LEBANON — A Lebanon official and his Turtlecreek Township farmhouse will have a brush with greatness — or at least Grant Goodeve — on the cable channel Home & Garden Television this weekend.

        Marty Kohler, city planning director, will be featured in Sunday's episode of If Walls Could Talk, a series about things people find when renovating old homes.

        Among Mr. Kohler's discoveries: a megaphone thought to date to the first Lebanon High School football team in 1911; the 1889 signature of proud wallpaper hanger George W. Koogle; and a cooking fireplace.

        The house “was very unaltered, which is a preservationist's dream,” he says.

        An HGTV film crew came to view his finds last April. Mr. Goodeve, the one-time star of Eight Is Enough, hosts the show but did not attend the filming.

        Mr. Kohler's farmhouse, on McClure Road just west of Lebanon, was in the same family virtually from the time James Cowan Jr. built it in 1811 until Mr. Kohler bought it in 1989.

        The last family member to live there was Scott McClure, a prominent Warren County politician and farmer who had married into the Cowan family. After his wife, Marian, died, he remained in the house until his death in 1988 at age 94.

        The house, however, had fallen into disrepair, and Mr. Kohler's first discoveries ran more to the four-legged than the historic variety. Before he even bought it, he found a cow skeleton in the attic, and it took him months to evict living critters like raccoons, snakes and owls. (The skeleton, it turned out, was a study tool for a veterinary student.)

        Mr. Kohler lived in the living room for two years while floors, ceilings, walls and windows elsewhere in were repaired or replaced.

        He laughs at the idea that his work here is done: “A person who is really an old-house person will never say they're finished.”

        The Cowan family is glad Mr. Kohler has rescued a monument to their past that probably would have been torn down otherwise.

        “What we were mainly pleased with is that Marty is a perfectionist,” says Marjorie Perrine of Lebanon, the oldest child of Scott and Marian McClure. “It's just wonderful to have everything back the way it should be.”

Football standout indicted
Race gap evident in Ohio test scores
Community gates swing both ways
Council to vote on begging rule
Raid shuts down Bristol's Show Club
Commission to vote on financing plan
Funds needed to send body
High school critics evaluate productions
Judge declares mistrial in shooting deaths
Laskey denied parole yet again
Taking pity on puppies
Tristate A.M. Report
Waste vote may start long fight
BRONSON: English Woods
HOWARD: Some Good News
KORTE: City Hall
SMITH AMOS: Police cases
Culture wins out over law in Fairfield building plan
Lebanon school district rethinks plan for two schools on same site
Man admits corpse abuse, not murder
Suit over closed meetings settled
These walls do tell stories
Traffic jab hits a sore point
Ohio's rules on belting in kids face new push
Building will serve as training site
Campbell Co. studying parks
Failure to indict angers Howell
Kentucky News Briefs
Ky. pushes for Hyundai plant
River site under study
Thomas More College cuts 11 jobs