Bob Evans (restaurateur) - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Robert Lewis "Bob" Evans born on May 30, 1918, to Elizabeth Lewis and Stanley L. Evans in Sugar Ridge, Ohio, located in Portage Township in Wood County, Ohio where his father and uncle farmed on rented land.

The family moved to Gallia County, Ohio in 1929, where young Bob and his two sisters could grow up in the company of their many aunts and uncles. The family settled in Gallipolis, Ohio where his father owned and managed a grocery store. Young Bob attended public schools in Gallipolis and would graduate with honors in 1937 from the Greenbrier Military School, a boys-only private military boarding high school in Lewisburg, West Virginia. He attended The Ohio State University School of Veterinary Medicine from 1937 to 1939.

Bob married Jewell Waters in June 1940. They moved to Gallipolis, where he bought a restaurant named the Malt Shop in the early 1940s. When Bob was inducted into the Army in 1943, he sold his interest in the restaurant to a friend.

Bob Evans Farms got its start when Evans began making sausage on his southeastern Ohio farm to serve at a 12-stool diner he owned in nearby Gallipolis in 1948. In the following years, Evans went into the sausage business. The building where he made the sausage was built with open ends, at the suggestion of his father, so it could be used as a machinery shed if the sausage business failed. In 1953, a group of friends and family recognized the growing demand for Bob's sausage and became his business partners by establishing Bob Evans Farms. The original Bob Evans Restaurant on the farm was called The Sausage Shop. Although it started with 12 stools, today the restaurant can seat 134.