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Pre-Civil War Era Holland Home in
McKenzie, Tennessee
Between 1901 and 1908, 26th president of the United
States, Theodore Roosevelt, set aside 360,000 square miles
of land for national parks, forests and preserves.
An avid sportsman and conservationist, he realized what
many did not in an age when wilderness areas were plenty,
that it is "vandalism...to destroy or to permit the
destruction of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be
a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird."
"I recognize the right and duty of this generation to
develop and use the natural resources of our land," he
stated, "but I do not recognize the right to waste them,
or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come
after us."
The previous century had seen the beginning of a family
farm in Carroll County. First cultivated by Albert
Gallatin Harris and his wife Lucy Permelia Gilbert in
1829, the farm has remained a part of the same family
throughout the generations to come, and is today owned by
Kermit Holland and his children, Jill Holland and Jack
Holland.
Two centuries removed from the farm's inception, and one
from the wisdom of Mr. Roosevelt, a new danger stalks the
heritage and quality of living of future generations.
"Urban sprawl" is stretching forth its tentacles at the
rate of 11 acres per hour in Tennessee, with airports,
highways and subdivisions sinking their unrelenting roots
into the best farmlands available.
"It's almost unbelievable," says Nancy Holland, who along
with her husband Kermit and their progeny are working
desperately to ensure their historic homestead is
protected from the onslaught.
"How long can you keep going (at that rate) without
destroying all the farmland?" she asks. "To me this is
just frightening. All around the country, communities are
working to save their farms and small farmers like us
really work hard to save the farmland and scenic beauty."
With 274 acres of prime farmland giving way to development
every day, forcing farming operations into land less
suitable for farming while mouths to feed increase at a
steady pace, it's a question many are asking, including
modern-day statesman, Phil Bredesen, who, as mayor of
Nashville, "added more land in eight years to the city's
parks and greenways system than had been added in the
previous seventy-five years."
In the tradition of Roosevelt, Bredesen also created The
Land Trust for Tennessee, a nonprofit organization that
helps farmers and landowners preserve forever the
historic, scenic and natural values of their land by
placing it under a conservation easement that regulates
the use of the land in a legal agreement that is binding
upon future generations of owners.
Kermit's son, Jack, was the first to realize the benefits
of a trust, two years ago walking into the Holland abode
with a document in his hand, declaring, "In Virginia they
have land trusts and they're saving their family farms,"
relates Nancy.
The family's vantage point is one that few in the latest
generations of Tennessee's historically agrarian families
enjoy or remember. Looking out the windows of the home
that was the original homestead on the property, the
Hollands view the pristine beauty of meadows, crops, ponds
and forested areas accented by cattle and abundant
wildlife. A walk within the boundaries of their property
does not take them in a circuitous route from front to
back yard, but extends through 200 acres of invigorating,
natural splendor.
The concept is nevertheless one that is understood by
anyone venturing past the city limits, as more farmland
gives way to development. "What's happening to our
farmland?" asks American Farmland Trust, based in our
nation's capital. "Each year you have to drive a little
farther out to find it. Slowed by traffic, through tangled
intersections, past rows of houses that seem to have
sprouted from the field, finally, you can see the
bountiful farmland. It wasn't always like this. But for
the past two decades we've paved over our farmland for
roads, houses and malls. Wasteful land use puts America's
farmland at risk, especially our most fertile and
productive-our most valuable-farmland."
"Our food is increasingly in the path of development," AFT
literature asserts, with "86 percent of U.S. fruits and
vegetables, and 63 percent of our dairy products, produced
in urban-influenced areas."
Sadly, greed seems to be the root of the problem as
residential land use out-paces population growth by 30
percent. "Over the past 20 years, the acreage per person
for new housing almost doubled and since 1994, 10+ acre
housing lots have accounted for 55 percent of the land
developed," statistics state. Masquerading as progress and
abetted by affluence, urban sprawl is a thief that affects
not only the nation's food supply; not only the wildlife
that is sheltered there; not only the land's natural
ability to filter impurities from the air and water; It
steals the very heritage of the future generations of
Americans, with Tennessee ranking number eight among the
20 states succumbing fastest to development.
"The small family farm carries the heaviest burden of
pressure to convert to development," Nancy says. "You can
make so much more money in development. We've never had
any desire to develop this farm. We're so thankful our
children have no desire for that; that they'd rather save
the land for their grandchildren than all the money that
could ever be realized."
The family knows they could "make a mint" if they chose
instead to develop the land in business or residential
ventures, "but then what would you have that would beat
farming - and we just love it," Nancy muses. "At 5:00 the roosters are
crowing. We have so many wonderful animals. The other day
five deer were out by the pond. We have quail: it's
nothing to drive out across the pasture and a covey of
quail fly up. We have owls out here, and we love to hear
them. We have red tailed hawks and they're so beautiful."
Until five years ago, Kermit and Nancy ran a dairy
operation on the farm, but "age and help problems" led
them to narrow their scope into beef cattle, row crops,
alfalfa for the cattle, and three types of hay grasses:
orchard grass, clover and fescue.
Their children and grandchildren are active in helping
out. Both Jack and Jill have homesteads on the farm and
when Jack is not working at Tecumseh in Paris, he's
helping Kermit keep the equipment in good condition, or
the grounds and fences in good order. He does all the
feeding during the winter months.
"Some of these days it will be his job to take over
management of the farm," says Nancy, who also enjoys the
participation of daughter Jill and all the Holland
grandchildren.
Jack and his wife Anna, who is a teacher in Gleason, are
parents to Mary, a junior at McKenzie High School, and
Taylor, a freshman football player at Centre College in
Danville, Kentucky.
