Bob Evans

Evans was born on May 30, 1918, to Stanley Lewis Evans and Elizabeth Evans (née Lewis), both of Welsh descent, in Sugar Ridge, Ohio, located in Center Township in Wood County, Ohio, where his father and uncle farmed on rented land.

The family moved to Gallia County, Ohio, in 1929 to be near relatives. The family settled in Gallipolis, Ohio, where his father owned and managed a grocery store. Evans attended public schools in Gallipolis and graduated with honors in 1937 from the Greenbrier Military School, a boys-only private military boarding high school in Lewisburg, West Virginia. He attended Ohio State University School of Veterinary Medicine from 1937 to 1939.

Evans married Jewell Victoria Waters (November 4, 1919 – July 24, 2019) in June 1940. They moved to Gallipolis, where he bought a restaurant named the Malt Shop in the early 1940s. When Evans 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. Evans could not find a source of satisfactory sausage, so he began making his own, slaughtering his own hogs and using the best parts of the hog. 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 Evans'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.