‘Neff Road’: A Beaverton author’s farmhouse memoir into sisters, secrets and soil
Published 2:07 pm Wednesday, August 13, 2025
In her debut book “Neff Road: Life, Love and Intrigue in America’s Heartland,” Beaverton author Pam Drake offers an intimate portrait of rural farming life, tracing her family’s history from the 1870s through multiple generations in Ohio.
The self-published memoir explores Drake’s family roots, beginning with her great-great-grandfather Leonard Langston, a former plantation owner from Georgia who renounced slavery and moved to the village of Arcanum, Ohio, in the 1870s.
The book highlights the challenges and deep community spirit of farming families, with Drake emphasizing the often-overlooked dedication of rural workers and the virtues of the hard working communities that build our society.
“Farmers are not always admired (in our society) as somebody that has a degree and is a business person,” Drake said. “And so, I tried to clarify just how much work goes into farming, and what a wonderful community it is in a rural area, and how much those people give. They are never away from their jobs. But when you have a family and a community that works like ours did, it’s a blessing.”
Inspired after losing her parents and the family farm, Drake spent 14 years crafting the memoir. Sprinkled throughout, the book features conversations and playful bantering with her sister June, providing an intimate style — mixing serious historical reflection with personal, sometimes playful family interactions.
If nothing else, the memoir displays the resilience of everyday working people — finding ways to carry on through migration, civil war and laboriously working in fields beneath the sun. Along the way, forming relationships with those ranging from righteous to organized criminals and to those in between.
Drake began writing as a way to preserve her family’s history and stories after the death of her parents.
“After we had lost both parents, we lost our farm,” Drake said. “None of us daughters lived back (in Arcanum), we all moved away, and there was such a rich history, I kept writing things down. I kept finding through my mother’s stuff, newspaper clippings and all this wonderful history. I thought I should do something with it.”
For Drake, writing the memoir wasn’t always easy. While at times she ventured through the tall tales of her ancestors, other times writing brought her sorrow as she lost people the book was intended for.
“It was a struggle, because I lost a lot of the people that I was writing the book for during those years,” Drake said. “Every time I went back and worked on the book, it was an emotional thing, and it was kind of a struggle about which format I wanted to use. I finally landed on the format that it would be our history. But not just that, it is sisters talking over the past, sisters bantering and picking on each other.”
Drake, who has a background in public relations and theater, hopes the book will give not only recognition to her family’s stories but provide insight into the rich agricultural heritage of rural Ohio, telling the stories of people who didn’t have the chance to tell their own.
Local libraries in Columbus, Ohio, have already purchased multiple copies, with the memoir acting as a personable historical record of life in the rural Midwest.
Drake is currently working on a children’s book and a musical as she continues to share her passion for storytelling and preserving family history.