Here’s how they’re linked:
For some 47 years this acreage was home to the acclaimed thoroughbred operation of George Smith.
For the first three and a half decades, he was partnered with his friend, Dr. Wilbur Johnston. Several of their horses were trained by Jim Morgan, who would become one of the Midwest’s preeminent trainers.
All three men had been prep standouts in the Miami Valley.
Smith and Morgan were All-City athletes at Stivers High – Smith in golf; Morgan in basketball – while Johnston won 11 letters in four sports at Sidney High.
While Morgan went on to stardom at the University of Louisville, where he scored 1,105 career points before being drafted by the NBA’s Syracuse Nationals, Smith and Johnston became Ohio State athletes.
Smith was an All-American golfer and the Buckeyes’ team captain and by the time he graduated, he was considered one of the nation’s top amateur golfers.
Johnston played on the OSU basketball team that made the Final Four of the 1946 NCAA Tournament.
Smith and Johnston called the 110-acres that housed their thoroughbred operation Woodburn Farm, and it became one of the most prominent racing facilities in the Midwest.
There they bred and owned numerous stakes winners, state champions and celebrated national runners, including the Breeders Cup filly, Extended Applause. She finished in the money in 15 of her 23 races and won $408,500 before retiring in 2002.
All three men now are gone: Smith died in 2017; Morgan in 2019; Johnson in 2021.
Woodburn Farm has been turned into farm fields. They’re now owned by Sam Morgan, Jim’s younger brother and a successful developer who for many years was partnered with former Cleveland Browns running back Ernie Green to form Ernie Green Industries.
Morgan rents that land to Jerry Lucas, his brother Mark and Jerry’s 26-year-old son Grant. Together they form Lucas Brothers’ Farms.
This year, for the first time since Smith died, Jerry said they planted field corn on the acreage that once was the Woodburn pasture.
The result has been astounding.
Put into racing terms, it is Secretariat winning the Belmont by 31 lengths.
The stalks tower along Nutt Road and, instead of the normal one ear per stalk, most have two ears and some have three.
“It’s the damnedest thing,” Sam Morgan said. “Everybody claims they’ve never seen corn like this around the Miami Valley.”
While the Lucas family are some of the area’s top farmers – they’re farming about 1,800 acres this year, most of which they rent from people like Sam Morgan though some of it (like Jim Morgan’s former farm nearby on Ferry Road) they own – Jerry is more subdued than Sam when it comes to assessing the Nutt Road crop.
While the hot, rainy weather played a part in the growth, he admits luck also was a big factor. And one thing upon which he and Morgan both agree is that they had one special factor giving them a boost:
Horse manure.
“That’s the key right there,” Jerry said with a smile. “This field wasn’t farmed for something like 60 years. It was a pasture for the horses and now it’s really high in organic matter and the fertility is good.”
For those six decades, the ground never was turned over. Although it’s been farmed since George’s death, Jerry said the crops – soybeans, hay, sweet corn for the family’s three well-known produce stands in the area – have been rotated and this was the first time they’d planted field corn.
“We were lucky,” he said. “It was a wet spring, and we had a real narrow window – just two days – to get it in.”
Grant said he planted the field – using a massive 16-row planter – with Pioneer seed (PO835am variety) seed at 3 a.m. on April 27:
“I’d been planting all day and that was my last field. I got it in just before the rain. A lot of farms around here were too wet and couldn’t get their corn planted in time. We’ve got some fields that don’t look that good either, but this one just hit perfect.”
It wasn’t until around July 4th that the field really took off.
“It just finally got ahold of the fertilizer,” Jerry said.
While Sam marveled at what the yield could be, Jerry was more cautious.
He knows Mother Nature can still play tricks.
“Plus,” he said with a laugh, “I don’t want Sam to raise the rent.”
All kidding aside, he admitted this could be the best field corn he’s ever had.
That deserves some extended applause.
And a look back too, said Morgan:
“This story has a little bit of history to it.”
‘This is a special place’
Growing up in a blue-collar family on Ashley Street near the Fairgrounds, George got a break when he was befriended by University of Dayton basketball coach Tom Blackburn who ran Madden Golf Course in the summer.
