THE HISTORY OF CB’S PLACE
by Conrad “CB” Balliet
The official name of this property is “ CB’S PLACE: The Conrad Balliet Family Nature Preserve.” The family name “Balliet” goes back to the Huguenot persecutions of the sixteenth century by the French, when many the fled to England, Germany, or Switzerland before emigrating to the United States. Some, including the ancestors of my father Conrad Sr, ended up in eastern Pennsylvania in the late 1700s, and eventually moved to the Hazleton and Sugarloaf areas where I was born. My father died in 1953; he had set up a trust for the family. When my wife Marion and I moved to Springfield in 1961, we borrowed money from that trust to buy our home in Springfield. By that time we had four children, Jean, Edward, Karen, and Paul. When my mother, Clara, died in 1971, part of our inheritance paid off our mortgage. And that inheritance made it possible for us to buy the property now known as “cb’s place.”
Ours had been an outdoor family. We had spent weekends in the Poconos and holidays on the Jersey shore . “Pop” had taken me along on fishing trips to Canadian lakes. I had camped with buddies in a tent along the Nescopeck Creek and walked the abandoned WB & H railroad path towards Honey Hole. Later, my wife Marion and I took our own family on summer trips in the 1960s with a Nimrod trailer from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from Nova Scotia to Florida. So in the early 1970s we decided to find a rural property around Springfield. A real estate friend, after we had delayed looking at a place she knew of, knocked on our door and insisted we go along to look at a farm that was for sale. We came out to what was a weedy, overgrown horse pasture, with barbed wire fences, briars, and a small stream in a gully. But it also had woods and about a quarter mile of the Little Miami scenic river running through it. We could see potential. So, with the money from our inheritance and some help from our friends, we bought the place in 1977. We worked with the government to put a dam across the small gully with a stream, and by 1978 had a one and a half acre lake, which we call “Lake Marion,” in honor of my wife.. In 1982, our son Eddie, who had a long-standing interest in Buckminster Fuller and geodesic domes, designed one, and he and I built it on the east side of the lake. In 1992 we gave almost two acres to our daughter Karen and husband Mark, who have been neighbors ever since. Karen has worked for many years in circulation at the Wittenberg library.
My wife Marion enjoyed watching birds and catching fish, but she liked living in Springfield, near her church, her friends, and the city life. She did not want to move here. After her death in 1999, I had a home built, with a Yeatsian tower, and moved here in 2000. Over the years, I have planted well over 200 trees. For the first decade, I rented the 27 acres of crop land, or share cropped it, and made a little money. But erosion was a problem and the lake silted in. So I enrolled the farm in the government’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), aimed at stopping erosion. It’s odd, since I get paid not to farm it than I made as a farmer. But the land has stopped eroding and the lake remains 10' to 12' deep.
Over a period of time, the property changed from a weedy horse pasture to a lovely natural retreat. In addition to family and friends, we have a host of other visitors: a variety of ducks and birds, including warblers, woodpeckers, tufted titmice, hummingbirds, owls, raptors, hawks, and geese; and on the ground snakes, raccoons, skunks, mice, groundhogs, a deer family with fawns most years; and in the lake and wetlands, peepers, toads, frogs, amurs, and bass; plus around the home cats and a dog or two of our own.
I did not want to see it become a gravel pit or condo complex, so in 2003 I contacted Little Miami Incorporated and arranged to put a conservation easement on some thirty acres that will preserve it, we hope, forever as a natural area. And since I enjoyed my calling as an English professor at Wittenberg and appreciate its ongoing devotion to a good liberal arts education, in 2008,I decided to will the major part of the farm to the university where I had taught for thirty years. So far, the biology department has made the most use of the property, I also see it as a source of inspiration for painters, photographers, poets, and star gazers (it has total darkness most nights). I now feel I have literal as well as metaphorical roots here, and hope the positive creations as well as my spirit will linger on here when I have gone to “that undiscovered bourne from which no traveler returns.”