The Farm

The farm was the largest piece of land imaginable to a young lad living there. We were taught to know the boundaries early on - the woods behind our bottom, the slave built rock wall on the back side of the back pasture and the fence along the Purvis place on the north. A quick trespass once in a while was OK, but we tried not to get caught.

Daddy was always looking for pasture land to rent, so we usually had another hundred or two acres to roam as well. When we rented land, we had to get the cows there so we just pushed them out the gate and drove them to the new place along the road. All the back roads were dirt and you hardly ever saw more than one or two cars in an hour. One of the places that he rented was a six mile drove.

In the late 1950's Daddy bought the "Mitchell Place" from TJ Mitchell and we added another hundred acres to our land. The new land was grown over and hardly useable for anything but woodland grazing for the cows. We spent about a year building fences and then turned the cows loose there. There was about 40 acres that we didn't fence and in 1958 the government paid us to plant that acreage in pines and leave it outside our grazing land. They actually paid us every year to "not farm" that piece of land. I always told people from the city that the Feds were paying us not to plant tomatoes.

The land is just the same size today that it was back then, but it seems a lot smaller...