Offered jobs to do around the pro shop, George also learned to play the game and ended up getting a scholarship to OSU, where he lettered three years and as a senior led the Bucks to a 22-stroke victory for the Big Ten title.
He was the medalist in the 36-hole qualifier for the 1954 Ohio Amateur, topping the likes of Arnold Palmer, who’d won the tournament the year before while stationed in Ohio with the Coast Guard, and Jack Nicklaus, then a highly-touted prep player at Upper Arlington High.
An ROTC student, George headed to Fort Sill after graduation to fulfill his army duty. But just weeks before the release of the Salk vaccine, he contracted polio and lost his ability to walk. He ended up on crutches and bulky knee braces and mostly in a wheelchair, his golf career done.
His college golf coach, Bob Kepler, who was from Dayton, took him to the racetrack and George was smitten. He bought his first racehorse – named Pineapple – with George Zimmerman in 1956.
Morgan grew up in Leslie County in Eastern Kentucky. The family lived in a two-room log cabin that had no electricity or running water and was accessible by mule, but not motor car.
After the cabin burned down, the family came to East Dayton.
Coming out of Stivers, Morgan, a 6-foot-1 guard, was offered a one-year scholarship to UD. Louisville promised four and he headed to Kentucky, a move that would haunt the Flyers.
Morgan’s Cardinals would win five of six games against UD, including the 1956 NIT Championship.
Syracuse, which became the Philadelphia 76ers, made him the 15th overall pick in the draft. He made the team, but when the Nationals wouldn’t budge on their $5,000 contract offer, he came back home to teach and coach at Stebbins.
Eventually he was drawn to Smith’s farm and soon began training horses.
He became Ohio’s winningest stakes trainer and trained Ohio’s Horse of the Year six times. In his career, according to Equibase, his horses had 10,350 starts, won 1,993 races and finished in the money 47 percent of the time.
He was enshrined in the Louisville Athletics Hall of Fame and the Ohio Basketball Hall of Fame.
In later years, Morgan, Dr. Jim Gable, a local vet on the Ohio Racing Commission, former UD basketball player Terry Bockhorn and legendary Flyers’ hoops coach Don Donoher would accompany Smith to River Downs or Turfway to watch the thoroughbred races. Or they’d go to the standardbred track in Lebanon and watch the simulcasts.
In his retirement, you sometimes could find Donoher at Woodburn, mowing grass, cutting down weeds, even shoveling manure.
He explained to me once he wanted the farm took look good:
“This is a special place.”
‘I was exuberant’
The place still is, especially this year, thanks to the Lucas Family who have been fully immersed for generations in farming and the side pursuits it presents.
Grant said his grandmother, Becky Lucas, started the family’s first produce market on Yankee Street, where the family once had a 70-acre farm and still owns three acres north of Lyons Road.
Along with the market at 8491 Yankee Street, they now have a produce wagon in Kettering at Stroop and Marshall that they stock each morning with fresh-picked vegetables, and they have another stand in Bellbrook on West Franklin Street (SR 725) next to Grismer Tire.
The family also runs the Candlebrook Farm Events Center (3269 Ferry Road, Bellbrook) which hosts weddings, reunions, corporate parties and school groups.
A petting zoo is nearby for kids and at the end of September, they will host the ninth annual Lucas Brothers Farm Fest that includes hayrides, a pumpkin patch and corn mazes.
The Fest runs until the end of October, but this year their real interest then will be on the Nutt Road corn crop they begin to pick.
If it’s a winner, it owes something to another George Smith steed that wasn’t quite so triumphant.
That first horse, Pineapple, debuted at a Chicago area track in 1957. It finished 11th in a field of 12 horses.
“But I was exuberant,” Smith once told me. “I was thrilled to be a part of everything that day and that feeling kept me in the racing game for all those years after that.”
That led to his celebrated filly, Extended Applause, a quarter century ago.
And this fall, when Grant Lucas pulls the corn picker through that promising field on Nutt Road, there may be cause for extended applause once again.
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