Malabar Farm State Park

Where it sits. Malabar Farm occupies roughly 950 acres of Pleasant Valley in southern Richland County, Ohio, about twelve miles southeast of Mansfield and a similar distance from Interstate 71. The valley runs between wooded sandstone ridges, and the farm's fields step down from those slopes to a bottomland where Switzer Creek drains toward the Mohican River. It is genuine working countryside rather than a museum meadow: state staff still run beef cattle, sheep and hogs here, still cut hay, and still plant the contoured strips that made the place famous. The Big House sits at the centre of it, white-painted and rambling, with a lane of maples running up to the door.

The story behind it. The farm is the creation of Louis Bromfield, an Ohio-born novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1927 for Early Autumn and then spent thirteen years living in France. He came home in 1938, bought four worn-out neighbouring farms in the valley where his grandparents had lived, and named the consolidated property Malabar after the coast of southwestern India he had visited while researching a novel. Architect Louis Lamoreux drew the thirty-two-room Big House in 1939, deliberately assembled to look as though it had grown by accretion over a century — a Western Reserve farmhouse with wings that do not quite match. Bromfield used his book royalties to fund an experiment in soil restoration, championing contour ploughing, cover crops, permanent pasture and heavy composting at a time when Ohio hillsides were bleeding topsoil. He wrote about it in Pleasant Valley (1945) and Malabar Farm (1948), and the farm became a destination for agronomists, conservationists and the merely curious. Bromfield died in 1956; after a period under a private foundation, the property became an Ohio state park in 1976.

On screen and in the gossip columns. Bromfield's Hollywood friendships gave the farm its first fame. Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall in the Big House on 21 May 1945, in a ceremony that lasted a few minutes and drew a press scrum to a valley that had never seen one. Four decades later the farm supplied one of the most recognisable images in American cinema. The opening sequence of The Shawshank Redemption (1994) — Andy Dufresne sitting in a parked car at night with a revolver and a bottle of bourbon, outside the cabin where his wife and her lover are inside — was filmed at Pugh Cabin, a log building near the park entrance on Pleasant Valley Road. The cabin still stands and can be rented.

The Shawshank oak. Two miles from the park entrance, on private farmland beside Pleasant Valley Road, stood the white oak of the film's final act: the tree at the foot of a dry stone wall where Andy leaves a letter under a piece of black volcanic glass, and where Red finds it after his release. The wall was built by the production crew for the scene and has been repeatedly rebuilt as souvenir hunters have carried the stones away. The oak itself was already ancient when the film crew arrived. A windstorm in July 2011 split it down the trunk, and the remaining half came down in July 2016; salvaged wood has since been sold as memorabilia. What survives is the field, the rebuilt wall, the stump and the sightline, which is close enough that the location remains a fixture of the region's Shawshank Trail. It is on private land, viewed from the roadside verge.

What you actually see today. The Big House opens for guided tours that take in Bromfield's study, the library where he wrote, and the room where the Bogart wedding took place; the furnishings are largely original, down to the writer's desk and his boxer dogs' place by the fire. Outside there are barns, a working dairy display, a heritage vegetable garden, a sugar shack that runs in late winter, and the Malabar Farm Restaurant across the road in a brick stagecoach inn dating from the 1820s. Trails climb to Mount Jeez, the ridge-top viewpoint Bromfield named as a joke, which delivers a long look across the whole valley and is the best sunset spot in the county. A separate path leads to Hidden Springs and the small ravine known as the Doris Duke Woods.

Getting there and timing. The park is reached from Ohio Route 603 or Bromfield Road, both narrow rural routes; there is no public transport. Grounds and trails are open year round from dawn until dusk without charge, while house tours run on a published schedule that thins outside the May-to-October season. Spring brings wildflowers and the maple runs are in February; autumn colour peaks in mid-October. Paths around the barns are hard-packed gravel, but the Big House has steps and narrow historic doorways.