Roy Exum
In the years to come, it will be proven that one of the smartest decisions the leaders of Hamilton County have ever made is to buy The McDonald Farm. I know because I am an expert in envisioning what will bloom and blossom on its nearly 2,200 acres. I am an expert because I have quite literally walked the farm for 60 years and any fool who cannot feel such might and grandeur beneath his feet should apply to moan and fret with some think tank in Nashville known as the Beacon Center.
The Beacon Center just lashed out at Hamilton County’s purchase of the farm for $16 million and, in disclosure, let me be clear it is my family who is selling it.
The county is getting a steal. I suspect the Beacon Center has never seen McDonald Farm and I strongly doubt the knaves have much foresight when they claim only 700 acres of the farm can be developed. Trust me, the possibilities are endless.
Granted, my heart weeps that its fields are fallow, and its barns are empty, but that’s what you get when the wrong guy in an extended family wrestles control and then runs the operation into the ground. The family members who live out of town just want the money so – what? -- here we are.
My attitude towards the demise is “Don’t cry because it’s over, be happy that it happened.” Before my grandfather died in 1990, the farm was a huge part of my life. My very earliest memory was waking up – this in the early ‘50s – at the muffled sound of the herd of milk cows just before dawn, tumble out of bed to pull on my boots and grab my “rifle” (Red Ryder BB gun).
Everybody in the big house would be asleep yet I would dash through the dark and morning dew to the milk barn. We’d milk about 350 head a day and my little hands would milk up a storm, but I was not savvy enough to wonder why I only got droplets on my tries to milk. I’d have coffee with the men – a tin cup filled about halfway with warm raw milk, lots of sugar and maybe two tablespoons of actual coffee.
I learned to drive when I was four. Mr. Elmer Pettyjohn would take me in his thick arms as he mowed the grass with an eight-gang rig. We were a great team. I’d work the wheel and Elmer worked the gas, the brakes, the clutch and gears. He’d also have a firm fist at the bottom of the steering wheel … he told me it was only to keep him from falling off, you understand. (It was my first brush with ‘power steering.’)
Throughout my elementary years I’d spent most nearly every weekend up there and almost all the summer, Elmer, who was black, became a second father. “Sonny boy, God don’t always come when you call Him, but there ain’t been nary a minute when He’s not right on time.” Hey, and never forget, “A smile don’t go out of style.”
Encouraged by my grandfather to try and do everything, I could skillfully drive any tractor or truck on the place from early on. By 12 I could untangle twine in the hay bailer and knew to keep a good knife in my pocket. I could saddle and ride a horse, I watched calves being born, and accepted Jesus into my heart at the Sale Creek Presbyterian Church.
I also went on the payroll at age 12 – beginning at $1 a day –and when I found out a lot of work is not as fun as it looks – I went to $1 an hour. Anybody who has worked a late-summer hay field knows a dollar an hour teaches character and a lot more.
The lessons a boy learns on a farm are priceless. Be the last to leave on a job. Pick up the heavy end of any load. Tidy any job site before you leave. “At 7 a.m. that tractor better be running, or you best be running.” There is always something that needs to be done, and if you can’t find it then you ain’t farming.
The Beacon buffoons called it a “Field of Dreams” when in fact ‘it is plowing time on the field of opportunity.’ Beacon doesn’t realize ‘the best fertilizer is the footprint of the owner’ and no one involved gives a rip about their opinion. There isn’t a county in Tennessee’s 95 that wouldn’t give an arm for 2,200 acres of promise and the McDonald Farm.
I feel sorry for people who are so short-sighted that all they do is whine. I can honestly see a huge future and if the Beacon boys would have bothered to look at the demographics of Hamilton County, about the only area we can expand with significant new growth in a big way is in the north end.
The price of $16 million? That’s easy. In 2009 the farm’s land in Hamilton County was assessed at $12.2 million but wait, there is another 350 acres in Rhea County. Extrapolate that out with the Rhea County assessment and the total assessment is up to $17.1 million in taxable value. Again, this was 12 years ago and land, particularly a large tract, does not depreciate in a world where they don’t make any more dirt.
In the next several days, McDonald Farm will sell away, and I’ll be left with sweet, sweet memories. It is not how our farm died but how I remember when it lived. Thank you, Dr Suess, for the stand that we don’t cry because it’s over but smile because it happened.
Golly, I’ve been blessed. So unbelievably blessed.