Jill and husband Mike Laughery, who is principal of
Dresden Elementary School, have two sons: John Kermit, who
is a freshman at McKenzie High School, and 12-year-old
Harris, both of whom work on the farm hauling hay and
feeding cattle. Jill works for the Mendez Foundation, a
"substance abuse and violence prevention organization
focusing on youth education as well as teaching balanced,
positive, healthy living."
The third Holland child, Ann, lives with husband Jerry
Gilchrest in Nashville with their two sons, Thomas and
Harrison.
Near or far, there's a reason the Holland children and
grandchildren are adamant about preserving their heritage.
(1) They are last in the line of ancestors who lived on
the farm before them; (2) They have seen firsthand the
fruits of the efforts of the farm's earliest forefather,
their great-great grandfather A.G. Harris; (3) They are
aware of the rich history of the farm, in which their
roots are inextricably entwined; and (4) They respect the
diligence, stamina and wisdom with which the farm's
current patriarch, Kermit, has sustained the land. They
accept with pride and gratitude their responsibility to
continue that tradition.
 Except for eight years in which he served as a Marine in
the Pacific theatre during World War II and stateside
during the Korean War, 89 year-old Kermit has worked the
land at the Holland farm. "He was born and bred a farmer,"
says his admiring wife. "Only by good management has he
been able to maintain the farming operation on 200 acres.
He's an outstanding manager, so frugal and so saving.
Lesser men would have lost it a long time ago. It's hard
work, but he never gives up. He's never seen anything
that's impossible to do; he always has a solution to every
problem."
The farm has seen both promise and problems since it was
started in 1829. Albert and Lucy raised nine children on
the farm which, at 600 acres, was originally much larger
than its current 200 acres. While Harris' brother, Thomas
Larkin Harris, served in the Confederate Army (losing his
life at Shiloh), the cotton farm provided food and fodder
for General Nathan Bedford Forrest's Rebel forces while
its blacksmith shod the cavalry's horses using shoes
forged on site. In the extravagant writing of yesterday,
handwritten receipts show that A.G. Harris sold to the
Confederate States fodder, corn, wheat and services that
included horse shoeing.
When later Union forces were approaching the farm, the
family was terrified they would burn the house after
pilfering what they could. They dug a hole deep beneath
the cobblestones of the kitchen floor where they buried
$1,000 in silver coins and hid their paper money beneath
the troughs where the soldiers watered their horses. The
family shared willingly provisions for the troops and took
one officer into the home to care for him while he was
ill.
"They were glad to do it to keep them from burning the
house," Nancy says. The troops marched away leaving the
house unmolested, a blessing that was offset by the
confiscation of every horse on the farm, right down to a
child's pony. It was a devastating loss in an age when
horsepower, driven by the sweat of the farmer's brow, was
the means of tending the soil.
When Albert died in 1866, a year after the war was over,
there were no photographs to remember him by. The family
commissioned an artist to portray his likeness in an oil
painting, using Harris' still body inside the casket as
his model. Though painted in death, the portrait - that
now occupies a place of prominence in Kermit and Nancy's
home - seems to have a life of its own, to the delight of
the Holland grandchildren. "What tickles the grandchildren
is that no matter where you stand in this room he's
looking at you," says Nancy, chuckling.
The children have also spent many hours in the basement
kitchen where the dovetailed cobblestones hid the family's
wealth. Though the flooring has long-since been replaced,
the wide hearth below the fireplace still boasts the same
bricks that once covered the floor, thick bricks that were
fashioned and fired in the farm's own kilns. In the
ceiling of the old kitchen, great, hand-hewn beams bearing
the marks of the adze used to square them traverse the
length and breadth of the home.
Upstairs, some of the original heart-pine tongue and
groove flooring still graces the old homestead. Receipts
show the lumber from Alabama was shipped to Wells Point.
Other receipts from 1855 bear out the name "Wells Point"
that apparently defined the community before it became
known as "Dundas" and, in 1865, McKenzie. The town was
incorporated as McKenzie in 1869.
When President Grover Cleveland came to McKenzie in 1887,
Ada and Z.T. were among the dignitaries who sat on the
platform as the president delivered his remarks to the
crowd. Albert and Lucy's daughter, Ada Medora Harris, and her
husband, Zachary Taylor Collier, from Cottage Grove,
continued the ownership of the farm in the next
generation, raising horses, mules and cotton. The
Collier's thriving horse and mule business eventually
moved to Memphis where Collier Mill was located at the
present site of the Red Birds Stadium along the
Mississippi River.
In time, Kermit Holland married Mary Collier, the
great-granddaughter of founder A.G. Harris. The couple had
three children: Mary Jill, Jack Collier and Ann Harris.
After Mary's death, Kermit married Nancy Holland, who
spent many years working the farm with Kermit and who has
taken the fight, along with Jack and Jill, to preserve the
farm that is a legacy to the Harris-Collier-Holland heirs,
three generations of whom live and work on the farm today.
During the month of October, the 173rd anniversary of the
historic farm, Middle Tennessee State University
proclaimed the Holland Farm as a "Tennessee Century Farm"
in a program that "recognizes the contributions of
Tennessee families who have continuously owned, and kept
in production, family land for at least 100 years."
Soon, the farm will become an oasis within the confines of
development on every side; an oasis that will never run
dry thanks to the conservation easement that will be put
in place as the farm becomes the first in West Tennessee,
outside Memphis, to join the Land Trust for Tennessee.
"This conservation easement will forever forbid any
development of any kind to ever be on this farm," declares
Nancy. "It will preserve this farm, which is prime
farmland, for future generations, forever." |
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