Cathie Browning collects thrifted dress-up clothes and dollar-store accessories, not necessarily to wear herself, but to build and decorate scarecrows.
Her yard is full of them.
There’s a ghostlike scarecrow dressed in shimmery white, blacksmith and chimney sweep scarecrows, a scarecrow with a pumpkin as a head. Her front porch is covered in scarecrows dressed like witches complete with sequined dresses and long, pointed noses.
“This is girls’ night out,” Browning said. “The two older witches in the sleigh, they're partying. They're kind of losing it. They all have their party cups.”
She points to a scarecrow holding onto the back of a sleigh with dear life.
“This one over here has had way too much.”
Browning’s yard isn’t the only one around featuring the fall staple in dramatic form. Drive down her street and you’ll find scarecrows in rocket ships, telling fortunes, digging graves and doing medical procedures on zombies.
All are stops on Fairfield County’s trail of 200-plus scarecrows.
The scarecrow capital of Ohio
“We do claim to be the scarecrow capital of Ohio,” said Jonett Haberfield, executive director of Visit Fairfield County. “There are other scarecrows around the state, but this is the only countywide scarecrow trail. And we're proud of that.”
She said the local visitor center and convention bureau started the trail five years ago, as a way to encourage people to explore the area. The idea has taken off.
Thousands of people scope out the scarecrows each year. The county even has an interactive map and app to let people know where to find them.
“It's become a tradition,” Haberfield said. “Just like going to the apple orchard or going to pick your pumpkin out at the pumpkin farm, it's one thing they do every October — they set aside time to go look at the scarecrows.”
How to build a scarecrow
Fairfield County’s trail of scarecrows exists only in October, but locals like Browning spend months dreaming up costumes for their figures.
“My brain works like Scarecrow all year round."Cathie Browning, scarecrow creator
“My brain works like Scarecrow all year round,” Browning said. “If we watch a movie, and you see a certain costume or something, then it gives you an idea.”
She brings those ideas to life in her garage, beside a table stocked with recycled craft supplies. The first step of successful scarecrow construction, she says, is finding a spine.
“Give him a spine — an old broomstick, an old hay rake, a stick out of the yard.”
She demonstrated using an old metal rod fit into an umbrella stand, and then got to work forming the rest of her scarecrow’s body — duct-taping a shoulder-width piece of bamboo to the frame, adding an empty cranberry juice carton for a head and hanging a trash bag stuffed with newspapers around its newly-formed neck.
“Now she has a chest and waist and hips, if you want,” Browning said. “Who knew?”
She dressed the figure in a lacy black dress, pulled striped tights over pool noodles to form legs and stuffed the body full.
“Traditionally, scarecrows were stuffed with straw because that's what people had,” she explained. “But after a while, that straw gets heavy. And we leave ours here in Sugar Grove out for a month, so then they get moldy.”
So she stuffs her scarecrows with plastic shopping bags instead, which are both waterproof and lightweight.
“So it blows in the wind, and that makes them a little bit scarier,” Browning said.
“I don't know why people are afraid to call them scarecrows. I mean, we have people say, those people in your yard or those mannequins or something like that. It's like, it's a scarecrow. Call it what it is — scarecrow.”
Browning says her scarecrows aren’t designed to frighten away birds. In fact, one of the scarecrows in her yard is draped with a necklace of apples and corn to attract them — plus flocks of visitors too.
