By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

GENEVA, N.Y. — John Johnston, an active farmer from 1821 until 1877, holds the little-known title of “The Father of Tile Drainage in America.” The Drain Tile Museum, a property of the Geneva Historical Society, is on the site of his farm.

The museum exists because of Mike Weaver. He worked in soil conservation for USDA for 30 years. He was working out in the field one day and found a funny piece of tile; he picked it up and threw it in his trunk.

“He found a few more and threw them in his trunk,” said John Marks, museum curator. “He started finding out what they were and then – the turning point for any collector – everyone found out he was saving them so they all started sending them to him.”

Weaver eventually donated some of the tiles to the Drain Tile Museum. The collection contains tiles from West Asia Minor from 500 B.C. and a piece of tile made by Nazi prisoners and inscribed with a swastika, donated by the Miller brothers from Bascom, Ohio. Many donations came from Indiana, Illinois and Ohio.

Without Johnston there might never have been a collection. He settled in Geneva after moving from Scotland 1821. At that time, drainage was not understood in this country. People knew about digging drains and filling them with rocks and bark and flat stones. Johnston introduced the idea of making a horseshoe-shaped terra cotta tile, Marks said.

Johnston had seen drain tiles used when he was a boy in Scotland. He often quoted his grandfather, who said, “verily, all the earth needs draining.” Johnston sent to Scotland for the horseshoe-shaped pattern tiles.

“Complete round tiles came about later, once they figured out how to extrude the clay,” Marks said. “Another name for the horseshoe-shaped tile was ‘shinbone tile’ because that is how they would make them – take a slab of clay and mold it over the potter’s shin, peel it off and let it dry before they fired it.”

A potter in nearby Waterloo, N.Y., Benjamin Whartenby, had been making crockery. That business was falling off because people were beginning to figure out that lead glaze was making them sick. He began making drain tiles.

In 1838 Johnston tiled a 10-acre plot. His friends in Seneca County drove past and made fun of him, Marks said.

“They said he was just burying crockery in the ground and nothing would come of it,” Marks said. “His yields the first year on his drained land went from 10 bushels (of wheat) an acre to 50 bushels an acre. In spite of that, until his death, there were people who were not convinced.”

Robert Swan apprenticed with Johnston in 1848. He eventually married Margaret, one of Johnston’s six daughters. His parents gave him a beautiful Greek Revival mansion called Rose Hill on a 300-acre farm as a wedding present (Rose Hill Mansion is also a property of the Geneva Historical Society).

“So he got a huge house and 300 acres and pretty much all the money he ever needed,” Marks said. “He was quite wealthy. But he was not a gentleman farmer; he took the business quite seriously. He got the farm in 1850. He started in 1851 and by 1852 he had completely tiled the land that needed it.”

That was about 75,000 pieces of drain tile, which came out to be about 60 miles, Marks said.

Johnston and Swan told others how to lay tile. Their advice, according to Marks, was: “You should hire an Irishman to dig the ditch because they spend their lives digging turf in Ireland and you can pay them a modest amount. The man who is in the ditch has to be paid the most because it is very important that he does his job properly and fits the tiles together and makes sure the job has the proper slope.

“He will need an assistant (who) will be in the ditch and will keep handing tiles all day, and that can be a woman or a child because you don’t have to pay them very much.”

That appalls the young women who visit the museum with school groups and tours, Marks said. The Historical Society’s biggest struggle is to tell those visitors and others what drain tile is and to convince them that it is not a joke.

“People want to include us (with) wacky museums in the United States. People think it is a joke. Drain tile is important,” Marks said.

For more information visit www.genevahistoricalsociety.com