Family farm placed in protective easement

VINCENNES – The owner of a family farm that dates to the early 1800s and includes one of Indiana’s oldest homes has placed the 500-acre plot in a conservation easement to protect it from encroaching development.

Mark Ewing, who lives with his wife, Rebecca, in the colonnade-lined home that dates to 1806, said he hopes the easement preserves for generations the character of his family’s Knox County farm, which is called Mont Clair.

Ewing said the signs of suburban sprawl from nearby Vincennes are just at the horizon, and he doesn’t want his family’s more than 200-year-old farm to become a subdivision or strip mall.

“I feel really good about doing it. I don’t think my children would ever sell the land for development, but times change and people change,” he told the Vincennes Sun-Commercial.

Under the conservation agreement with the Sycamore Land Trust, a Bloomington-based nonprofit group that preserves natural landscapes, the Ewing family and all future owners of the farm can continue farming the land, but they cannot develop the land commercially.