Photograph of Murrin Cellar on a Sprayer at the Brown Fruit Farm

Murrin Cellar is pictured here standing on a pesticide sprayer at the Brown Fruit Farm. The hand-written caption by his son Bernard (Brownie) Cellar reads “Dad, on a very early sprayer.”

Murrin was farm manager from 1936 to 1958. His father came to work on the farm in 1913 when he was fourteen years old and attending Worthington High School, and he started working in 1915, becoming full time after his high school graduation. At age 19, he supervised the picking of apples and cherries by crews of transient labor. In 1936, after the deaths of Frame and Marie Brown, the farm’s owners, Murrin worked with their daughter Molly to keep the farm running until 1958. The Cellar family continued to live on the farm property following its closing.

The Brown Fruit Farm operated north of Worthington for nearly fifty years, from around 1912 to 1958. The farm sold grew and sold apples and apple products such as juice, candy and apple butter, as well as cherries, plums and honey. As of 1925, the farm encompassed 100 acres planted with 4000 fruit trees and was the largest fruit farm in central Ohio. Owned by Frame Brown and later his daughter Molly, it was renowned not only for the quality of its produce, but also for its innovative roadside marketing, including signs telling motorists how many miles they were from the farm.

In “An Orchard Romance,” an article published in the September 1931 issues of the magazine “Columbus Today,” Frame Brown explained that apples were sprayed with pesticide seven to nine times a year, spraying 150,000 to 200,000 gallons of pesticide throughout the apple orchard each growing season. Spraying was frequently done continuously, day and night.