can still see the remnants of this ambitious project today. There is a historic stagecoach inn built in 1820, a 1940s log cabin where the opening scenes of The Shawshank Redemption were filmed, and a barn that was burned to the ground in 1993 but was eventually reconstructed by 150 volunteers from the Timber Framers Guild.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons