Used to be, if your were a trapper or a forager in the 1820s, you could drop off your furs and your roots at Sam Wells' place on the banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati,
settle on a price for your goods and head on back to your cabin in the woods with a pocketful of cash.
That's what Daniel Boone did. He'd bring Sam furs and roots from time to time. These days, though, you've got to go to the Pondlick Herb Farm way out in the sticks to do business with
Samuel Wells Co. But it's worth the drive.
Sam's long gone, of course. Roots won't keep a man alive forever.
And the company no longer buys furs or pelts, not since Paula and Don Wright took over four years ago and moved its headquarters to their 43-acre farm in the rural hinterlands
outside Hillsboro. "Didn't want the animal-rights people on our backs," Don says.
But foragers and diggers are still bringing ginseng root they find growing wild in hardwood forests to Samuel Wells Co., getting up to $400 a pound for wild root. There's your cultivated root, your woods-grown root and your wild root, Paula says. The people of China, where most of the world's ginseng ends up, especially the primo American ginseng , put a bit more stock in wild root.
That doesn't mean there aren't people out there trying to figure out ways to develop quality home-grown ginseng . The Wrights tried it themselves.
"We had 50,000 plants growing on a northeast slope - that's where they grow best," Don says.
"Some of them we'd brought along from roots that were eight years old. Then, one night two years ago, someone came along and tore them all up. Sort of like what you hear about
happening sometimes with somebody who's raised a patch of marijuana. Only ginseng is legal."
The Wrights settled here 18 years ago, having tired of the suburban life in Montgomery. They restored the one-room log house that the Lyle family built here sometime around 1815,
and Paula set to work filling the ffields with flowwers - everlastings, mostly, which she'd hang to dry in the barn each fall.
For the first six years, Don raised tobacco. Then Paula started finding ginseng in the forest. "I started reading about herbs and frontier medicine," she says.
"Herbs are what we used to treat maladies before the big pharmaceutical companies came along with their Valiums and their Libriums.
"The settlers learned from the Shawnee to use goldenseal for sore throats, willow bark for fevers, white oak bark to get rid of worms. That's how they survived. And, for an overall
tonic, they'd dig up ginseng ."
Linda began hanging out at Lloyd's Library at Ninth and Plum streets downtown, poring through the pharmaceutical journals collected in the late 1800s by the three Lloyd brothers - John Uri Lloyd, Nelson Ashley and Curtis Gates. The Lloyds manufactured medicines from plant extracts; their pharmaceutical firm used to be the main supplier of botanical
preparations for a school of medicine known as "eclectic medicine."
She learned that the Chinese have been using ginseng for more than 4,000 years. She says they believe that the ginseng root represents the vital spirit of the earth and that its essence can be used for everything from prolonging life to warding off disease to increasing potency.
And she became friends with Herbert Harschbarger, who owned Samuel Wells Co. and who regularly dealt with the ginseng brokers in New York and San Francisco. She learned about the trade and about the seven families in Hong Kong who control the entire Asian ginseng market, where 90 percent of America's ginseng is shipped. She remembers once sitting in
Harschbarger's office when a man showed up with a barrel of ginseng root and Harschbarger wrote out a check for $77,000. Shortly before his death four years ago, Harschbarger offered
the business to Paula for what she calls "a very reasonable price."
Today, Paula is widely regarded as an expert in herbal mmedicines. A pair of botany professors at Ohio State University call Pondlick Farm with questions all the time. On
Dec. 6, she's giving a talk entitled "History of Herbal Medicine" at Anderson Mercy Hospital's Wellness Center.
"We abandoned herbal medicine in early 1900s, but now the big pharmaceutical companies are again looking to plants for treating diseases," Paula says. "It's interesting how we're coming full circle."
- BY : David Wecker
- SOURCE : The Cincinnati Post1995.11.21
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