MAGNOLIA, Ohio — When Ian Smith arrived at work Monday morning, he knew something was wrong.
Roughly 200 Christmas trees had disappeared from Smith Evergreen Nursery’s yard in Magnolia, in Carroll County. Like the Grinch in the classic Dr. Seuss tale, someone made off with a load of holiday cheer – leaving the family-owned business searching for answers.
“It makes you sick,” Smith said. “It hurts. It’s hard not to take it personally.”
The Smith family believes the theft happened sometime late Saturday, Nov. 22, or early Sunday, Nov. 23. Cameras on the lot didn’t capture the heist.
The thief or thieves – Smith’s sure it had to be more than one person – stole cut-and-bundled trees from a loaded Smith Evergreen truck and the surrounding yard. The truck had been moved but left behind. And the key, usually kept inside, was missing.
Now the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office is investigating an unusual crime.
“Usually, it’s ATVs. Side-by-sides. Chainsaws. Things like that get stolen. This is the first time I’ve ever taken a report for cut pine trees,” Deputy Erik Licht said Friday.
Licht said there are some potential leads, but he’s still working the case. He’s asking anyone with information about the theft to call the sheriff’s office.
Meanwhile, Smith Evergreen is offering a $500 reward for tips that lead to a culprit.
Most of the trees were 7-foot to 9-foot Fraser firs – premium cuts from the nursery’s best fields, destined for garden centers, a church and a Boy Scout troop in Cincinnati.
Smith said the stolen trees were probably worth $8,000 to $10,000 from a wholesale standpoint – and easily twice that much at retailers.
“But we’re blessed,” he said. “We’ll recover. We’ll pick up. We’ll get through it.”
The money isn’t the biggest blow. It’s the thought of how much time and effort went into each of those trees. Smith Evergreen buys transplants and seedlings to grow at farms across Carroll County, in a painstaking process complicated by droughts and hungry deer.
“These trees have been in the ground for 10 years,” Smith said. “Ten years of mowing them, trimming them, spraying them, fertilizing. Nurturing. Last year they could have been cut. They may have been not quite ready. This year they were ready. We did it. We cut it. We baled them. We hauled them. All the work was done. And then they walk out the back door. So that’s really what stings the most.”
On Monday, Smith immediately started calling customers to work on replacement orders. Employees fanned out to cut fresh trees from untouched fields.
“We had to go back out in the fields that we didn’t initially intend to cut in,” he said.
The nursery also repositioned its cameras to eliminate blind spots.
Christmas trees are a small part of the family’s business. The nursery grows a wide range of pine, spruce and fir trees, and a few other varieties, for landscaping.
But the Christmas trees are sentimental.
“That really is where our heart is,” said Smith, whose grandfather started out with a small Christmas tree lot in the 1950s.
The nursery sells about 5,000 Christmas trees each year, from multiple farms.
The family marks the trunks with wax and wraps the trees with colored twine. But those are easy things to cut off. Smith’s not confident he’ll see those missing trees again – unless, that is, the Grinch who stole Christmas has a change of heart.
“God bless them. … Obviously, they’re in a tough spot,” he said. “So our prayers are with you. We’ll be all right. And our employees will be OK. I just hope that they can … come around and do the right thing.”
